Deloris Buckley, Front Line Nurse

Lt. Ruth Deloris Buckley at an Army                               Lt. Buckley in her nursing uniform Nurse Corps Press Conference in Paris, 1946.

Ruth Deloris Buckley, of Spring Valley, Wisconsin, was only 19 years old when she found herself serving her country on the European Theater in World War II as part of the 95th Evacuation Hospital Unit in Italy. In Front Line Nurse, Buckely provides vivid and harrowing recollections of war from being attacked by a Nazi dive bomber while separated from her unit to aiding wounded soldiers amid ramshackle conditions in Naples.

Excerpts from Front Line Nurse:

"There was no sense fooling myself. I was plenty scared. I suppose the other nurses were too, although none of them let on.  Anyone seeing us standing around speaking calmly about boyfriends and food, the two favorite topics of conversation, would never have guessed that we were on our way to the battlefront... We heard the sounds of warfare after the third day at sea. The dull heavy boom of canon fire sounded from the other side of the horizon. It was D plus three - Army parlance for the third day after the start of the invasion - that we moved into the Bay of Salerno. I could see the pinpoints of colorless flash flame from the muzzles of the German 88's..."