Someone on Lucianne places obituaries of World War II heroes on her forum...
This one (link) caught my eyes:
On the night of June 11 1944, Iris Bower (then Iris Ogilvie, known to all as "Fluff") and her nursing colleague, Mollie Giles, boarded a tank-landing craft at Gosport along with 200 men and their tanks. Just before dawn she scrambled ashore on Juno beach near Courseulles-sur-Mer; only her Red Cross armband and diminutive frame marked her out from the men as she became the first woman to set foot on the D-Day landing beaches. When the beachmaster saw the two women in the pale light he simply said "Good God!"
....Iris Bower was determined to look her best when she faced the Germans and commented: "I was not going to land in Normandy looking a sight."
She had put on her lipstick and carried a small waterproof bag she had made for her make-up. Once established ashore, she slept - as did her patients - in slit trenches, washed out of buckets and used a thunder box. Every morning, with shells flying overhead, she took care to apply her Elizabeth Arden lipstick before putting on her tin hat and battledress blouse.
Working out of a roughly-constructed field hospital, she tended to the 1,023 wounded soldiers treated in the first five days; she and Mollie Giles also escorted them to emergency landing strips from where RAF Dakotas flew them back to hospitals in England. She remembered some heartbreaking scenes, but realised that the sight of a pretty face and a smile were a great boost to the morale of the badly wounded...
LINK2
What struck me is that this was a tough, loving, caring woman...
I predate the feminine revolution (my medical school only had 5% women)...so women like this were my roll models...
And in these days where feminists have a cry baby/victim/male hating mindset,
We need to remind our daughters (or for me, my granddaughters) that women like Fluff are the ones to emulate....
No comments:
Post a Comment