What this Army nurse saw through her own movie camera from D-Day to V-E Day
Army Nurse Corps 1st Lt. Mary Aline Cornelius served the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in Europe in World War II, traveling with a movie camera that she and her peers used to record themselves, their unit and operations, and visits from VIPs like Gen. George S. Patton and the Queen Mother Mary of Teck. The captured everything they could, from the hedgerows of France to their evacuation during the Battle of the Bulge to their celebration of Victory in Europe.
Mary didn’t see much direct combat, but she and her peers from the 67th Evacuation Hospital saved thousands of lives and provided a boost to friendly fighters across the continent. At peak operations, the hospital admitted over 150 patients per day and performed about 90 surgeries.
Mary told her story in an audio history in the Veterans History Project in the Library of Congress. Her descriptions have been lightly edited for clarity.
Arriving in Europe and Meeting VIPs
Some of Mary’s early clips are pretty standard for anyone who served in a deployed unit: VIP visits. But what is remarkable is the number of extremely high-level visits that the unit received, and you can hear her excitement in the audio, even decades later. First is the Queen Mother Mary of Teck, the former Queen of England who helped lead the country through World War I.
“Now, Queen Mother Mary is in this car,” Mary said. “She was the grandmother to Queen Elizabeth. She came to visit us in the mess hall the following morning that we set up. And this is the new mess hall on a Sunday afternoon, and as you can see, it was a beautiful day. We had very few that were sunny and warm like it was that day.”
Later, the hospital received a visit from some of the most famous and highly ranked generals in the war. And Mary gave a brief aside about how then Lt. Gen. George Patton was, let’s call it “separate” from the other bigwigs like generals Omar Bradley and Courtney Hodges and Secretary of War Stimson.
“Now, this is where the—we call them the firemen. Secretary of War Stimson, generals Bradley, Patton, and Hodges came to inspect our hospital,” Mary said. “That’s [our commander] Colonel Crawford with Stimson, Bradley, and Hodges. They went through all the tents. One of them, Omar Bradley, he was a good commanding general. His men liked him.
“And they went through all the, the whole hospital, one tent after another, and saw the whole operations. And in the meantime, General Patton, who did not even look at one ward, was in the background, signing autographs. General Patton, he signed autographs for all the GIs, and they’re all set to go back in their convoy to the next inspection, I assume.
“And of course, everybody couldn’t wait to talk all about General Patton because he was all dressed up in his better field outfit where Omar Bradley had his combat outfit on,” Mary continued over the footage. “Here’s where the gab fest was. Everybody was all thrilled and overjoyed at the visiting firemen.”
Command visits must’ve hit differently in 1944. But yeah, seems that Omar Bradley went through each tent, got to know the operations and how they would affect his men while George Patton showed off his sweet duds and met with his fans. And Hodges is lost to the background.
Honestly a decent encapsulation of the relationship between some of the most important generals in the war.
Day-to-Day While Liberating Europe
Like the rest of the Army, the women had to survive the wartime conditions near the front lines of Europe, from evacuating patients ahead of Nazi advances to sleeping in minefields. They did this while saving thousands of casualties from places like Cherbourg, a crucial French port targeted in Operation Overlord.
“We took care of over 4,000 patients, and most of the 4,000 were from the Fourth Infantry Division that was assigned to move into and take Cherbourg,” she said. “We finally took Cherbourg on June the 25th, but, oh, the casualties were high. Now, if the enlisted man, if the soldier got back to our hospital, their chances of living was almost 100 percent because our death rate was well below 1 percent.”
That made the men very lucky to have been in the care of Mary and the 67th Evacuation Hospital. Battlefield medicine took a huge leap forward in World War II, but field hospitals still typically saw fatality rates of 3 to 5 percent. You wanted Mary at your back. And Mary and the other staff made their way east despite the dangerous conditions.
Mary said, “We had a night move into Saint-Lo, and at 3:00 in the morning, they said, ‘Take your bed rolls off the truck and sleep in your bed roll on the ground because this is a mined area.’ Well, in the morning when we woke up, here are the shell holes, and that’s Betty Heffernan, and that’s me behind a cloud of smoke.”
”And there were the dead Germans and the GIs and cows in that field that morning,” Mary continued. “Of course, they were all taken away. An ambulance driver went back in the field and hit a mine, and everybody went back to help him out. We had three enlisted men hit with shrapnel from another mine, and the engineers picked up the dead shells that were laying around.”
“But, Sergeant Ruff was the worst casualty. He had a piece of shrapnel go through his chest into his lungs, and it’s a good thing he was at a hospital because they could operate on him right away.”
Ruff made it, recuperating in France for a week before traveling to England for more recovery.
Part of surviving in France and Germany as the Nazis got pummeled back to Berlin was living under the constant threat of buzz bombs.
“This was Buzz Bomb Alley,” she said, “and there were buzz bombs going over every day. And we always used to stop and listen to see if the motor was gonna cut out because if it did, you ran for cover. And lo and behold, one day, one of them did land about, oh, I would say a couple of miles from the hotel we were in, and I went up to see the destruction. Well, it hit in a wooded area and just laid the trees over like toothpicks and broke out windows like a quarter of a mile to half mile away. A lot of cuts and bruises from flying debris.”
But the women found ways to have fun despite the war. Betty Heffernan reportedly kept her friends laughing, even amidst the wounded and the violence.
“Oh, [Betty] was so funny,” Mary said. “She always put lipstick on ’cause she said she never knew when she was gonna meet the father of her next child. She was a spree.”
Another Betty, Betty Spiegel, caught a kitten and kept it. The women spent the war saving patients, saving themselves, smoking and flirting, and making their way generally east, except for when the massive German advance in December 1944 forced their evacuation.
Germany, the Battle of the Bulge, and V-E Day
The women were supporting the American advance into Germany when he combat forces broke into Aachen, Germany, the first major city of the Siegfried Line to fall. The American, British, and German fighting over the Siegfried Line was some of the most brutal of the war.
Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, the one from the earlier VIP visit to the hospital, commanded First Army as it fought in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and Battle of Aachen. The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was one of the longest battles the U.S. ever fought.
Both battles were brutal grinds with combined casualties of over 50,000. Mary, the Bettys, and their friends would have saved thousands of those casualties. They were in Malmedy, Belgium, near the border with Germany, when the Nazis launched the Battle of the Bulge.
“One Sunday afternoon, the, the Jerries hit, starting the Battle of the Bulge, and they hit Malmedy, and we had to get out,” Mary said. “It was about 5:30 in the evening that we start moving, and we moved back to Namur, Belgium over Christmas.”
The Germans overextended in the Battle of the Bulge, allowing Allied units to start inflicting more deathblows on German units. Going into 1945, the Nazi defenses slowly collapsed. The Soviets dashed across 300 miles of territory to reach artillery range of Berlin. As they attacked the city, the rest of the Allies took out major objectives in the rest of the country.
On May 7 and 8, the remaining major German units surrendered and the War in Europe ended.
”This is V-E Day at Bayreuth, Germany,” Mary said. “That was a German airfield, and there were wrecked planes all over the area. It must have been a pretty big operation for the Jerries. And the [American] colonel carted cognac and champagne across Germany for this day. The bottles of champagne were going around like crazy. We really had a good time that afternoon. Of course, why wouldn’t we? The war was over.”
Bayreuth is in western Germany, nearly to the border with what was then Czecheslovakia, meaning that Mary had served from the coastal towns of France, into Belgium, and nearly all the way across Germany in about 11 months of fighting. The 67th Evacuation Hospital then spent weeks processing German prisoners.
Mary later returned to the United States and recorded her story in Ohio.
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