Local 100-year-old remembers time on a WWII hospital ship

As a young Naval nurse in World War II, Alice Miller saw more than her share of suffering in the 1940s. But the 100-year-old rural Old Fort resident looks back fondly on some good times too. Alice celebrated her 100th birthday on Jan. 20. Although COVID prevented a full-out birthday party, she received lots of phone calls from family, friends and neighbors, and her dining room table was filled with flowers. "There were six bouquets and lots of notes and lots of phone calls," she said. "And the choir from St. Paul's in Fremont came out and sang on the deck. Ten of them. "The special guest priest in Fremont has three little girls," she said. "They came and sang happy birthday to me. They were cute as they could be." Her friends and church in Tuscon, Arizona, also wished her well. "Everyone's been very kind," she said. For many years Alice and her sister, Betty, 98, lived in Ohio in the summer and Tuscon in the winter. But last spring they sold their condo in Tuscon and came back to Ohio to stay. "I tell them jokingly that the cemetery is closer here," Alice said. Tucson is where she ended her nursing career as associate director of nursing at the University Hospital there. "I helped to set up the university hospital in 1970," she said. But Alice's early years as a nurse also are vivid in her memory. "I was Navy," she said. "I was assigned for a year to a hospital ship." After graduating as a nurse from the Toledo Hospital School of Nursing in June 1941, WWII broke out in December of that year. She was working as a nurse when she saw posters about the need for nurses, and she felt the call to answer. On her 22nd birthday, January 20, 1943, she was on her way to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, to become an ensign in the Navy Nurse Corps. She said 16 classmates — half of her nursing class — joined either the Army or Navy. Alice said she was one of the first nurses who entered the Navy as an officer because it was the first time nurses were given rank. "One of these classmates was my good friend Alene Deurk, who later became the first woman admiral in the Navy," Alice said in the written version of a speech she gave in 2012. Deurk was from Holgate, Ohio. "She was my friend and I kept in touch with her until she died," she said. In boot camp, Alice said she learned the "Navy Way" of hospital protocol along with military rules and regulations. "We exercised, marched and learned to salute from a salty first mate who said, 'Don't look as through you are shading your eyes.'" Nine months later, she was assigned to a Naval air base in Jacksonville, Florida, and worked in a sick bay near the airfield, about a mile from the main hospital. "It was exciting to be near the airfield and take care of the pilots and sailors who worked on planes," she said in the speech. "We also had our meals with the airmen, so we got to know these daring young men. Lots of laughs. They would tell us how they had flown low and buzzed chickens that would scatter. I'm sure the farmer wasn't too happy." She said the men often would visit the nurses with minor cuts and scrapes just to break up the routine. She next worked in the surgical unit at a Naval hospital in Oakland, California. "Overwhelming," she said. "The surgeons were repairing or reconstructing battle wounds." In February 1945, Alice was assigned to the U.S. Navy hospital ship, the USS Solace. But first, Alice and three other nurses were sent for training in a swimming pool. "We learned life-saving skills," she said. "We jumped from the high diving board and learned to swim and get into a lifeboat without falling in the water or tipping the raft over." When they were ready, the four women flew to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, (her first flight) and joined then on to a three-day flight in a C-54 cargo plane to meet the ship in the South Pacific, fueling at small islands along the way. The four nurses caught up with the USS Solace in Guam when it arrived with its first load of wounded from Okinawa. "At last I saw this great white ship with a huge red cross on either side and learned it was lighted every night for identification and safety," she said. "I was in awe - my home for the next year." As a floating emergency and trauma unit, Alice said the Solace had room for 416 patients. There were two surgeries and six units. She worked in the burn unit with room for 60 patients in upper and lower bunks with less less-wounded on top. All 13 nurses aboard — one a chief nurse — shared six sleeping rooms and a general living area. They, along with 20 doctors, 200 corpsmen and two chaplains, cared for the wounded, while the ship's crew took care of the sailing, cleaning, laundry and food preparation. Alice said she remembers the wonderful people she worked with. Many of the corpsmen were pre-med students, she said, and were "super guys." Her first trip to Okinawa was April-June 1945. "We were in the Battle of Okinawa, the largest, bloodiest battle of the war - 12,500 American killed and 37,000 wounded," she said. "These were some of our patients." She said some troops described the battles they had been part of. "We had these kids that were shot to hell and back," she said. "They were young and healthy so many were able to make it through it. "One 18-year-old described this scene as he landed on the battlefield for the first time," Alice said. "Imagine trying to fight the enemy and stay alive while walking in mud up to your knees with Japanese hiding in caves and shooting at you - a catastrophic situation. And on the sea kamikaze planes diving into our ships causing explosions, fires and oil spills; sailors jumping onto the burning water, and of course, being burned; bombs flying everywhere." While working in the burn unit, Alice saw many victims of kamikaze warfare. She said the Solace would anchor near the battleground, take on patients, sail to base hospitals on Guam, unload patients and then sail back to the battle area. "We all turned to working both day and night," she said. "Our goal was to save lives, prevent infection, ease the pain, comfort and wash them. It didn't take long to fill all the beds. "We got the wounded off the battlefield and give them first aid, and sailed them back to Guam," she said. "That was about a five-day trip. "When you see what happened to those boys," she said. "We did everything we had to do. She said hospital ships were protected under the terms of the Geneva Convention, but they found out the Japanese were no longer honoring that understanding when a bomb was dropped near the Solace. "I saw it with my own eyes," she said. "We took cover." Later that night, she said a kamikaze dove into another hospital ship and killed medical personnel. After that, hospital ships remained with the military fleets and were escorted by destroyers. "One night we were attacked. Scary to say the least," she said. "We doctors, nurses and corpsmen sat on deck in our units with our patients. Total darkness. Ports closed. Dead silence. And bombs flying around. No hits. Lucky again." While the work was intense, Alice said there was time for fun too. She related one memorable event when the nurses were invited to a party the Third Marine Division had for war correspondents. During the party, she and a friend met Ernie Pyle, "the GI's favorite war correspondent." They asked for his autograph. He said he had to use "the head" and had been unable to break away, so they escorted him to the bathroom. "By the way, he was a Hoosier and we were Buckeyes, so that made it special," she said. "We were only too willing and he signed our dollar bills. A delightful man. He was killed two weeks later on the battlefield." After her Navy service ended in August 1947, Alice worked at the university hospital in Chicago until she went to Tuscon in 1970 to help set up the university hospital there. She worked in Tuscon until she retired in the early 1980s, and then continue to live in Tuscon and Ohio for 30-some years. Happy 100th birthday, Alice!