For the Boys: The True Account of a Combat Nurse in Patton’s Third Army

“It is up to our generation to make the supreme sacrifice,” wrote WWII Army nurse Mary Balster (1920–2020) in a letter home to her family in 1944. “We can only hope that it will be a sacrifice that will be great enough so that our children won’t have to do it 20 years from now.” Mary’s daughter Davis draws extensively on Balster’s letters and war diaries in this powerful debut chronicle of her mother’s wartime experience. Born in St. Paul, Minn., Mary signed up to become a combat nurse after she turned 18, against the wishes of her family. Part of the 39th Evacuation Hospital, an emergency medical unit in France, Mary’s unit was “one of a handful of Third Army hospitals set up just behind the front lines whose purpose was to care for the sick, wounded, and dying.” Detailed here with dramatic flair, Mary’s experiences included holding the hands of young GIs as they died, digging foxholes to sleep in, challenging the discriminatory race policies of the army to save a patient’s life, and the travails of young love. Davis also discusses her mother’s postwar period of self-isolation, which today would likely be diagnosed as PTSD. “My mother died during that war,” Davis movingly writes, “not physically, but she died all the same.” This novelistic narrative captures both the violence and trauma of WWII and its subject’s remarkable heroism. (Oct.)