2011 Article About Former Camp Maxey Nurse Eleanore Ashman

May 24, 2011

By DIANE A. RHODES

Special to The Press-Enterprise

Eleanore Ashman was one of 59,000 registered nurses who volunteered to serve in the

U.S. Army Nurse Corps during World War II. Although her orders kept her stateside,

about half of these nurses volunteered to serve at front-line hospitals in overseas war

zones.

"I feel like those women were really in the war, but I had my place, too," said Ashman,
91, of Hemet. "I saw the soldiers before they went off and I saw them when they came
back, some as amputees and such."

After graduating from nursing school in Minnesota, where she was raised as the

youngest of 11 children, Ashman took a job as a surgical nurse at a hospital. She
enlisted in 1943.

 "I felt like it was the right thing to do," she said. "Uncle Sam needed me."

 After a stay in South Dakota, she was sent to Camp Maxey near Paris , Texas, where

soldiers were trained with mock battle conditions.

"We were besieged with cases of pneumonia and meningitis," Ashman recalled.

 "Penicillin had just come in and it saved a lot of our boys."

 She said a book about Army nurses who served at the front lines -- "And If I Perish" by
Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee -- helped remind her of how things
were in the early 1940s. She said the stories in the book mirror those she heard through
letters from colleagues who were in the war zones.

 While in training at Fort Lewis, Wash., Ashman requested to be sent overseas as an air
evacuation nurse because she said she always felt like she should be doing more. But
then the war ended.

 Ashman met her husband, George, while he was a captain in the dental corps. After she
was discharged in 1946, they moved to Inglewood and lived there for 10 years.

 The couple then moved to Hemet and George Ashman opened a dental practice in San
Jacinto. They raised four boys and Ashman now has several grandchildren.

 She began volunteering with the now-defunct Hemet Community Builders and other
organizations. With a background in glee clubs and church choirs, Ashman joined The
Happy Harmoneers about three decades ago. The volunteer singers perform in the
community to raise scholarship funds for local high school students.