My godmother, Mary Sommerhauser Russell, chose to serve in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during WWII because she was tired of wearing white nylons. Nurses back then, much in demand, had a choice as to which service they could join.
“I had good looking legs and wanted to show them off. I liked the Army uniform better.”
While she admits it sounds vain, she has no regrets because, with the army, she saw real action. Mary landed on Omaha Beach in August 1944, two days after the Liberation of Paris. She was 22 years old.
She tells of sailing on the RMS Queen Mary, which had already been whisked to Sydney, Australia, to be converted into a troopship, painted navy gray, stripped of its finery and had degaussing coils added to protect the ship from magnetic mines.
For her journey to Europe the approximately 72 nurses were sequestered on the upper deck with the thousands of male troops below.
“I had a date every 15 minutes,” she smiles slyly. “But then in the middle of the night they came and made us move to a lower deck.”
Well, that got Mary’s goat. She rose early the next morning to see who had taken her precious upper deck and when she looked up, there, standing at the railing, was a well-known world leader dressed in his famous blue jumpsuit, holding his cigar. Winston Churchill traveled frequently as “Colonel Warden” on the Queen Mary, who, because of her speed, was difficult for any U-Boat to catch, and became known as the “Gray Ghost.”
Raised in Butte Montana, in a German and Irish household, Mary knew how to get a job done.
“When we got there they kept telling us we would have a hospital, but we worked in tents in the fields. To save our precious penicillin we would dig holes in the cold ground, put the vial of penicillin in a condom, then in a can and bury it. There was no refrigeration. You made due.”
She talks of how the snow covered soldiers arrived at their medic tents with disfiguring frostbite, the engineers that stayed with the makeshift hospitals to keep the equipment running, the death and hope they all lived with daily.
There is no telling how many lives she touched in an attempt to save our boys and the horror she keeps privately tucked away.
But I know that from now on I will refer to First Lieutenant Mary Sommerhauser, Mrs. Ralph Russell, who just turned 95, as the real Queen Mary–for all the love and support she gave to the hundreds of troops on the ground in the European Theater. I am so proud she is my godmother.
They came using wheelchairs, walkers, canes, or gratefully, walking with pride. The group of heroes that gathered last week in Seattle for the reunion of the Survivors of the Battle of the Bulge all sat in the warmth of friendship and memories, with their thoughts drifting to those who served beside them, fell on the field of battle, and helped them along the way.
Vince wore his famous Geronimo insignia symbolizing the 101st paratroopers division that dropped from the sky not only on D-Day, but also the Battle of the Bulge.
When a book wants to be written there is no stopping the steam engine bursting with ideas and material that charges you way.
Trusting his judgment, I eventually picked up At Dawn We Slept, somewhat dreading the 850 pages of details within. I opened it to look for pictures–ever hopeful. What I found instead sent shivers down my spine. Instantly I recognized the paper and type as having come across the newswires from the Seattle P-I. Just reading the first sentence I knew I had something special.
That horrific bit of news I stuffed back into the fold of the book and considered if I wanted to search further. But the excitement of the hunt got the better of me. I flipped forward. My rewards brought tears to my eyes. There was a typed sheet with Cast of Characters, very helpful, but more importantly, hand written notes of my fathers as he read the book. I had struck gold and tenderly attempted to read my father’s script. 
I went to the front title page only to discover the hand-written dedication to my father by Donald Goldstein, Ph.D. Goldstein, along with Katherine V. Dillon, CWO, USAF (Ret.), helped consolidate the 3,500 pages, constituting thirty-seven years of research and work by author Gordon W. Prange, into the current book after Prang’s unfortunate death in 1980.