The first woman to lose her life by enemy action in the European Theatre was Frances Y. Slanger, a nurse who had such pride in and compassion for the American soldiers who appeared before her bloody, filthy, and exhausted.[i]

Frances Y. Slanger was born Friedel Yachet Schlanger[ii] into a Jewish Russian family in Lodz, Poland in 1913. Her parents were David Slanger and Eva Lefkowitz Slanger. The couple had married in 1905. Waiting at home for a baby sister, was Sally Slanger Sidman, five years older than Frances. Living where they did put them as witnesses to the horrors of WWI which eventually led to them leaving for a new life in America.[iii] David emigrated first, arriving in 1913. The rest of the family followed in 1920.[iv]

Her father supported the family as a fruit peddler. Sometimes, Frances would help him with his work.[v] As we hit years of the Great Depression, the Slanger family is living in Boston in a rental home on Oneida Street. By this time, David and Eva are celebrating their silver anniversary – their 25th. Only Sally reports working in the 1930 census. She’s a stocking inspector in a stocking shop. Meanwhile, Frances is still in school.[vi]

Frances graduated from the Abraham Lincoln School[vii] and the Practical Arts High School.[viii]

HER LIFE BEFORE MILITARY

From about 1932 onward, Frances wrote poetry. Much of her poems relate to her service life. Those poems and other materials can be found at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Frances’ interest in writing wasn’t just poems. She sent jokes to local newspapers as well as editorials, wrote short stories and even published an account of her first training session with the Army Nurse Corp, according to an article in the Boston University Bridge. Her short stories proved her a budding novelist with themes of dances and finding true love.[ix]

Frances was a 1937 nursing graduate of Boston City Hospital.[x] She also worked at Boston City Hospital.[xi]

By 1940, as the war years arrive, Frances is the only child living at home with her parents. The family is still renting on Oneida Street. Frances is working at the hospital and making about $19 a week.[xii] Meanwhile, her sister, Sally, has married to James Sidman, a clothing cutter, and has begun a family of her own.

HER MILITARY STORY

When Frances stepped up to help with the war effort, she wasn’t alone. She was one of 225 former Boston City Hospital nurses who did so.[xiii] She enlisted in 1943 in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Her basic training as an army nurse took place at Fort Devens in Shirley, Massachusetts.[xiv] She worked with the 229th Station Hospital at Fort Rucker, Alabama.[xv]

Frances’ story is that she fought to get to front line nursing. According to ArmyHistory.org, Frances was assigned stateside and relentlessly argued to go overseas.[xvi] Apparently, she was at first told she couldn’t serve overseas due to her poor eyesight, but the decision was later reversed.[xvii]

Frances Y. Slanger told her own story better than any other writer could. She took her pen one night and wrote a letter to the editor of The Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper. It was picked up over and over until it ran from tiny town newspapers in Sergeant, Nebraska to Denton, Maryland, to Florence, Alabama – to the whole country. The Sergeant Leader newspaper wished it to be required reading for everyone who turned down buying a war bond or complained about ration coupons and other inconveniences.

Her letter was published in the Stars and Stripes but not until 17 days after her death. When they printed the letter, word had not reached the editors she was dead.[xviii]

Frances was assigned to the 45th Field Hospital just behind the front lines of the U. S. First Army.[xix]

Frances wrote:

To the Editor of the Stars and Stripes:

It’s 2 a.m. and I have been lying awake for one hour listening to the steady breathing of three other nurses in my tent. I have been thinking about some of the things we have discussed during the day. The rains are beating down on the tent room with torrential force. The winds are on a mad rampage and their main objective seems to be to lift the tent off its poles and fling it about our heads.

The fires are burning low, just a few live coals are left in the bottom. But with a slow feeding of wood and finally of coal, they will be roaring again. I couldn’t help thinking how like a human being fire is. If it is not allowed to run too low and if there is a spark of life left in it, it can be nursed back. So can a human being. It’s slow. It’s gradual. But is done all the time – in these field hospitals and in other hospitals in the E.T.0.

Today we were reading several articles in different magazines and paperbacks sent by grateful GIs praising the work of the nurses in the combat zones. Praising us! For what?

Lieutenant Bowler is sleeping with one eye open. I whisper to her. Lieutenant Powers and Lieutenant Cox slumber on. Fine nurses and great girls to live with. Of course, like all families, there’s an occasional quarrel. But these are quickly forgotten.

I’m writing this by flashlight. In this light the tent looks like a dive. In the center are two poles. Kindling wood lies in disordered confusion on the damp ground. We don’t have a tarpaulin on the ground.

A French wine pitcher filled with water stands by. The GIs say we rough it. We in our little tent can’t see it that way.

True, we live in tents, sleep on cots and are subjected to all types of weather. We wade ankle deep in mud, we are restricted to an area – a cow pasture or a hay field. But then, who isn’t restricted? We have a stove. We have coal. We even have a laundry line in the tent. Our GI drawers are at the moment doing a dance on the line. With the wind howling through the tent, rain beating down, guns firing and me writing by flashlight, it all adds up to a feeling of unreality.

Sure, we rough it. But in comparison to the way you men take it, we can’t complain, nor do we feel that any bouquets are due us.

But to you men behind the guns, driving the tanks, flying the planes, sailing the ships, building the bridges and to the men who are left behind, it’s to you we doff our helmets. To every GI wearing an American uniform – for you we have the greatest admiration and respect.

Yes, this time we’re handing out the bouquets, after taking care of you and your buddies, seeing you brought in, bloody and dirty, caked with earth and mud and grime. Most of you [are] SO tired. Somebody’s brother. Somebody’s father. Somebody’s son.

