{"id":4181,"date":"2014-06-01T15:53:38","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T21:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewsingreen.com\/?p=4181"},"modified":"2014-06-01T19:28:42","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T01:28:42","slug":"2lt-frances-slanger-army-nurse-corps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/2014\/06\/2lt-frances-slanger-army-nurse-corps\/","title":{"rendered":"2LT Frances Slanger, Army Nurse Corps"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"slanger\"\u201cThe fire was burning low, and just a few live coals are on the bottom. With the slow feeding of wood and finally coal, a roaring fire is started. I couldn’t help thinking how similar to a human being a fire is. If it is not allowed to run down too low, and if there is a spark of life left in it, it can be nursed back. So can a human being.\u201d \u2014Frances Slanger<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lt. Frances Slanger of Roxbury, Massachusetts was one of four nurses who waded ashore at Normandy on D-Day. She was also the first American nurse to die in Europe in World War II.<\/p>\n

Frances Slanger was born in L\u00f3dz, Poland, and came to America with her family in 1920 to escape persecution of the Jews. Much to the dismay of her immigrant parents, Frances was determined to become a nurse. Rejecting their pleas for her to marry, she graduated from nursing school in 1937. At home in Roxbury, 29-year-old Frances regularly heard news from her relatives in Poland: she knew Jews in L\u00f3dz were being shipped to Auschwitz and Chelmno. In 1943, she enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps, and fought to be deployed overseas despite her bad eyesight. If she was afraid, she didn\u2019t show it.<\/p>\n

\"Frances

Frances Slanger, the first American nurse killed in Europe in World War II, in the 45th Field Hospital, Normandy, 1944.<\/p><\/div>\n

Just 4 days after the D-Day invasion, Frances waded onshore at Normandy, France, to find truckloads of injured soldiers. Frances proved herself to be a compassionate and creative nurse, fashioing water bottles from IV bottles and rubber tubing for wounded men who couldn\u2019t easily drink water.<\/p>\n

On October 21, 1944, she wrote a letter<\/a> to Stars and Stripes about her experiences as a nurse and her admiration for the servicemen she helped. Slanger didn\u2019t live to see her words in print. She would be killed an hour after writing the letter, by a German artillery attack. She was 31 years old.<\/p>\n

To me, the most affecting part of Frances Slanger\u2019s story is what happened after her death: Hundreds of Americans who had read her letter in the newspaper wrote the paper demanding that she be honored for her service. It was these letters that led to the naming of a warship in her honor, her posthumous Purple Heart, and the creation of the first all-women\u2019s veterans\u2019 chapter in the country. The Lt. Frances Y. Slanger Post #313 of the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S. was founded in February 1946 to represent Jewish women veterans. If her letter had never been published, the outcome of this story may have ended very differently: without it, there may have been no ship, no Purple Heart, and no veterans\u2019 chapter. Frances\u00a0wasn\u2019t trying to secure her place in history with this letter, she was simply praising soldiers, eager to share their heroism with those at home in the U.S. What she couldn\u2019t have realized at the time was how her own selfless heroism shone through in her words, touching so many and keeping her story alive.<\/p>\n

\"A

A Lockheed P-38 Lightning painted “In Memory of Lt. F. Slanger, U.S.A.N.C.”<\/p><\/div>\n

[This article republished from the Jewish Women’s Archive<\/a> with permission of the author].<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe fire was burning low, and just a few live coals are on the bottom. With the slow feeding of wood and finally coal, a roaring fire is started. I couldn’t help thinking how similar to a human being a fire is. If it is not allowed to run down too low, and if there is a spark of life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2175,"featured_media":4183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,43],"tags":[28,100,57],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-05-01 22:07:40","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jewsingreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}