Blogs Feature WWII Women POWs for Women's History Month

Dorothy Scholl graduated from nursing school in 1936, Photo courtesy of Carolyn Armold Torrence

A huge thank you to bloggers featuring PURE GRIT to celebrate Women's History Month!

Seventy-nine American WWII nurses survived combat and three years as POWs of the Japanese, but the story is perhaps best told through the eyes of a single nurse.

Dorothy Scholl was born a hundred years ago, the same year five-thousand suffragists marched to the White House amid much ridicule and abuse by an antagonistic mob.  She grew up far from Pennsylvania Avenue, the ninth child of ten on a farm in Missouri. But she had the independent spirit of a 20th Century woman, and two of Dorothy’s older sisters helped send her to nursing school. Read more...

Over at her blog READ LIKE A WRITER, a Teaching Blog, Author Christine Kohler offers a look at how the stories of the World War II POW nurses were almost lost forever. 

In 1945, when the women arrived home after their three years as POW’s in the Philippines, their superiors had them sign statements agreeing not to speak of the atrocities they had seen.

“They treated it as if it was a stigma,” said Lieutenant Colonel Hattie R. Brantley.

A good number of the seventy-eight POW nurses had died before there was any effort to preserve their stories. Read more...


And check out Christine's novel NO SURRENDER SOLIDER, a story encompassing the experiences of a WWII soldier, a Vietnam soldier and the boy that links the two.

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