Tending to the boys of war
Jackson’s Strube cared for soldiers on stateside Army basesJACKSON — She dedicated nearly her entire adult life to caring for the ill and the injured, but perhaps nothing had a more profound impact on her than the years she tended to our nation’s men in uniform — the broken, the battered boys of war.
By: Julie Buntjer, Worthington Daily Globe
- Strube and frame
- Strube and uniform
JACKSON — She dedicated nearly her entire adult life to caring for the ill and the injured, but perhaps nothing had a more profound impact on her than the years she tended to our nation’s men in uniform — the broken, the battered boys of war.
“War is hell,” said Josephine “Jo” Strube of Jackson.
Though kind and compassionate, she doesn’t mince words when she speaks of the horrific injuries suffered by American G.I.s in Europe and the South Pacific during World War II.
Jo Strube was among four of five children in her family to answer the call of duty during World War II. She had one brother stationed in the Army, one brother in the Navy and a sister in the Army Air Corps.
After completing nurse’s training at Mother Cabrini School of Nursing in Chicago, Ill., where the family lived, Strube signed on for the Army Nurse Corps with a couple of her girlfriends.
“With the war breaking out, we decided it was time to serve our country,” she said from her daughter’s home in Worthington Tuesday afternoon.
The three women enlisted in November 1944, but when given the opportunity to spend the holidays with their families, they waited until January 1945 to report to Basic Training at Camp McCoy.
First glimpses of war
Though Strube had offered to go on an overseas deployment — she was fluent in Italian, the family’s spoken language in the home — she spent her entire military career stateside, at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin and at Fort Custer in Michigan.
During basic training at Camp McCoy, she learned to walk in snowshoes and wear a gas mask, and then put her nursing skills to the test caring for not only America’s injured soldiers, but Japanese prisoners of war as well. Camp McCoy was the only Army base in the U.S. that housed Japanese POWs during World War II.
“We also had some Korean prisoners of war,” Strube said. “Some of them had leprosy, so we had to separate them.”
The Japanese POWs were always quiet, but they watched every move their captors and caretakers made, she added.
Strube recalled one incident when she, along with a medic and a military policeman, had entered the ward where the Japanese POWs of higher ranks were housed. A Japanese officer, she said, had gone through the ward and collected all of the belts, strung them together and wrapped it around a large ceiling pipe that ran the length of the ward.
He’d planned to hang himself.
The medic in the group hollered out that he was short one belt, said Strube, adding that it shocked and irritated the officer.
“He was so angry he couldn’t do what he wanted to,” she said. It was an image she hadn’t expected to see in a military hospital.
While at Camp McCoy awaiting her military assignment, Strube established an obstetrics unit on the Army base for the camp’s soldiers and their families.
A new home
In the spring of 1945, Strube and one of her girlfriends were transferred to Fort Custer, a large Army base in south central Michigan.
“We had a choice to be at (Percy Jones Rehab Center in) Battle Creek or out at Fort Custer,” she said. “We chose Fort Custer.”
When they arrived, Strube was assigned to patients immediately. She worked in wards C-1 through C-7, and there were approximately 30 patients per ward.
“One ward was for communicable diseases, and C-2 was for venereal diseases,” Strube said. “Up along the line we had a ward for amputees.
“We had so many different illnesses — malaria — almost everything you can imagine,” she said.
The base also housed injured German POWs.
“They were just young kids,” said Strube, adding that many were being treated for trench foot.
The German POWs were treated by their own medics.
Injuries of war
Strube saw more injuries, more pain and more suffering than she cares to remember, but she did what had to be done.
“The worst ones that I took care of were the paraplegics,” she said. “They must have laid in the field for a long time before they were rescued. They were full of bed sores.
“Oh, the boys were so young. They never spoke about the war,” she added. “They had such a good sense of humor — I suppose because they were young, they were able to face it.”
The humor was a necessity — not only among the soldiers, but among the nurses who tended to them.
“If you had seen these boys, ruined for life,” she said. “It was hard on us.
“When we went back to our own barracks, we were ready to start crying,” she added.
They tried hard to keep a positive attitude, building friendships and forming their own family of sorts with the soldiers in the wards.
“It meant everything to us to be able to help our boys,” said Strube. “We had such a close bond with our boys.”
Making do
When Strube first began her nursing career, drugs like penicillin weren’t yet available to help treat pain. Certainly, caring for the soldiers of World War II was much different without the medications and the technologies available in later years.
“We didn’t have much,” she said. “All those poor boys got for pain was APC (a mixture of aspirin and pain medication). When penicillin came out, that was a godsend.”
The soldiers referred to the new drug as their gold, she added.
Plasma was used extensively in treating soldiers, and quinine was administered for those who had contracted malaria. Back then, burn patients had to grow their own skin, she added, describing one soldier who was growing skin from his nose to his chest for use in a skin graft.
“Those poor boys,” she said. “Really, there was not much medication.”
After the war, Strube aided in transferring all of the paraplegics from Fort Custer to Vaughn General Hospital, located in a suburb of Chicago, via troop train. Once at Vaughn, she spent a few months working to train the nursing staff there on how to care for the injured.
Love is in the air
Strube talks fondly of the boys she cared for at Fort Custer, but it was the head of medics at the base who ultimately stole her heart.
Jackson native Norman Strube had signed on to aid in the war effort and spent much of his military career operating an ambulance that transported injured soldiers from the C-47’s that landed on base to the hospital there.
During their shift each evening, Strube said the work crew would gather to share warm rolls delivered by the Mess Sergeant. It was during those gatherings that Norman would show up with a scrawny dog named Sarge.
“(He) had this poor dog that needed food, and that’s how we met,” Strube said with a smile. “I think that was a good excuse for him to come and see me.”
There was one problem, however. Norman was a corporal, and she was a lieutenant.
“We weren’t supposed to fraternize with the enlisted personnel,” she said, adding that despite being pulled aside and reminded of the rules, she and Norman continued to find ways to see each other.
Norman was discharged in April 1946, and she received her discharge that June. They were married on July 13, 1946.
“We got married right away. We couldn’t wait,” she said with a laugh.
After marriage, the couple moved to Jackson, where she worked at Halloran Hospital, helped establish a hospital in Lakefield and then returned to Jackson. She retired from nursing at Jackson Medical Center in 1978, and in 2003 was honored by the Minnesota Nurses Association for distinguished service to her community and her country.
Norman died in 2005.
Tags: honor flight, jo strube, world war ii, southwest minnesota honor flight, news, worthington, veterans, jackson, nurse, boys, war, soldier
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