Army nurse shares war stories

WENDY PIERRO/Acorn Newspapers Billie Thibodeau Over the years, Billie Thibodeau, 88, has lost her uniform and other mementos from the three years she spent as an Army nurse during World War II. But she still has the small yellow combat ribbon with four battle stars the Army awarded her.

The Army gave the Camarillo resident the ribbon and stars because her unit chased Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, across Africa and was part of the D-Day invasions of Salerno and Anzio, Italy, and Southern France.

In 1942 the Iowa native, then Billie Walden, joined the United States Army fresh out of nursing school.

"Everybody was talking about joining—we'd been bombed by then," Thibodeau said, referring to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Soon the new recruit and others left a New York harbor for parts unknown on a cruise ship the government had called into action. Once the crowded ship was on the high seas, their destination was disclosed—Casablanca, Morroco.

But Casablanca was far from the romantic setting depicted in the award-winning movie. The place was hot and dusty, and Army uniforms were made of 100 percent wool in those days, she said.

Thibodeau was assigned to the 95th Evacuation Hospital. Unlike the hospital in the TV show "M*A*S*H," the 400-bed 95th hospital traveled. Wherever Rommel went, the hospital followed, Thibodeau said.

The unit's 200 enlisted men could tear down and set up the hospital in seven hours and usually placed it two miles from the front.

The nurses slept in tents. When it rained, the dirt floor turned to mud. To rainproof the tent, the outside was saturated with grease.

"It was horrible. It really was, and conditions were terrible. But we had the best cooks," Thibodeau said.

At one point the hospital treated more than 3,000 patients in 15 days, she said. Despite the primitive conditions, the patient survival rate at the 95th was in the high 90s, Thibodeau said.

Hospital staff even operated on German soldiers.

In recognition of the unit's high survival rate, a congressional act after the war declared that the 95th Evacuation Hospital will exist as long as there is a U.S. Army, Thibodeau said.

She remembers one September morning in 1943 when she and her bunkmate were jolted out of bed. The Germans had bombed their ship, the British HMHS Newfoundland, a hospital ship clearly marked as such and protected from attack by the Geneva Conventions. The ship was anchored off the coast of Salerno when the Allies invaded Italy.

The attack killed several British nurses and medical officers.

Thibodeau escaped the sinking ship but remembers those who didn't.

Thibodeau recalled a happier event toward the end of the war. Fifteen armed German soldiers walked into the mess tent. The cooks, thinking they were captured, raised their hands. But the soldiers were eyeing the steaming vats of food and not the cooks.

One of the cooks realized the soldiers were hungry and wanted to surrender, so he led a young soldier outside the camp and motioned to the ground and to his gun. Firearms were prohibited in the camp.

The soldier laid down his weapon and eagerly accepted a bowl and spoon from the cook, and the two walked back into the mess tent. The 14 other German soldiers quickly did the same.

In 1945, when her unit was poised to enter Germany, Thibodeau became ill and was sent home. Later, her friends from the 95th mailed photographs of what they saw at Dachau Concentration Camp. Three of the photos were too horrific to keep, Thibodeau said, and she destroyed them. But she kept one photograph—it shows dozens of naked corpses lying in rows at Dachau—to show her daughters that the Holocaust really happened.

After Thibodeau left the Army she returned to college to become a certified public health nurse. She worked as a school nurse until age 63. She married Gerard Thibodeau in 1950, and they had four daughters.

The family settled in Illinois, but in 1977, Gerard died from cancer. Thibodeau moved to California in 2005 to be closer to one of her daughters.

The Leisure Village resident has five grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

Annual reunions brought the nurses, doctors and enlisted men of the 95th together for decades. Soon their children, then grandchildren, accompanied them.

At the last reunion in 2002 or 2003, only five of the 30 nurses, eight doctors, five officers and 200 enlisted men of the 95th showed up. Thibodeau said she, a doctor and an enlisted man are the only ones left now.

"You still had hope; you still had friendships," Thibodeau said of those war years. "You really depended on each other, and you knew you had to come through."

Thibodeau and some 40 other women who served in the military during World War II or worked in technical and mechanical civilian jobs that supported the war will be honored in the Women in War exhibit, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. tomorrow, May 9, at the Commemorative Air Force Aviation Museum in the Camarillo Airport.

Few people are aware of how women contributed to World War II, and the exhibit aims to publicize their contribution, said Ceci Stratford, one of the exhibit organizers.

"They paved the way for what women do now in business, in supporting our war effort," she said. "To have them all together is really historic."