Local Resident Discusses Navy Nurse Experience During WWII
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Jennifer Peryam-jperyam@timesuniononline.com
Warsaw resident and former Navy Medical Corp World War II nurse Arleen Koors remembers where she was when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Koors, 89, was 17 and a senior at Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy, a private boarding school in Mankato, Minn., when the attack occurred. “I heard on the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and went to the chapel and prayed immediately,” Koors said. She served as a nurse in the Navy Medical Corp from 1944 to 1946. Today marks the 72nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States’ entry into World War II. Koors entered the Navy as a nurse at 20, and was employed at Oakland Naval Hospital in Oakland, Calif. She recalls going from Oakland Naval Base by bus to San Francisco to meet the wounded Navy personnel who came on ships and took them back to the hospital to care for them. “I saw a lot of horrible things and injuries,” Koors said. When Koors was serving at Oakland Naval Base, she said she remembers entertainers visited the base including Kay Kyser, bandleader and radio personality in the 1930s and 1940s, and Kyser’s orchestra. Koors said Kyser donated a swimming pool for her base. She said Jeanette MacDonald, American singer and actress, also visited the base and Koors went to meet her backstage. She also met Carmen Cavallaro, American pianist, who performed her favorite song, “Warsaw Concerto.” Koors worked in the hospital’s children’s ward, assisting with delivering babies, and worked in the dependants ward caring for dependants of those who served in the Navy. Besides being a nurse, she also worked in the Navy’s legal office, writing information on Navy personnel who broke military rules and came before judges to receive their punishment. In 1945, she saw the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel and remembers watching the dignitaries come into the hotel. Koors was discharged from the Navy in 1946. She is the only woman in Indiana to have been appointed by former President Gerald Ford to serve as Selective Service director on Kosciusko County’s draft board that was based in Warsaw. The board interviewed those who were called for the draft, but did not want to go into the service. In summer 1951, she obtained her private pilot’s license through a GI loan.
