Review: Pure Grit: How WWII Nurses in the Pacific Survived Combat and Prison Camp

Pure Grit: How WWII Nurses in the Pacific Survived Combat and Prison Camp by Mary Cronk Farrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love reading nonfiction about things I never learned about in school. I was a history minor in college and took a lot of military classes--I never knew that some American nurses were POWs in WWII in the Pacific. Loved the details about some of the women in the book--you see them in pictures, hear their stories, and grow concerned about whether or not they make it. The description of the Coming Home after the war fascinated me--hard to be a happy homemaker when you ate almost nothing for three years and saw war and devastation. PTSD was prevalent, but the government giving them reparations for being a POW were not. Fascinating stuff. These were tough women and set the tone for future war nurses in Korea and Vietnam.

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