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About The Georgia bulletin (Atlanta) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 9, 1989)
PAGE 10 — The Georgia Bulletin, November 9, 1989 A Veteran Remembers Army Nurse Served In South Pacific During WW II BY RITA McINERNEY Florence Pecora’s scrapbook is filled with photos show ing how members of her hospital unit survived the war in the South Pacific from 1942 until 1945. Fading pictures show nurses in grass skirts rehearsing for a company revue; men and women at Christmas mid night Mass. She also has pictures of tent hospitals filled with GI patients and ships sunk by Japanese kamikaze pilots. The gory side she doesn’t talk about. What she prefers to remember is how the human spirit’s will to survive and make the most of situations overcame the sadness and harshness of war. Lt. Col. Pecora retired from the U.S. Army in 1968, after 28 years as an Army nurse. Assigned to Fort McPherson four years earlier, she liked Atlanta so much that she stayed here. When Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II, she had been an Army nurse for a short six months. Her ser vice in the Pacific theater began in 1942 when she shipped out on a convoy to New Caledonia and duty with the 31st, later renamed the 109th, station hospital. “We got there just after the battle of the Coral Sea,’’ she recalled. “We supported ground troops, including the V ENCUENTRO El fin de semana pasado del 26 al 29 de Octubre, se realizo en San Agustin, Florida, el V Encuentro Regional del Sureste. Asistieron 23 Diocesis, entre ellas estuvo Atlanta. Te preguntaras y que es eso de un Encuentro? Pues fue una gran reunion para que cada diocesis se evaluara. La evaluacion era de acuerdo al Plan Pastoral Nacional para el Ministerio Hispano. Este Plan resulto de las necesidades y recomendaciones del pueblo Hispano en un 3er. Encuentro Nacional. El Plan se aprobo en 1987 en la Conferencia Nacional de Obispos Catolicos. Este Plan va dirigido a TODA la Iglesia de los Ei iados Unidos. El Plan tiene 4 Dimensiones especificas: Pastoral de Conjunto, Evangelizacion, Opcion Misionera y Forma- cion. Estos fueron evaluados detalladamente. Tambien tuvimos tiempo de que cadapais alii representado ensenara un poco de su cultura. Hubo una misa Mariana donde cada pais presento a la Patrona Virgen de su pais. Fourth Marine Division.” The hospital unit did get occa sional casualties of battles at sea, and once, Japanese prisoners of war. This was rare because “they all commit ted harikari,” she said. Four European nuns and a priest who had long been held by the enemy were patients after being liberated. They had been missionaries on another remote South Pacific island when the war began. When they arrived at New Caledonia they were debilitated by the hardships oi captivity. Conditions at the Allied base on New Caledonia, a 19th century French penal colony, were "very rough.” The hospital and quarters were set up in World War I tents which shared a field with cows. Boxes served as desks. Florence Pecora was one of seven children of first generation Italian-American parents in Woburn, Mass., a truck farming area near Boston. Before the war the family experienced bigotry yet when six of her children went off to serve the U.S. during the war, “the neighbors were beautiful” to her worried mother, the nurse said. Pecora knew how to sew. She had worked in a brassiere factory before beginning nurses’ training. And, in New Caledonia, amid the confusion of war, she began sewing again. She found an old treadle sewing maching “sitting out in a field,” an abandoned military surplus. “I asked if we could take it,” she remembered. Permis- Tambien tuvimos bailes, cantos y poesias de diferentes culturas. Fue bello ver la diversidad de culturas Hispanas que existen aqui en los Estados Unidos. Descubri que muy pocas personas estamos enteradas se este Plan Pastoral. Pero tambien estoy conciente que debemos renovar estos objetivos y tomarlos en cuenta en la Arquidiocesis de Atlanta. Como esta escrito en la pagina 37 del Plan: “Enfoca las necesidades de los Hispanos Catolicospero es un reto tambien a todos los Catolicos como miembros del mismo cuerpo de Cristo.” Te reto a que te enteres y ayudes en la promocion de este Plan. * * * * * El Padre Dario Bentancourt estara dirigiendo un Retiro Espiritual el dia viernes 10 de noviembre a partir a las 7:00 p.m. hasta el domingo 12 de noviembre, ter- minando con la Misa de Sanacion a la 1:30 p.m. en Holy