And seeing you gradually brought back to life and consciousness. Seeing lips part in a grin when they first welcome you. Hurt as you are, you usually kid. It doesn’t amaze us anymore to hear “Howya, babe?” or “Holy mackerel, an American woman!” or the indiscreet “Say how about a kiss?”[xx]

Such soldiers stay with us only a short time – for ten days or two weeks. But we have learned a great deal about the American soldier and the stuff he is made of.

At the 45th Field Hospital,[xxi] her tentmates were Lt. Elizabeth Powers, Lt. Christin Cox and Lt. Margaret Bowler.[xxii] She also had a special relationship with Dr. Isadore Schwarth at the hospital. That friendship may have included romantic feelings.[xxiii]

According to The Miami Herald, the letter was much commented on by troops at the front line. “It seemed to put the final touch on the bond of mutual admiration and respect that exists between the front-line fighting men and the front-line nurses,” the Herald’s reporter stated.[xxiv]

Hundreds of GIs wrote to thank her but of course, she never knew of those letters.[xxv] Even 10 years after her death, newspapers were reprinting her letter for Memorial Day.[xxvi]

During Frances’ time near the front lines, she served as an Army nurse for over 3,000 men on the Western front.[xxvii]

Frances, wearing a three-pound helmet, fatigues, and army boots,[xxviii] waded on to shore in Normandy just four days past D-Day. Within two hours, she and the other nurses were at work in the field hospital. She was one of just a few nurses who went ashore then.[xxix] On the front lines, she worked as part of a surgical team.[xxx]

HER LAST DAY

As Frances noted in her letter, it had been raining hard on October 21, 1944. The area had been quiet in the previous days and the dinner hour proceeded normally. It was quite a surprise when the hospital near Liege came under attack from German artillery.[xxxi]A few hours after penning her letter and dropping it in the mail,[xxxii] German 88s hit the hospital.[xxxiii]

There was an assumption the hospital was in a safe zone, so no foxholes had been dug. Without the foxholes, there was little place to seek cover.[xxxiv] She, was hit by shrapnel which slashed her stomach[xxxv] and died of her wounds[xxxvi] near Elsenborn, Belgium.[xxxvii]

The National Museum of American Jewish Military History shared reports that as Frances lay dying, she was still more concerned with the wounded soldiers and nurses receiving treatment than she was for herself.[xxxviii]

She was Boston’s only woman killed in action.[xxxix]

As an article in the Boston Globe noted, she “died in the same manner as the heroic soldiers she praised.”[xl] In the Cincinnati Enquirer, noted her letter “will live as long as brave men fight for liberty, for it concerned the wounded and the fact that they do not cry.”[xli]

HER FUNERAL AND GRAVE

Second Lieutenant Frances Y. Slanger’s body was originally buried with a Star of David in France.[xlii] In 1947, her body was transported on a ship, the Joseph V. Connolly, the first casket-carrying transport from Antwerp. There were 5,600 bodies aboard the ship heading to New York.

Her body arrived in Boston on November 14, 1947, by train. The train was met by Frances’ mother, sister, and brother-in-law. Members of the Frances Y. Slanger Post, all women veterans, formed an escort for the casket.[xliii] She first lay in state at the Dorchester Stanetsky Funeral Chapel in a flag-draped casket. Hundreds passed through saluting.[xliv]

An honor guard in full military uniform marched alongside the hearse, pulled by a caisson of four horses, carrying Frances Slanger’s body at her funeral on November 16, 1947. The procession included many members of a dozen or more posts, nurses from the hospital, Jewish war veterans, the Marine Corps League, Legion of Valor and Gold Star Mothers. Numerous dignitaries were present.[xlv] The funeral service was held at the Crawford Street Synagogue in Roxbury.[xlvi]

Frances’ grave marker bears the epitaph U.S. Army Nurse Corps. “The wounded do not cry. Their buddies come first.” She is buried at the Independent Pride of Boston Cemetery in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.[xlvii]

Many letters of sympathy, including those from notable dignitaries, are available in the Boston University archives.

COMMENDATIONS

Purple Heart

American National Red Cross Medal[xlviii]

World War II Victory Medal

Nurse Corps Badge

World War I Victory Medal

American Campaign Medal

Army Presidential Unit Citation

Army Good Conduct Medal

European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign[xlix]

MEMORIALS

Frances Y. Slanger’s letter has been forever memorialized on a plaque at the Armed Forces Memorial in Downtown Norfolk, Virginia.

2004: A plaque commemorating Frances Slanger was placed in the Massachusetts State House.[l]

Boston City Hospital named their library the Morse-Slanger library in her honor.[li]

1949: A plaque was dedicated in memory of Lt. Frances Y. Slanger at the Amarillo, Texas Veterans’ Administration Hospital.[lii]

1947: Frances’ mother, Eva, was made an honorary member in the Jewish War Veterans of the United States during a ceremony in New England Mutual Hall.

1945: The U.S. Army purchased a ship from Italy, the Saturnia, and converted it to a troopship. In 1945, the troopship was converted to a hospital ship and named the Frances Y. Slanger. After that, the ship was used to moved military dependents. Eventually it was returned to Italy where it was renamed the Saturnia. It was scrapped around 1965.[liii] During its time as a hospital ship, it carried many passengers. For example, in September of 1945, the ship arrived in New York carrying 1,552 patients.[liv]

1944: Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman spoke on “The Jews in this War” and shared the story of the American Jewish record in WWII as he paid tribute to Lt. Frances Y. Slanger’s sacrifice in the European Theater.[lv]

1940s: A post was named in her honor. It was called the Frances Y. Slanger Post, Jewish War Veterans. It was the first all-female post of Jewish veterans.[lvi]

ABOUT THIS STORY

This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen saved on Together We Served and Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smartphone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen's name and read his/her story.

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