Book III in the Rose Series
A Burnished Rose - Book II
Rose never knew it would be so difficult. Maybe everyone was right; maybe she shouldn’t have joined the Army Nurse Corps. Rose wanted to do her bit for the war effort, help the boys who were risking their lives fighting the Germans and the Japanese, and maybe see a little of the world along the way. But there was no way she could have predicted the horrors she would encounter and the difficult choices she would have to make.
Rose Krantz has made it through nursing school and much to everyone’s dismay, most notably her boyfriend, Malcolm, she joins the Army Nurse Corps. Her first assignment is at Camp Crowder, Missouri. There she meets three nurses who see her through three years in a tent evacuation hospital, four foreign countries, and more human misery than they could have imagined. What they encounter shakes even Rose’s resolve to see it through. These women, and a corpsman by the name of Alfred, form bonds that will last a lifetime.
When the war in Europe is finally over, Malcolm surprises Rose with a romantic trip to Salzburg, Austria, where Rose finally realizes what is truly important in her life only days before she was to lose it.
A Burnished Rose entertains, inspires, and reminds us what life was like for women of that era, and for the nurses who, right along with the men, made significant sacrifices for their country.
Behind the Story
Part I is mostly working up to Rose going overseas where Book II is Rose's time first in Africa, Italy - including on the beach of Ansio where the tent hosptials were bombed - France and finally Germany. I took my information from not only Marcy, but a surgeon in Marcy's unit who wrote a book about the 95th titled:Hospital at War by Zachary Friedenberg, and another 95th nurse and friend of Marcy's Bea W. Hansen plus many other books about other nurses in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). I followed Marcy's unit but used the experience of other nurses here and there to give the reader a bigger picture of what those women encountered.
Besides using my dad's story of his time in the 3rd Armored, I was also able to tell a bit about the famous Flying Tigers. My Aunt Kay (my dad's sister - now 90 something) was married to a Flying Tiger, Fritz Wolf. She was the one that told me that when they disbanded that unit, because it wasn't officially a Air Crop or later Air Force unit, the government wouldn't pay their way home. I am guessing this was in part because they wanted the men to stay and fly for the Air Force against the Japanese.
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I am proud to be able to honor the sacrifices my father, Fritz, and nurses like Marcy and Bea made in the war by writing this book.