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By Al Zdon
Vera (Brown) Peters wanted to be a nurse from the time she was a little girl.
"Every since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I was putting a uniform on and taking care of other kids."
Growing up in St. Paul on Maryland Avenue, Peters never gave up on her dream. When her father, Tom Brown,
retired from the St. Paul Police Department, he moved to Morris, Minnesota, where he bought a liquor store in 1937.
There were five children in the family including Vera's twin sister, Veda. "No we
weren't identical. She was small and slight and I was big and clumsy. And she always had a tough time in school, poor kid. She had dyslexia and in those days nobody understood it. Later she became a good
business woman, but she took so many hard knocks in school."
With the family moving, Vera had to transfer from St. Joseph's Academy in St. Paul to St. Mary's Academy in Morris, where she graduated in
1939.
She was determined to become a nurse, a decision that didn't sit well with her parents. "They thought it was such hard work. My dad said all I'd do was empty bedpans all the time. But in the
end, he said, 'If that's what you want to do, you'd better do it.'"
Peters came back to St. Paul and began her training at St. Joseph's Hospital. "I loved every minute of it." She was still in
training, working in the nursery at St. Joseph's when the United States entered World War II in December 1941. "My aunt came over to visit me and she told me about Pearl Harbor and that we were at war."
After graduation in 1942, St. Joseph's offered Peters a job and promised her supervisory RN wages, about $70 a month. Peters took the job. "The first check came, and what they'd promised wasn't
there. The second check came, and it still wasn't there. Here I was, graduated from school, and I'm supposed to be out there and independent, and I'm still asking my dad for money.
"I decided to join
the Army. At least there I could make $70 a month and get board and room."
She enlisted at Ft. Snelling and in one day went from being a civilian to a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. There was no
training, no lectures, no marching, no orientation. "They just put us to work right there at the Ft. Snelling hospital. They just put us out on the floor and we began doing our job.
"We still had
those old blue uniforms, and when my mom came to see me I wanted to look so good in that uniform, I was so proud of that uniform, but I didn't even know how to tie the tie. I asked my mother to do it."
After four or five months, Peters was transferred to Ft. Warren near Cheyenne, Wyoming, in March of 1943. It was pretty much routine hospital work with no casualties from the war. Only the usual
accidents and illnesses filled the beds of the base hospital.
After a time, the Army took Peters and another nurse and paired them with a nurse anesthetist to learn that skill. "After nine months,
they hauled her out and sent her overseas and left us holding the bag. We weren't ready, but it didn't make any difference."
Peters said they used mainly sodium pentothal and a relaxant for
anesthesia, and sometime nitrous oxide. They were not allowed to use some of the better and newer gases because they were explosive.
Not long after that, she herself was shipped overseas, and was
assigned to a "station" hospital at Perham Downs, England, about an hour outside of London. The unit was the 103rd General Hospital. It was just before D-Day. The movement of troops south and the rush to
get the hospital up and running were big clues that the invasion of France was near.
"We were told we had two weeks to get the hospital up and running. We worked like the devil getting it ready."
The army had different levels of care for wounded soldiers. Normally, they would first be taken from the front lines to an aid station or field hospital, then to an evacuation hospital near the battle
front, and finally to a station hospital, often in England at that point in the war.
Two days after D-Day the first casualty arrived. And then it was a flood of wounded young men.
It was there
that much of the surgery was done for combat wounded GIs. "We would do several surgeries and then take a break for a few hours while people cleaned up the operating room, and then do some more. There
were a lot of guys who had had their arms or legs shot off. A lot of them who were shot in the stomach died. We just worked around the clock. The casualties were far more than we had expected, but we had
a job to do."
There was no penicillin and infection was a constant danger at the hospital.
"The hardest part of my job was seeing those boys have to go back after being wounded."
Conditions for
the nurses were not terrific. They slept four to a room, and the rooms were cold and damp. Peters said she sent home for flannel pajamas. Several of the nurses contracted tuberculosis while in England.
In April, 1945, Peters was assigned to the 27th Evacuation Hospital. "I just happened to be in Paris on VE Day on my way to my new assignment. What a celebration that was. They were up all night,
swinging from the chandeliers. I remember the French people dragged the prisoners of war down the street. They were just unmerciful to those prisoners.
"The people were swinging from the upper floors
of the Opera House. They were so happy the war was over, they didn't know what to do with themselves. Nobody slept a wink that night, or for the next two nights."
Her destination was Sternberg Sea in
Austria. Although the war was over, the hospital still had quite a few casualties at the beginning, but in a few weeks, the number of patients had been reduced drastically.
The Army had another
assignment for Peters. It was at a place called Dachau. Peters was among the first group of 15 nurses to be sent to the camp.
The massive concentration camp had been one of the cruelest in Europe. It
was where prisoners of war, Jews, political prisoners and others who had caused trouble at other camps were sent.
