Review: ‘American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger, Forgotten Heroine of Normandy’
In the early morning of October 21, 1944, in a field hospital near Elsenborn, Belgium, Army nurse Frances Slanger couldn’t sleep, so she wrote a letter to Stars and Stripes, the weekly magazine for the US troops. It was a letter praising the soldiers:
“We wade ankle deep in mud. You have to lie in it. We are restricted to our immediate area, a cow pasture or hay field, but then, who is not restricted? We have a stove and coal. We even have a laundry line in the tent. Our GI drawers are at this moment doing the dance of the pants, what with the wind howling, the tent waving precariously, the rain beating down, the guns firing, and me with a flashlight, writing. ….
Sure, we rough it, but in comparison to the way you men are taking it, we can’t complain, nor do we feel that bouquets are due us. But you, the men behind the guns, the men driving our tanks, flying our planes, sailing our ships, building bridges and to the men who pave the way and to the men who are left behind – it is to you we doff our helmets. To every GI wearing the American uniform, for you we have the greatest admiration and respect.”
Later that day, she and her three tent mates signed the letter, and with the permission of her commanding officer she mailed it to the Stars and Stripes office operating out of Paris.
The letter appeared in the November 7 issue, not in the letter column but as the guest editorial (only General Eisenhower had had that honor prior to this time). Across northern Europe, over 100,000 issues were delivered to soldiers, sailors and airmen. Many of them were deeply moved, and responded with letters of their own, thanking her for her words.
Frances Slanger never got to read them. She had been dead for seventeen days, killed by shellfire only hours after she’d finished writing her paean to the American fighting man.
Author Bob Welch’s biography is a stirring, ultimately heart-warming chronicle of a courageous woman who survived a childhood as a Jew in Lodz, Poland during World War I. Afterwards her family immigrated to America…she arrived at Ellis Island when she was seven years old. She always had ambitions to be a writer, and a nurse. Jewish girls weren’t supposed to become nurses…she persevered. She graduated from nursing school in 1937, in 1941 she volunteered to go into the Army.
She begged her superiors to be sent to France, and on June 10, 1944, she and 17 other nurses of the Forty-Fifth field hospital came ashore at Utah Beach, along with hundreds more soldiers to swell the troops fighting for Normandy. They were the first American nurses in France…sent months before it had been intended because of the tremendous battle casualties the Americans were facing. Along with the other nurses Slanger helped doctors operate, comforted the sick and wounded, and expressed her emotions and observations in letters and a journal.
Welch tells Frances Slanger’s story against the larger backdrop of a cold world, from the persecution of the Polish Jews by Russian Cossacks, to the assembly-line automation of Ellis Island, to the life of immigrant Jews in Boston. Frances determination to make something of herself…to leave a mark on the world, shines through the story of her arrival in Normandy, the progress of the invasion, her work and relationships at the Forty-fifth…and her death. She was the first American nurse killed in the line of duty during World War II.
This is a fast-paced narrative and a meticulously researched work. Welch interviewed many of Slanger’s contemporaries, especially the four surviving nurses with whom she worked. An appendix presents excerpts from many of the letters that the GIs wrote to Stars and Stripes in response to her editorial (before they knew of her death, the news of which was not published until weeks afterward).
Welch is an award-winning general columnist at The Register-Guard newspaper, and has written seven other books including A Father For All Seasons and Where Roots Grow Deep.
