As we honor our veterans this month we will be joined by Diane Burke Fessler, author of No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses of World War II. She wrote her first book to honor the nurses of the 1940s. Her aunt was an army nurse who wrote letters every week from her stations overseas and led Fessler to want to write about her. After attending a reunion of the 166th General Hospital in 1989 with “Auntie Raine” (Lorraine Krause Taylor), she interviewed and wrote the oral histories of more than 200 nurses whose stories had not been told. Covering all theaters of war, the nurses told of their overseas assignments, including the first flight nurses, women at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines, and African American nurses who served in a segregated U.S. Army.
Diane Burke Fessler grew up in Chicago, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Journalism, and lives in Phoenix. She also contributed a chapter about women in Arizona during the 1940s to a book titled Arizona Goes To War: The Home Front and Front Lines During World War II, published by University of Arizona Press.