Back to previous page Book Notes Nonfiction American Nightingale By Bob Welch (Atria Books, $22) It took a couple of amazing coincidences to create this moving account of the first American nurse to die in Europe after the D-Day invasion. In December of 2000, Welch, a columnist for The Register-Guard newspaper in Eugene, Ore., got a call from Nathan Fendrich, who teaches high school seminars about World War II and the Holocaust. Nathan had come across the Frances Slanger story in an obscure book about Jewish women in the military, and wanted Bob to write a column about her. After his column came out, Bob Welch got another call, from an 82-year-old woman who lived 10 minutes from his house. Sallylou Cummings had served with Slanger in the U.S. Army's 45th Field Hospital Unit, and had a list of other survivors who had known the nurse. This set him off on a two-year quest that took him to Boston, where Slanger had become a nurse, and Normandy, where she had nearly drowned coming ashore with the other doctors and nurses four days after D-Day. The result is a book that profiles an unlikely American hero, a tiny Jewish girl with bad eyes who overcame every obstacle in her path to become a battlefield nurse, only to be killed by a German artillery shell. Born in Poland, she survived World War I privations; on Ellis Island, the 7-year-old was almost barred from entering this country due to an eye infection; in Boston, she had to miss school to help her father, a struggling fruit peddler; her parents opposed her becoming a nurse; her supervisors in nursing school gave her an especially hard time, and she had to fight to get an overseas assignment. And she encountered anti-Semitism in one form or another everywhere she went. But Slanger pressed on, and the nurse who wanted to be a writer gained fame by a letter she wrote to the Stars and Stripes newspaper -- published before the editors learned of her death. In it she told of watching the coals heating her tent, and thinking how the spark of life can be brought back to wounded soldiers just as coals can burst into flame again. She said that while the nurses might be slogging through mud and working while bone-tired, they were not the ones roughing it. To the soldiers she wrote: "It is a privilege to be able to receive you, and a great distinction to see you open your eyes and with that swell American grin, say, 'Hi-ya babe!'" The publication of the letter generated hundreds of responses from grateful soldiers, who were stunned to discover later that its author had died a day after she wrote it, in Elsenborn, Belgium. There are many emotional moments in this account of Frances Slanger's life and death, but one stands out. In 1947, when her body was returned to Boston for burial, one in the throng of visitors paying respects was fellow nurse and tent-mate Elizabeth Powers, who had been wounded in the same blast that killed Slanger. Welch tells of the nurse kneeling at the casket: "Her eyes were misty. 'Hello, soldier,' she whispered." -- Smiley Anders Copyright © 1992-2004, 2theadvocate.com, WBRZ, Louisiana Broadcasting LLC and The Advocate, Capital City Press LLC, All Rights Reserved. Back to previous page