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Talk & Optional Lunch
“The Nurse and The Navigator”
A Son's Memoir of his Parents' Battlefield Romance
By Charles W. Dunn III
Wednesday, April 5 │ 11AM ET
at the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force
Join us IN PERSON or on ZOOM
FREE admission to the talk. Seating is limited.
Join us afterward for an optional lunch
Inspired by approximately 900 WWII love letters that were available to a son only after his parents passed away. Join us to hear their son, Charles Dunn III tell their story.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED
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Lunch is $12/10 for Members and $17/15 for Non-Members for credit card/cash.
Lunch Menu: Lunch menu to be determined, Desserts and more!
The Nurse and the Navigator is perhaps the only ‘Greatest Generation’ memoir in which both husband and wife were battlefield veterans. Charles W. Dunn, Jr. served at different times with eight different entities within the 8th Army Air Force. For her part, Alva G. North was with the 45th Evacuation Hospital of U.S. 1st Army. 2nd Lt. Dunn first arrived in England with the 92nd Bomb Group at Bovingdon on August 18, 1942 and almost immediately flew his first bombing missions over France. The last of his 26 missions originating from England occurred on October 3, 1944 with the 96th Bomb Group out of Snetterton Heath. In between were a four-month side trip to North Africa with the 1/11th Combat Crew Replacement Center, a temporary redeployment back to the U.S. to study H2X radar at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, two orthopedic surgeries and three months of physical therapy at Grenier Field AAF base in NH, pathfinding duties with the 482nd Bomb Group at Alconbury back in England, two shuttle missions to the Soviet Union, two landing accidents, and two DFCs. Capt. Dunn finished out the European War at 45th Bomb Wing headquarters. 2nd Lt. North first met her future husband on the medical ward at Genier Field in NH in October of 1943 where she was a flight nurse and he was a recovering surgical patient. When she learned that he would eventually be returning to his flying duties with 8th Air Force in England, she applied for a transfer to a field evacuation hospital because this increased the likelihood of her also deploying to the European Theatre of War. 2nd Lt. North arrived in England with her 45th Evacuation Hospital unit on November 24, 1943. She waded ashore with her unit at Omaha Beach on the Normandy Coast on June 16, 1944, among the first 80 American nurses to do so. During the Battle of the Bulge, she and the other medical personnel of her unit were obliged to hide for four days in the basement of an abandoned Belgian high school. Afterward, hers was the first Allied hospital to admit patients east of the Rhine River and the first to minister to Holocaust survivors at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Perhaps the memoir’s most dramatic chapter describes Capt. Dunn’s attempt to rendezvous with his then girlfriend amidst the Battle for France. On September 1, 1944-- while only a navigator, and without orders-- he posed as the co-pilot on a “blood plane’ flying medical supplies to various evacuation hospitals in the Cherbourg Peninsula and then evacuating wounded soldiers back to England. He did not find her that day. Weeks later, when the relevant APO mail finally reached him, he belatedly learned that her tent hospital had relocated to the Loire Valley several days before his failed search. Capt. Dunn and 1st Lt. North were married back in England two weeks before V-E Day. On the day that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Capt. Dunn heard the news over the public address system aboard a troop ship steaming back from Scotland to the United States. By then he knew that his bride of four months was pregnant-- but not that she had been relieved of her nursing duties with the Army of Occupation in Germany as result, nor that the Army had ordered her to return home by military air transport three days earlier, nor that she had miscarried over the Atlantic.
Contact 912-988-1835 or [email protected] for details.
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