It wasn’t exactly the life that the handsome young recruiter had promised. But for Virginia Visser and many of her friends who served as Army nurses in World War II, it was good enough,
“We were young and we were spirited,” said Visser, the widow of past Emporia State University president John Visser, to a crowd of over 100 Thursday night. “We were doing what we had been trained to do. It was a great experience. It was incredible.”
Visser spoke as part of the World War II Roundtable, a veterans’ lecture series that ESU has held since 2005. It also happened to fall on International Woman’s Day and is considered part of the university’s National Women’s History Month celebration.
Visser, who did her wartime service as Virginia Schuyler, never had to go through basic training. Nurses came in knowing what they needed to know and were immediately put to work stateside until they could be shipped overseas, she said.
The core of what she needed, Visser said, was drilled into her at St. Benedict’s in Iowa.
“After you spent three years of nursing training under the eyes of the nuns at St. Benedict’s, the Army was a piece of cake,” Visser said, to a laugh from the audience. “The nuns taught us two important things. First, you had to be on time, clean, neat, shoes shined. Second, if someone said ‘Do you know so and so?’ you never said ‘I don’t know.’ You said, ‘I’ll find out.’”
The students probably would have wound up in military service anyway, though the attractive recruiters that the Army sent certainly didn’t hurt things. Visser was quickly posted to Camp Carson in Colorado, where she spent eight weeks before getting orders to go overseas in 1944.
The ship that left for the United Kingdom was big and dark, blacked out to guard against raiders. It was her first time at sea. Naturally, she was seasick almost immediately.
“One of the GIs told me I was so sick, I’d have to get better to die,” Visser said.
Her hospital wasn’t set up yet when Visser arrived in England so she and another nurse were sent to stay with an English family. It wasn’t long before they had their first experience with a German air attack.
“Mr. Tilbury told us ‘You ladies, get down, there’s an air raid,’” Visser remembered. “We said, ‘Thank you, we’ll be OK.’ He said “I’m not kidding.”
Down they went, under a metal Wellington table with a mesh around it to guard against flying fragments. That space held the two nurses, Mr. and Mrs. Tilbury, their daughter and their baby.
“We spent several nights under the table and were happy to do so,” Visser said.
Once in the hospital, life was busy, particularly after D-Day Twelve-hour days were routine. That August, Visser learned that her brother, a pilot, had been shot down and was recovering in the north of England. She asked for permission to see him, but admitted that she felt guilty leaving the hospital.
“Gen. Rose died last week and we haven’t stopped the war,” her superior reassured her. “So I think we’ll manage without you.”
After returning, she and four of her colleagues signed up to serve on the Continent. She initially treated German prisoners of war in Dijon before being transferred to the Second Evacuation Hospital, somewhere in Germany. But no one could tell her exactly where, and at each stop that she and her friend Doris Thomas made, they seemed to have just missed it.
By the time they reached Wiemar, they had gotten in contact with the unit and a very frustrated chief nurse. But on their last day before reporting in, a GI offered the two nurses a chance to see a concentration camp.
It was Buchenwald. And it was unforgettable. Ragged figures could still be seen in some of the beds, too ill to move just yet.
“We passed the ovens and the ovens were still warm,” Visser said. “Doris Thomas and I held hands. When we started out, there were bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting. ...
“It was a searing experience,” she said. “I never imagined you could see that kind of action taken by people. That was inhuman. It was awful. We went back and I don’t think we said a word to each other.”
Arrival meant more 12-hour days, sometimes working on wounded soldiers, sometimes on displaced French, Dutch or Belgian civilians that had not been able to return home yet. But it wasn’t all work. One night, the commander of the 100th Infantry arranged for a dance, inviting the entire medical staff.
“A tall, blond, handsome man from Grand Rapids, Mich. asked me to dance,” Visser recalled. “He wasn’t a very good dancer. But he meant well.”
The soldier was John Visser. He would meet her again at a new posting in Germany, this time with a broken finger from a basketball game.
The day after they met for the second time, she was ordered to Marseilles to get ready for a return to the States. She did so with mixed feelings, but as New York drew near, she couldn’t help searching out the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
“We all stood by the railing and I’m amazed the boat didn’t tip over,” Visser said. “We all knew we were coming home.”
She came to an aunt and uncle in Chicago for a little while. But one last surprise waited for her. From her home town in Iowa, her sister wanted to know “Who is this Visser or Viser or whatever his name is?”
“Why?” she asked. “Is there a letter?”
“There’s about 15 letters.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow.”
One last mission had been accomplished.