"These prisoners were reduced to something less than human. When I got there, they
were still dying at a rate of 150-200 a day.
"These men had just lost their sense of decency. They couldn't even talk. We'd put clothes on them, and they'd take them off and go wandering off down the
street. They had lost all sense of what it was to be a human being.
"We'd hand them a plate with food on it, and they'd go over to the corner and eat it like a dog.
"They were so undernourished and
underfed that they'd just lay on those slabs in the barracks. They would die right in front of you. We couldn't begin to take care of them."
Every day when Peters and the other nurses would go to
work, they'd be doused in DDT to protect them from disease. "And you know how dangerous DDT turned out to be. But it seemed like it didn't hurt any of the nurses."
There were few doctors. "The
ones who helped the most were the priests and the rabbis. I don't know what we would have done without them. I don't know where they came from, I suppose some of them were from around there, but they
were the ones who did the most." Many of them had been prisoners themselves.
The goal was to get the prisoners out of the camp, and there were agencies set up from the various countries – Germany,
Poland, France, and others – to arrange to bring the inmates home. It was a difficult business because many of the prisoners were sick unto death or insane.
There was also a problem with supplies.
"They would only let us use German supplies for the prisoners. So many of them had open wounds, and you'd put one of the German dressings on them, but they were only made of paper and they didn't work. I
don't know why they wouldn't let us use American supplies."
And what supplies they had seemed to vanish regularly. "The people who were there from the different countries had nothing, and so they'd
steal our supplies."
The nurses tried to feed the prisoners, make them drink water, try to keep them dressed in clean clothes, but for many it was a difficult task. "There just didn't seem to be much
we could do for them."
When Peters arrived, they took the nurses on a tour of the huge camp. "We saw where they still had the bodies stacked up. The stench was unbelievable. The smell got to me, it
got to all of us."
"A lot of the girls went up to see the crematoriums, but I couldn't do it. I just couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand to see where these people were tortured."
Even in the
barracks where the nurses were sleeping, a converted SS barracks at the camp, the smell was awful. "Finally, they found a body in the basement that had been dead a long time. That was what was causing
the smell."
Peters spent three months at Dachau, and while she'll never forget, she said it didn't give her nightmares later. "I was young. I just had to will it out of my mind. I knew I couldn't
think about it. When I first got there, I would cry all the time. You'd try to help, but so many were just beyond help. So many of them had just stopped thinking. It was horrible, horrible."
The
nurses would try to keep each others' spirits up the best they could. "We try to cheer each other up. Maybe somebody would make a little joke, or something. We did what we could."
From there, in July
1945, Peters was sent to a women's hospital near Wiesbaden. "I was glad to get out. We had a job to do at Dachau and we did it. But I was glad to get out.
"Now it just seems like a bad dream to me
that I was there. I have so much respect for the Jewish people, to have endured that and to have survived. So many came to America and made good lives after that.
"Why people do that to other people,
I don't know."
Because she didn't have enough points, Captain Peters remained in Europe after the war until December when she was finally given orders to travel to LeHavre for a ship home. It was
another experience she won't forget.
"It was an Italian freighter, and it was packed. We had to sleep in shifts. As we went across the North Atlantic, a storm came up that was so bad we all thought we
were going to drown. The ship was pitching so violently that the propellers would come right out of the water. At one point, the portholes burst and we all got soaked. Everybody was sick."
The cruise
took 14 days, but it finally did land in New York. From there it was a train ride to Ft. Dodge, Iowa, where Peters was given terminal leave as her final paperwork was being done.
"I had gotten the flu
on the train ride, and I was so sick. But my sister and brother came down from Morris to get me, and we set off in this awful snowstorm. We drove through that snow all day and when we got near to Morris,
we finally couldn't go any further. We had to walk the last three and a half miles into Morris, and I didn't have any boots.
"They had planned this big celebration, but by the time we got there it was
three in the morning and everybody had gone home."
The family moved to Ely for a time, and Peters worked part-time in a hospital there, but she eventually ended up back at St. Joseph's in St. Paul.
She took a course at the University of Minnesota to become a nurse anesthesiologist and that was what she did for the rest of her career.
She married Alfred Peters in 1949, and they had five children
together. "Every time I got pregnant, I'd have to leave my job, and so I worked at a lot of different hospitals. But I loved it so."
Alfred died at age 54 and Peters has never remarried. She retired
in 1984, and now lives in a retirement community in White Bear Lake. In addition to her five children, she has 10 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Peters served as commander of American
Legion Post 521 in Mendota Heights. She was one of 11 veterans honored this year to represent the Minnesota American Legion at the dedication of the World War II Memorial in Washington D.C.
(Part of this story came from a story Vera Peters wrote for the Military Vehicles and Arms Museum publication.)
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