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Navy flight nurse fondly recalls her service in World War II

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A young Jacqueline Melvin feeds an injured solider ice cream in a reception hut on the island of Guam in 1944. Read story

LAKE GENEVA — Jacqueline Melvin was 22 in 1943 when a Navy nurse came to her nursing school.

The woman said the Navy needed young women to join the war effort.

Melvin (then Jacqueline Jacquet) and her roommate signed up.

“Maybe I was more adventurous than most,” she said. “If the war hadn’t started, maybe I wouldn’t have joined. But it was the best thing I ever did. I had a wonderful time.”

Melvin and the other young women who joined reported to the naval hospital in San Diego, where they spent 18 months in training.

The Navy decided it needed flight nurses to compete with the Army and the Air Force, both of which already had flight nurses.

Mary O’Connor, the head stewardess for United Airlines, selected 125 nurses from the hospital to become Navy flight nurses.

“I was one of them,” Melvin said, recalling her excitement.

The flight nurses were sent to Alameda (Calif.) Naval Air Station, where they trained for eight weeks. The young nurses went on practice flights to get comfortable with take-off, flight and landing.

“We only had one flight,” Melvin said. “And then right away, they sent us to Guam.”

The nurses eventually were stationed at a naval base on the island of Guam, which was a hub for the Navy in the Pacific Theater.

The nurses went on regular eight-hour flights to Okinawa and Iwo Jima. They left Guam at 1:30 a.m. and while in the air made sandwiches “for the boys” from loaves of bread and cans of bone-in turkey. Then they slept until landing.

Once on the ground, they stayed for only an hour.

“The Japs were bombing all around,” Melvin said. “They wanted to get the hospital plane out of there.”

The nurses worked quickly to administer basic medical care to injured sailors and corpsman to ensure they were well enough to be flown back to Guam for more treatment.

“They came to us muddy, glassy-eyed, injured,” Melvin said. “And they were so happy to get on board.”

At Guam, the men were housed in a reception hut near the airstrip, where the nurses fed them soup or ice cream. Those well enough to continue traveling hopped island-to-island back to the United States. Those who could recover quickly were returned to their units.

“We had to change dressings, give them their medicines, calm them—just be there for them,” Melvin said.

Each nurse made two round trips to Okinawa or Iwo Jima before returning to the states for a three-day reprieve.

The girls would go shopping, go to the beauty shop and catch up with friends and family.

“Then we were ordered out again,” Melvin said. “You had to catch any plane you could.”

Melvin made 10 round trips to Okinawa.

Melvin left the Navy shortly after the war ended. She worked for an obstetrician/gynecologist for 2 1/2 years back home in Michigan.

But when she learned in 1948 that Naval Air Station Glenview (Ill.) needed a flight nurse, she couldn’t turn down the opportunity. She went back to the Navy for about three years, working at the clinic there.

While there in late 1948, she met her would-be husband, Martin. They married in 1950.

Melvin was discharged from the Navy as a lieutenant after she became pregnant with her first child in 1952. The couple had eight children, a handful of whom followed in their parents’ footsteps and joined the service, including their daughter Maureen, who became a Navy nurse.

Melvin, 87, now lives in Lake Geneva. As she paged through her scrapbook of black-and-white photographs, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia, she spoke fondly of her time as a Navy flight nurse during World War II.

“It was so good for a girl,” she said. “You had all these girlfriends because you were always with other Navy nurses.

“It was such a good life. I would do it all over again.”