American Nightingale
80 years since D-Day and 20 since the book was released, a look back at how I connected with heroic WWII nurse Frances Slanger
Drop a pebble in the water, just a splash and it is gone; But there’s a half-a-hundred ripples circling on and on; Spreading from the center, flowing to the sea; And there’s no way of telling where the end is going to be.
—James W. Foley, Found in Frances Slanger’s scrapbook
I THINK OF HER OFTEN, and especially will today, the 80th anniversary of World War II’s D-Day—and the 20th anniversary of the release of American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger, Forgotten Heroine of Normandy.
Slanger, the first U.S. nurse to die after the June 6 landings, was the subject of the most ambitious book project I’ve ever undertaken; I spent nearly four years on it. More importantly, she’s a reminder of how the most unlikely people can change the world in profound ways.
When Slanger, a Polish Jew, arrived at Ellis Island as a 7-year-old girl on Sept. 7, 1920, she was detained because of an eye infection. At that moment, she had no country, having left Poland and not been accepted into the U.S. She had no family, having been separated from her mother and sister. Goodness, she hardly had any human standing, having been placed in a cage while awaiting her fate.
Nobody would have looked at that wide-eyed little girl and thought: There’s somebody who’s going to grow up and inspire thousands of people across the world.
But Frances Slanger did.
When a letter she wrote honoring our GIs appeared in the military’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, it filled countless soldiers with a renewed sense of pride, purpose and hope. Weeks later, when they learned she’d been killed in action, the news broke their hearts.
“She died as she had lived,” wrote Pvt. J.A. Marfin, in Holland. “As a hero.”
“Something must be done to honor this woman,” one GI wrote to the newspaper. “Her memory cannot be forgotten.”
Wrote Lt. Eugene C. Bovee: “It is my opinion that there would be no finer way to honor this courageous woman than to name after her the best and finest hospital ship yet to come off the production lines.”
As chronicled in my book, Pebble in the Water, about the entire American Nightingale experience, my connection to Frances Slanger began in December 2000 when Nathan Fendrich, a retired Jewish man who’d lost much of his family in the Holocaust, called me at The Register-Guard, where I was a columnist. He told me about a letter he’d seen written by Slanger in Women in the Military: A Jewish Perspective. The book told of her death and about the honor the army ultimately accorded her. I found it a compelling story but it had no local connection, which was all but mandatory for my local column.
“Sorry, Nathan.”