Re: Nurse-POW... I Love My Freedom

Date: May 28, 2004

"Stirring Up Memories

I love my freedom

On her 24th birthday, Frances Allen shrugged her shoulders and told a friend that she was a bit disappointed to be so old, yet nothing exciting had ever happened to her.

Her friend looked amazed. He was a major in the United States Army and a physician. Frances was a 2nd lieutenant and a nurse. And they were both prisoners of war in Germany. It was April 15, 1945.

Frances Theo Allen Lee laughs about it today. It didn’t seem like anything special at the time, she says. So much was going on.

That has been the story of Frances’ life—something has always been going on that was interesting, exciting and often far away.

Growing up on a farm on the Pelham Road not far from Bainbridge, Frances always knew that when she grew up she would travel and have adventures. Geography was her favorite subject. “I knew I couldn’t be a secretary,” she said. “So I decided to be a nurse.”

The door to adventure opened quickly. Soon after her graduation from the Sisters of Charity Hospital in Mobile, she joined the Army Medical Corps. This was in the fall of 1942. Always self-reliant, she determined not to tell her folks of her decision. “The first they knew was my letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report.”

In January 1943 everything in Frances’ life changed—even her name. Up until then she’d always been called Theo, her middle name. But Uncle Sam’s representatives didn’t like middle names; they liked first names. Theo became Frances.

“I grew up in a hurry,” she said. She first served at a hospital in Miami Beach. As soon as she arrived she filled out a form listing her nursing preferences. She put surgical nursing last, and she spent over a year in that hospital doing surgical nursing.

In April 1944, she shipped out and began an odyssey across Europe in a field hospital not to different, Frances says from the one in the movie MASH. They treated casualties too badly wounded to be moved to safer permanent hospitals. Hours were long and tiring, but “after 16 or 18 hours, you quit noticing.” Nurses gave up their snappy uniforms and wore men’s clothing because they had to lift and move the patients so often. Many of these patients were in shock. When Frances wasn’t in the operating room; she was working with these patients.

The field hospital moved across Europe—from the Brest Peninsula to Reims, then, just before the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 to Alsace-Lorraine—following the action.

“Quickly, you learn what you are capable of,” Frances said. They were capable of lots. More than even this strong band knew.

On the morning of April 1, 1944, once again the field hospital was on the move. Traveling some 20 miles east of Frankfurt, Frances sat in the cab of a two-and-one-half ton truck. She watched a Jeep carrying a doctor friend pass the truck. Her friend waved and fell. Realizing they were under attack, Frances, following her training, rolled out of the truck into the roadside ditch and kept her head down.

In a few minutes, she felt something cold and hard pressing up under the back of her helmet. It was a German rifle. The German soldier rolled her over. When he saw her bright red American lipstick he said, “Mein Got! Es ist eine Frau!” “My god! It is a woman!”

The German soldiers rounded up all of the Americans, men and women—eight women were in the group—and marched them off down the road headed for a prisoner-of-war camp. As they trudged along the road, an American plane flew overhead. They were terrified that their own side would strafe them. Because the Germans had been using a red cross to disguise their artillery movements, the medical units were not allowed to display the emblem. But apparently the plane crew realized these were Americans and held their fire.

One of the German officers knowing this was a medical unit, decided not to send them off to the camp. Instead, he diverted them to a nearby farm. That first night at the farmhouse, supper was a pot of soup with potatoes, onions and a ham bone. Frances remembers it as one of the best meals she’s ever eaten.

The medical unit set up a treatment facility in the farmhouse where they treated both Germans and Americans as much as possible, but when the Germans took them prisoners, they had removed all the medical gear and equipment from the trucks and destroyed it. Frances remembers them cutting up the uniforms. She wore the same clothes for the entire time.

“It seemed like about a week, but later, when I checked the dates with the Defense Department, they told me it was almost three.” During this time, the unit worked hard, but on April 10, Frances managed to find a typewriter. She didn’t want her parents to worry so instead of writing to them, she wrote to her friend, Dr. W.L. Wilkinson of Bainbridge, describing the capture and the tough conditions. She might as well have written to her folks, for Dr. Wilkinson had the entire letter printed in The Post-Searchlight and her mother found out

On April 18, the U.S. 5th Infantry appeared and liberated the group. Less than a month later, the war in Europe was over. Shortly after, Frances returned to the States and mustered out of the Army.

This wasn’t the end of her adventures or travels. She later served as a nurse in an oil camp in Venezuela where she met her husband. They lived in many places around the world, including England, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, India and Egypt, before Frances returned to Bainbridge. Winston Edward Lee was born in England, and Frederick Allen Lee in Belgium. “It’s more fun to live in a place than just to visit it,” Frances said.

Not that she’s quit traveling since she’s settled down at home; she has made trips to Bermuda, Hong Kong, the Bahamas and all over the United States. Any day she is likely to get a neighbor to feed the cat, and hop in the car in search of a new adventure.

“I love my freedom,” she says.

Are there more women in our area who served in action? If you are one, or if you know one, you can e-mail me at food@e-postprint.com, call and leave a message at 246-6766, or send me a note at The Post-Searchlight, P.O. Box 277, Bainbridge, GA 39818.
To listen to me read this column, call the SearchLine, 246-6331 and press extension 2022.
Trilla Pando is a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance
©The Post-Searchlight 2004"