Army Nurse Mary L. King

David L. and Janie King, it was reported in The Shreveport Times newspaper on September 30, 1943, were about to have two children overseas with the US Army. Their only son, William, a Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, had completed the USAAC navigation school and was in his final training before heading overseas for combat duty. The Times reported that older sister Lt. Mary L. King was “one up on her brother,” because Mary, serving in Australia with the Army Nursing Corps, had already been stationed in the South Pacific for over a year as an anesthetist. Eight months of that time was in New Guinea. Mom and Dad King, originally of Lafayette County, Arkansas, which borders north Bossier Parish, were temporarily in Pascagoula, Mississippi because David, who worked as a cotton buyer in peacetime, was doing defense work there. (Younger sister Frances was still a teenager). By the end of the 1940’s, David King transferred to a defense job at Barksdale Field (now Barksdale Air Force Base) and the family moved to Bossier City. The Kings, it seemed, would be a perfect family to feature for Veterans Day. Having not yet written about a member of the Army Nursing Corps, or about anyone who served in the South Pacific, it is Mary’s story I will focus on here.

Born on April 6, 1916, in Stamps, Arkansas, Mary was a graduate of Stamps High School, attended Henderson College in Arkansas, and graduated from the Highland Sanitarium School of Nursing in Shreveport. On Dec. 11, 1939 she began her military career as a second lieutenant in the Army Nursing Corps at Barksdale Army Air Field, serving as an Air Corps station nurse when the US military’s flying force was still a part of the Army.

The U.S. Army Nurse Corps (ANC) was established on February 2, 1901, under the Army Reorganization Act, though of course women have been nursing American soldiers back to health since the Revolutionary War. In the years following World War I, the ANC’s rolls had declined, leaving fewer than 1,000 nurses in the corps at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Within six months of that event, which brought the United States into the War that was already raging on the other side of globe, the ANC’s ranks expanded to 12,000 nurses. Because the vast majority of these urgently-enrolled nurses did not have prior military experience, soon the Army instituted a formal 4-week training course for the Army nurses to learn military customs, protocol, and procedures, field sanitation, and defense against attacks, among other skills.

The next significant shortfall in nurse training that the Army discovered early in the war was that nurse anesthetists were in alarmingly short supply in every theater of operations. The Army developed a special 6-month course for nurses to become anesthetists, and Mary L. King availed herself of this opportunity, studying anesthesia at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. Along with ultimately over 2,000 other nurses who trained in this specialty, she learned how to administer inhalation anesthesia, blood and blood derivatives and oxygen therapy as well has how to recognize, prevent and treat shock. It wouldn’t be long before Mary King, finding her niche, would literally be at the head of the class, as the instructor.

Serving in the Pacific Theater, Mary’s experience would have been unique among nurses serving on the European or Mediterranean theaters. On those fronts, nurses worked under fire close to the front lines, and performed more than admirably. However, commanders in the island-studded Pacific, for a variety of reasons but most ostensibly to protect the nurses from bands of Japanese guerilla fighters, chose to keep the nurses far from active combat areas. The nurses treated soldiers only once they were evacuated or the fighting on a particular island had stopped. According to the Army’s Center of Military History, “The Army Nurse Corps: A Commemoration of WWII Service” by Judith Bellafaire (1993), this decision, which meant that nurses only arrived on an island once it had come under Allied control, was an unpopular drain on morale for soldiers needing treatment and the nurses who were overseas to provide it.

While not near or under direct fire, this did not mean the Pacific nurses had it “easy” compared to nurses in other fronts. Only two specific details that Mary had written home about her time in New Guinea were shared in the Sept 30, 1943, article in the Times. One was that when she first arrived in New Guinea, her tent did not have a floor, and once one was installed, she felt like she was in a palace. The other detail was that she had to always wear boots, and never once wore a dress the entire 8 months she was there.

For a young woman from the South in the 1940s, wearing boots daily and never wearing a dress for three quarters of a year would absolutely be noteworthy. No further details were given about the environment in which she was serving, but both the excitement of having a tent with a floor and the constant need for boots could perhaps be explained through the writings of an ANC nurse in New Guinea who kept a journal with her at all times, Capt. Ruth Kinzeler, of the 4th General Army Hospital in New Guinea. The island was so covered in mud that Capt. Kinzeler recalled operating in a floorless tent while standing in mud up to everyone’s knees. And while perhaps not operating under fire, an ever-present threat to both the soldiers and nurses in this muddy and humid environment were tropical diseases, such as dengue fever, dysentery, typhus, and especially, malaria.

Following WWII, Mary King continued in the Army Nurse Corps. Later in the 1940s she was stateside serving at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Fort Knox in Kentucky (nurse training locations). She advanced among the ranks, and in 1950 as a Captain, she was named the chief instructor of the Army School of Anesthesia at the Army’s 98th General hospital in Munich, Germany. In May, 1953, Bossier City’s Planters Press newspaper reported that Capt. Mary King would be sailing home for 30 days’ leave to be with her parents in Bossier City and would then report to duty at the Army-Navy hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Mary L. King retired from service in 1961 at the rank of Lt. Colonel. She moved to the Clearwater, Florida area soon afterwards, and continued to work as a nurse anesthetist, this time in a civilian hospital. She passed away in January, 2009 at the age of 92.

If you have stories of veterans from Bossier Parish, please share them with us the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center. The History Center in the Bossier Central Library complex remains closed while our new exhibits are installed. However, you can still contact History Center staff by phone or email. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. If you enjoy World War II history, please come to our next meeting of World War II’s Day, a monthly coffee and discussion program on a variety of WWII-related topics, will be Tuesday, November 10th at 10:30 AM in the Bossier Central Library Complex’s large meeting room. We hope you can make it, and stay tuned for the re-opening date of the History Center and its new exhibits!

Images: 

• Photo of Mary King in her nursing uniform, C. 1930s, as published in the Shreveport Times, Sept 30, 1943, pg. 7
• Photo of 3 Army nurses in Australia during WWII, from “The Army Nurse,” 1944, US Army publication
• Advertising postcard for the United States Army Nurse Corps with a color photograph of doctors and nurses wearing surgical gowns, caps, latex gloves, and face masks operating on a patient in an operating room. (Likely a nurse anesthetist by the patient’s head). Not dated, but pre-1951. From the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) at the National Institutes of Health collection

Article by: Pam Carlisle