Family. El Padre Bentancourt es un reconocido lider a nivel mundial de la renovacion carismatica, autor de libros y bendecido por El Senor con el Don de Sanacion. Para mayor informacion, por favor llame a estos numeros: 971-6580 (Holy Family) o 442-5610 (Ana Maria Culverhouse). TARGET — There were no survivors when this American munitions ship was sunk at Guadalcanal during Florence Pecora’s duty there. she created evening dresses, hula outfits for the company revue, “New Faces of 1944,” cassocks for the chaplain, and clothes for figures in the Nativity scene unveiled at Christmas Eve Mass. Fabrics were salvaged from discard ed parachutes and remnants of the material used to patch plane wings. Returning home in 1945, her career as Army nurse brought her duty in the states, in Berlin “when the wall was going up,” and Okinawa in 1949-51 during the Korean con flict. She was promoted to lieutenant colonel around the time she came to Fort McPherson in 1964. “Rank then was hard to come by.” She tithed at Blessed Sacrament parish in Ben Hill, but attended Mass at the Fort McPherson chapel. Eventually, the parish pastor became curious. She answered the door one day to find him there, determined to meet the “mystery lady.” After leaving the military she worked as a hospital nurse in the Atlanta area, retiring again in 1981. She became involved at Blessed Sacrament when Fort McPherson was without a chaplain for several months. Father Robert Dyer, M.S., was pastor when she began at tending daily Mass at the rectory. When a woman at Blessed Sacrament said they needed someone to do the altar linens she was willing. She had also volunteered to do this in the South Pacific. She doesn’t find it hard to wash and iron 30 to 40 pieces each week, more when there are holydays, weddings and funerals, for use at Blessed Sacrament, and the chapels at Fort McPherson and Fort Gillem. “I’m very regimented,” she explains her efficiency. A trim and cheerful woman, she spends her days sewing, or “on the road,” from fabric shop to mill end warehouse looking for fabrics and trims needed for her church and craft work. Her workroom is the dining room of her brick ranch house. The old derelict treadle machine that served her “beautifully” in wartime is just another memory. There is a Huskylock for intricate stitchery and a new Singer in the dining room, a covered “golden oldie” Singer in the living room and another packed away in the basement. So well equipped, she was up to the challenge when Father Joseph Aquino, M.S., her pastor, asked her to make a banner last January for the annual Mass celebrated by black Catholics in memory of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “He gave me a little picture taken off an envelope and told me he needed it in a week or 10 days.” The banner she created, turquoise, white and gold, is on the altar in the chapel at the Village of St. Joseph where the parish now worships. Now, so many years after her service in the South Pacific, she wonders why war is necessary. She tends to blame “jealousy and greed” and an “evil element that’s around and keeps people stirred up.” She will fly her flag on Veterans’ Day because she is still “full of pride and patriotism.” But she concentrates on live ly memories as she leafs through a wooden scrapbook made for her by a GI on New Caledonia. She’s looking for a photograph of a Lister bag, the big Army issue containers used to hold water for drinking, washing and cooking in field situations. “That’s why we all drank beer,” she said matter of factly. MEMORIES — Florence Pecora looks over scrapbook filled with snapshots of her wartime duty in the South Pacific. sion granted, she cleaned it up with gasoline and in stalled it in the nurses’ tent. She “trundled it along” when the hospital outfit moved to Guam. It went to Guadalcanal with her, strapped to the deck of the ship, its vital parts taken out and locked in a suitcase. Pecora chooses to remember how her com pany coped rather than the horror of those South Pacific years. Some of their experiences could easily have inspired “MASH” episodes. It had to be this way to remain sane, she explained. Looking back, she can see that it was the men and women strengthened by the hardships of the Depres sion years who survived the grimness of war. They knew how to improvise and create their own fun. Her dependable sewing machine, left behind when she returned to the states in 1945, “saw a lot of wear” in the South Pacific. With it * ■O V i>! - V
