11.12.2001
Wartime journal
reveals strength
and tenderness
•
The family of Barbara Eddy Garland, a member of the Army Nurse Corps, had no idea she kept a diary while she took care of injured German and American soldiers at a hospital in England.
BY ELIZABETH ABBOTT
Journal Staff Writer
This is the last in an occasional series of profiles about Rhode Island's female veterans.
CRANSTON
-- The diary ends abruptly in 1945, leaving Barbara Elizabeth Eddy, a young Army nurse from Cranston, caring for badly wounded German prisoners of war deep in the English countryside.
"They need care desperately," Eddy wrote in small, neat script.
The first wave of Germans brought to the Midlands hospital to which she was assigned was "horribly shot up and smelled terribly," Eddy wrote. They had gangrene and tetanus had set in to "alarming degrees."
Then came the Americans, hundreds upon hundreds of them. These "boys," as Eddy called them, were wounded in the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. As they lay suffering in their hospital beds, they apparently stole the hearts of Eddy and the other nurses who tended to them.
"We all felt nothing was too good for them," she wrote.
The young Americans had terrible wounds, "but they were so cheerful and so hungry."
An only child who grew up in the Auburn section of Cranston, Eddy saw a lot of action during World War II. Not the horror of the battlefield, but plenty of its horrid aftermath. She describes this experience on 29 pages of a small, lined notebook with a faded red cover, a notebook that completely surprised her family when they found it a few years ago.
"I did not know it existed," said Linda McDonald, Eddy's oldest daughter, who is a nurse at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence.
No one did. McDonald and her two sisters knew that their mother had served during World War II, of course. They also knew it was important to her; in her later years, Eddy's eyes would fill with tears whenever she heard Kate Smith sing
"God Bless America,"
McDonald said. But Eddy seldom talked about her wartime experience. And she never once mentioned the diary.
Eddy died in 1986, but her memory was very much alive last week in the snug condominium McDonald shares in Cranston with her daughter, Debbie Suggs. With photographs of Eddy strewn about them, showing a handsome, straight-backed woman with thick, dark hair, they reminisced about the young nurse, who eventually became "Grammy" -- and the little red diary she kept more than 50 years ago.
"It was packed away for years," McDonald recalled.
A few years ago, her brother-in-law stumbled upon an old tin Woolworth's box filled with family memorabilia as he was cleaning his cellar, she said. And inside, there it was, this amazingly detailed account of a young woman's encounter with history that revealed a side of Eddy her family never knew.
Before reading the diary, McDonald saw her mother as a tough woman, she said. Widowed about 10 years after returning from Europe -- she raised McDonald and her two sisters on a nurse's salary. This made her a no-nonsense sort of person, McDonald said, a woman who could pack a lot of rectitude in her 5-foot, 4-inch frame.
"I knew her for 40 years and she was never wrong," McDonald said.
But the woman McDonald found on the pages of the diary was tender-hearted and often girlish, someone who wept when a British band played American songs and who worried about the young American soldiers she nursed.
"They were wonderful boys and it made us all quite sober to think that the young kids we took care of . . . were now jumping in France and being killed by Germans," she wrote.
Suggs remembers her grandmother as a reserved person who didn't dwell on the past. She never once expressed a desire to visit the battlefields of Europe, as many World War II veterans do, she noted. And if she talked about her wartime experience at all, it was only to mention the friends she met and tourist attractions she saw, not the soldiers she had nursed.
"To know my grandmother, you would not say that's a daring woman," said Suggs.
But the young woman Suggs met in the diary turned out to be the very definition of daring. She was only 22 when she joined the Army Nurse Corps. Given the time she lived in and the fact that she was not only a woman, but also an only daughter, leaves her granddaughter in awe.
"I see her as heroic," Suggs said.
Eddy's fearlessness comes through in the diary's first sentence.
"The twenty-third of March, 1944, found me aboard a train, leaving Camp Edwards, Mass., bound for I knew not where," she wrote.
She goes on to describe a harrowing 12-day crossing of the Atlantic during which her convoy encountered a fierce storm at sea, a dangerously close brush with an enemy submarine and air alerts that sounded whenever enemy planes flew overhead. Her commander told the nurses about the enemy planes because "he didn't want us to think we were on a pleasure cruise," Eddy wryly noted.
Once in England, she traveled by a cold, uncomfortable train to a small town in Wales, where she spent five weeks in training. Then it was on to a hospital in the Midlands section of England, where she would stay until the war ended in May 1945. It was in that hospital that Eddy cared for the German prisoners of war, an experience she described as "wonderful," but also somewhat challenging.
"Some were only 16 years old and yet they felt that the Americans were inferior and soft for treating them with the attention they received," she wrote.
It was freezing in England and the work was hard.
"From the moment I hit English soil I have been cold," Eddy complained.
But the challenges of military life seem to have been balanced by the excitement of meeting new people and seeing new places. Eddy's love of food, especially sweets, comes through in her writing, a fact that amuses her daughter and granddaughter. "We all have developed cravings for candy," she confesses at one point.
And, then, suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the diary ends.
What happened?
It's easy to imagine the worst, that Eddy had been killed. But McDonald and Suggs have another theory. They think the reason she stopped writing was because something more interesting came along. His name was William Garland and he was a medic from Virginia. The couple married in England on Sept. 29, 1945, and the following year, he would become McDonald's father.
"It's six months since I last wrote in this book and a lot has happened since then," Eddy wrote in her last entry.
A lot indeed.
Since finding Eddy's diary, both McDonald and Suggs have become involved in an effort to create a memorial in the Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery in Exeter to honor the state's women veterans. Ground was broken for the memorial in September; an unveiling is planned for November 2002. Knowing what they know now about her patriotism, both women are convinced the memorial would have meant a lot to Barbara Eddy Garland.
"I think she would have been thrilled," said McDonald, adding, "My mother was very pro-women."
Donations for the Women
'
s War Memorial can be sent to the Rhode Island Women Veterans Memorial Project, 645 New London Ave., Cranston, R.I. 02920.
