Yesterday, she was greeted by President George Bush.

Her host was French President Jacques Chirac. He was joined by Queen Elizabeth and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and a dozen other heads of state.

Sixty years ago?

Betty was greeted by 17 trucks loaded with wounded soldiers.

She was a nurse with the 45th Field Hospital Unit. Along with 17 other women in her unit, she became one of the first American nurses to set foot on the beaches of Normandy.

It was June 10, 1944.

That’s D-Day + 4 in the parlance of World War II and yesterday, when the world paused to remember the colossal battle that shaped the future of the 20th century, many were reminded that women like Betty Quinn, now 85, did their part.

“When we got to Utah, the LCI couldn’t get into the beach, so we had to wade in,” said Betty, who stood but 5 feet 4 inches. “A doctor grabbed me and pulled me in by the arm and we just went to work in our wet clothes.”

Bodies still floated in the water.

Nothing in her training had prepared her for that.

Betty graduated from Manchester High School West in 1937. She spent a year working behind the lunch counter at Woolworth’s on Elm Street, then she enrolled in the Sacred Heart Hospital School of Nursing.

“We went to nursing school year-round in those days,” she said. “When I graduated in 1942, they had these signs up everywhere, ‘Uncle Sam Needs You!’ so I enlisted. I wanted to go into the Navy, but my roommate — Irene (Labrie) Underwood — was afraid she wouldn’t pass the physical, so we both joined the Army Nurses Corps so we could be together.”

No such luck.

Irene was sent to Hawaii.

Betty drew duty in Europe.

Her unit crossed the Atlantic on Feb. 27, 1944. Twelve days later, after landing in Cardiff, Wales, they were first billeted in the quaint village of Upton-on-Severn.

“We got French lessons in Severn,” she smiled, “and then we were in a castle. It was called Fairfield Castle in Bristol. In the mornings, we’d sew sheets together and put big red crosses on them. We knew we’d be laying them out in fields to make it known we were a hospital. It was to keep planes from bombing us.”

They wouldn’t deter the artillery, however.

Eventually, those sheets and the nurses — along with 640 soldiers — were bundled aboard the William N. Pendleton, a U.S. Merchant Marine freighter scheduled to cross the English Channel a week after D-Day. The horrific casualty count, with more than 10,000 killed or wounded in the assault, altered the timetable.

Thus, at 2 p.m. on June 10 — just 10 hours after a bomb from a German glider had buckled a bulkhead on the Pendleton — the 18 nurses of the 45th gathered on the vomit-slicked main deck of the ship. When the order came from their commanding officer, Capt. Elizabeth Hay of Pelham, they went over the side.

Three stories below them lay their bobbing, surging LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicles and Personnel). The only route down was a treacherous one — a rope cargo ladder — and the nurses, Betty among them, made their way down just as the soldiers had on June 6 and every day since.

Like the soldiers around them, the nurses stood shoulder to shoulder in the rectangular landing craft. Like the soldiers around them, they wore green fatigues, over-sized Army-issue boots and three-pound steel helmets.

“When people think about nurses in France, I’ve found that, to a person, they think of women in nice white dresses with white stockings and white caps, instead of these women jumping out of landing crafts, same as the men,” said Bob Welch, author of a new book called “American Nightingale.”

In his book, Bob tells the story of another nurse from the 45th, Lt. Frances Slanger, who would ultimately be killed in a German artillery attack. In researching his book, he interviewed several of her colleagues, including Betty (Belanger) Quinn, and he came away with profound respect for their service.

That wasn’t necessarily the prevailing opinion in 1944.

“In general, soldiers’ reactions ranged from enthusiasm to amusement to flat-out hostility,” Bob writes. “Newspapers and magazines, even ones published by the military such as Yank, looked at Army nurses with a sort of wink-wink brush-off.”

The newspaper and magazine articles were refuted when the nurses from the 45th reached the beach. They quickly hooked up with the large contingent of men from the 45th, 208 doctors, corpsmen, X-ray techs and other medical specialists.

“There was a medical tent right there near the beach, and we just went to work in our wet fatigues,” Betty said. “We had had to take our turns in the operating room at Sacred Heart, but I had never seen anything like that.

“The soldiers would come in on stretchers; we’d cut their clothes off. We didn’t have whole blood. All we had was plasma. We had to mix it ourselves. It was dehydrated, so we just added sterile water. If they didn’t need plasma, they got saline and glucose and when we had them in the field hospital — a tent is all it was — all of their heads were toward the center so we could run plasma and oxygen lines to them along the tent poles.”

With few exceptions — according to material compiled by Welch for “American Nightingale” — “the 45th took non-transportable patients, those who would die if they didn’t have immediate surgery.

“A field hospital was like a giant Intensive Care Unit,” he added. “If a badly wounded soldier could undergo surgery within six hours of being hit, his survival rate was high . . . (yet) often, surgeons didn’t even do sutures, leaving that for down-the-line docs without life-or-death patients on their stretchers.

“The goal,” he said, “was simple: to keep a man alive long enough so hospitals in the rear could put him together again.”

Sometimes, they couldn’t meet that goal.

“When you lost a patient,” Betty said, looking away briefly, “you put them outside the tent and the unit that cared for the dead, the Graves Registry, took them away. We didn’t lose many,” she added. “We kept them alive. That was what we did.”

They did so with stunning efficiency, in primitive conditions.

“At Utah Beach alone,” said author Bob Welch, “there were those 17 trucks loaded with wounded soldiers waiting for them. It was a pretty horrific and difficult life. It was a very gutsy, roll-up-your sleeves kind of existence. None of these women were really prepared for it, but they did it.

“Twelve hours on, 12 hours off, seven days a week,” he added, “and also picture them moving 30 times in a year, from Normandy to Czechoslovakia, making and breaking camp 30 times. I think Betty would have been involved in about 2,000 surgeries. The unit itself handled almost 5,000 casualties and in that time, only 223 soldiers died in the 45th Field Hospital.”

Three members of Betty’s unit — Lt. Frances Slanger, Dr. Herman Lord and Pvt. Vicente Rivas — died in combat. They were killed in a German artillery attack in Elsenborn, Belgium, in the weeks leading up to the Battle of the Bulge.

In the intervening 60 years, 219 others have died.

Only four remain.

Only Betty is in France.

“I wasn’t going to go,” she said, “but no one else from the 45th was going, so I figured I’d go and represent the whole group.”

So, on Saturday morning, Lt. Elizabeth (Belanger) Quinn, USANC-Ret., was presented with the French Legion of Honor — the most prestigious award issued by the government of France — as one of a hundred veterans so honored in solemn ceremonies conducted at Cour d’Honneur des Invalides in Paris.

It’s a nice accompaniment to the Bronze Star she won 60 years ago.

Her escort for the occasion was a proud husband, former Marine fighter pilot and retired West High School principal Charles Quinn, who skipped his induction into the Saint Anselm College Hall of Fame so he could walk by his beloved Betty’s side.

He was there again yesterday.

He was at her side first for the French-American ceremony at Colleville-sur-Mer and later for the international remembrance at Arromanches, where Betty sat side by side with the men — and women — who helped save the world.

It’s good that she was there.

Hers is a side of the story that’s too seldom told.

John Clayton’s latest book is a collection of veterans-related stories entitled “New Hampshire: War and Peace.” His e-mail address is jclayton@theunionleader.com

© Copyright 2004.



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