By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

MASON - Before she joined the Army in 1943, a family trip to Indiana was a journey far from home for Hilda Hines.

Hilda Hines of Mason with a photo of herself, shot in England in 1944 while deployed as an army nurse during World War II. (Glenn Hartong photo)

But within a year, the 22-year-old Army nurse from Middletown found herself living in tents in the fields of France, following along behind the massive Allied occupation force. She tended to the wounded, the sick and soldiers for whom the noise and chaos of battle had become too much for their minds to bear.

"I was green as grass," said the now-81-year-old widow, one of about 200,000 women military veterans of World War II still living. "I couldn't believe where I was and what was happening."

Women stepped into a multitude of roles that, before the war, had been the domain of men. By the hundreds of thousands, women on the home front went to work in defense factories while the male work force served in uniform overseas.

But a relative handful of women joined the military - all of them volunteers - as the draft applied only to young men.

Hines was one of 59,000 members of the Army Nurses Corps, a mostly female force that served in field hospitals, on hospital ships and in the air as nurses on medical evacuation planes.

Hines started her career in nursing at the age of 17, when she entered the Christ Hospital nursing school. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, she was still a student at Christ, learning her profession by helping staff the hospital's emergency room. She trained in triage and emergency care, which would serve her well a few years later on the other side of the Atlantic.

After graduating in 1943, she worked five months at Middletown General Hospital before she, along with many of her fellow nursing graduates, joined the Army Nurses Corps.

"Things were not going well in the war and a lot of us, including me, just felt like we had to do something,'' recalled Hines, sitting in the living room of her Mason home. "I had a skill the Army needed. I felt like I could make a difference."

For her first seven months in the Army, she was assigned to the base hospital at Camp Atterbury, Ind., a major center for processing departing troops and a detention area for enemy prisoners of war. There, she worked overnight shifts, from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.

"I remember working on a ward with a lot of Italian POWS, soldiers who had been captured in North Africa," Hines said. "They seemed perfectly nice to me. They never gave us any trouble. Maybe they were just scared to death."

When she was shipped overseas, she was sent to Gloucester, England, as part of the Allied military buildup that would lead to the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

She was assigned to the 49th Field Hospital, a forerunner of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units that came along in the Korean War. It was a medical unit designed to follow quickly behind a moving army.

"We could pack up the whole hospital and move in four hours' time," Hines said. "We had to move quick."

For a while, doctors, nurses and medical corpsmen of the 49th were billeted in the homes of British families. But as D-Day approached, they were moved into a vast tent city near the English resort city of Torquay, on the English Channel near Plymouth.

"There were some palm trees in Torquay, which I thought was crazy because I couldn't imagine England had palm trees," said Hines.

But the weather in the spring of 1944 in the south of England was anything but tropical.

"It was cold and wet in the tents all the time," Hines said. "That's when I started drinking coffee."

The 49th wasn't involved in the first wave of the invasion on June 6, 1944, but Hines remembers the day clearly.

"We got out of the tents and looked up and the sky was just covered with airplanes, as far as the eye could see,'' said Hines. "That's when we knew just how big this was."

It would be two more months before the 49th Field Hospital shipped across the English Channel to Normandy. At one point the backup of military ships meant they had to sit in the channel for three days on a ship "loaded with bedbugs."

Hines remembers clambering down a rope ladder on the landing vessel carrying a stray cat she had adopted back in England.

"For the life of me I can't remember what happened to that cat," Hines said. "But I do remember he landed at Normandy."

What followed was months of moving across France, setting up and knocking down the field hospital countless times, as they tried to keep pace with the Allied forces battling their way across central Europe.

"We just moved and moved," Hines said of the 18 nurses, 18 doctors and dozens of corpsmen.

For the rest of the war, it was days of 12-hour shifts tending to the wounded, the ill and those shell-shocked soldiers who had to be removed from the front.

"There were some who couldn't take it and had to go back behind the lines to recuperate," said Hines. "The sick outnumbered the wounded by a long shot."

By the time the war in Europe ended, the hospital squad was moved to a large staging area near Marseilles, where they expected to stay until they were shipped to the Pacific Theater.

But in August 1945, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the Pacific war without a full-scale invasion of Japan. The 49th Field Hospital was sent home.

Hines left the service and went to work at Christ Hospital as a nurse in the psychiatric ward. After a few years, she left the nursing profession when she met and married her late husband, Albert "Bud" Hines, who became county treasurer in Clermont County. The couple raised five children.

Today, Hines lives with a daughter in Mason and is getting ready for a trip to Washington, D.C., this month to witness the dedication of the National World War II Memorial on the National Mall.

"It will be a last hurrah for all of us who served," she said. "Hard as it was, I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything. It was an amazing time."

Paying a visit

The National World War II Memorial, to be dedicated May 29 in Washington, D.C., is open to visitors.

There's no charge to tour the football-field-size, granite-and-bronze memorial, which honors the 16 million who served in U.S. armed forces and the more than 400,000 who died. Demand for free tickets to the dedication is high but those on a waiting list have a chance to secure a spot (call 800-297-1421). A non-ticketed viewing area will be set up on the National Mall between 10th and 14th streets.

Across the Atlantic, in France, the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the June 6 D-Day landings also is straining capacity. Hotel rooms in Normandy are hard to find; D-Day tour companies are swamped with bookings. U.S. World War II vets who served in Normandy are being offered housing by French families (register at normandymemoire.com). A list of tour companies that also run D-Day excursions this year can be found at www.normandy-dday.com.

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E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com

Sixth in series

On May 29, the National World War II Memorial will be dedicated in Washington, D.C. This is the sixth of seven weekly profiles of local WWII veterans who plan to attend the ceremonies.