Willow Glen Resident

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Army veteran was a nurse on the front lines

By Mayra Flores De Marcotte

Willow Glen resident Jewell Baker Thornton has always felt the call to care for others. This truth was never clearer than during the years she served as a World War II nurse.

Thornton's daughter, Pamela Erickson, says her mother's initiation into the war began in White Sulfur Springs, W. Va., where the army had a German POW camp.

Erickson recalls asking her mother what she was thinking before she stepped into the hospital ward to take care of the soldiers.

Erickson says her mother replied, 'I closed my eyes and saw a whole room filled with little Hitlers. Not knowing what would happen, I shook my head to clear that image and entered with a medic.' "

Her mother says, a young German lieutenant, about the same age as the then-22-year-old Lt. Baker, called his men to attention and then to rest. She walked around the room handing out medication.

" 'They had simply become patients who needed my help,'" says Erickson, recalling her mother's words. "This just gives me goose bumps every time, and that's the way I start my story about her."

Thornton, 86, grew up on a farm in Kentucky where she looked after her siblings and the family pets.

"As a little kid, I took care of the sick dogs on the farm," Thornton says. "I was always taking care of something or someone."

It was a natural decision for her to chose nursing as a career. She graduated in August 1943 from nursing school and, along with two-thirds of her peers, volunteered for the U.S. Army.

She began her service at Camp Campbell, Ky. From there, she was shipped to White Sulfur Springs, W. Va., and then overseas to England, where she received her first assignment.

"I was part of an evacuation unit," Thornton says. "It was like M*A*S*H. The hospital was a large tent, and we lived in tents."

The apparel was much like the chaotic living quarters, she says.

"When I first went in, there was no Army Nurse Corps so our uniforms were helter-skelter," Thornton says.

Black-blue skirts with dark blue jackets and an overseas cap was the initial uniform. During the summer, a beige dress was issued and in the winter it was a brown one.

"Luckily, we worked in fatigues in the hospital," she says. "It was a lot better than the crisp white uniforms we used back home."

Since Thornton's unit, the 108th Evacuation Hospital, arrived in England before the equipment, local residents housed the unit.

"It was a good experience, " she says. "We learned a lot from them."

The nurses learned how to ration whatever they needed to survive.

Her unit arrived in the middle of the Blitz in 1944, which was a second attempt by the Germans to continually bomb the United Kingdom into surrendering.

From England, Thorton's unit was shipped to France. There she became part of one of the biggest battles of World War II-- Battle of Ardennes, better known as Battle of the Bulge, a German offensive.

The men coming into her hospital were from the front lines, and the hours were endless. The nurses would treat the soldiers, and they would be either sent back to the front lines after their wounds were tended or they were sent home.

"We saw everything from very little injury to very severe," she says, "but taking care of the GIs was the best part of the experience."

While tending to the soldiers, a number of famous individuals crossed her path. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen. George Patton and even Helen Keller, who Thornton describes as a "delightful" person, came into medical facilities to offer encouragement to the troops.

After the war Thornton, like millions who served, returned to the United States with memories that would never fade. She says those years of serve enriched her time as a school nurse and her career in the nursing profession.

"There was nothing I ever wanted to do," she says.