The United States Cadet Nurse Corps

By Marilyn Turk

In the sequel I'm writing to my book The Gilded Curse, my main character is a nursing student in 1942. During my research for her role, I discovered an entity that was created especially for that period in our history, and I want to share that information with you.

Nurses were already in short supply when the United States entered World War II.

In July 1940 as war loomed over the country, the Nursing Council for National Defense was formed to investigate the status of nurses in America. The Council surveyed nursing resources and schools throughout the nation and determined that 100,000 nurses were eligible for military service, but they also found most nursing schools were ill-equipped to expand. In response, the organization urged the federal government to appropriate public funds to support nursing education.

As a result, the federal government partially funded the education of 12,000 students at 309 nursing schools in 1941 and 1942. The need for additional federal aid for the recruitment of nurses became apparent when 2500 new nurses were requested by the U.S. Army and Navy each month during 1943.

Representative Francis P. Bolton of Ohio, an advocate of nursing, introduced a bill to "provide for the training of nurses for the armed forces, government and civilian hospitals, health agencies, and war industries through grants to the institutions providing the training". The nurses would be a uniformed body, with no discrimination against race, creed, or color. The Nurse Training Act, also called the Bolton Act, was passed unanimously by Congress on June 15, 1943. The new program was named the Cadet Nurse Corps.

The Cadet Nurse Corps was open to all women between the ages of 17 and 35, in good health, who had graduated from an accredited high school. Marriage was permissible subject to guidelines. Successful applicants were eligible for a government subsidy, which paid for tuition, books, uniforms, and a living stipend. In exchange, student cadets were required to pledge to actively serve in essential civilian or federal government services for the duration of World War II. The program changed the length of nurse training from the traditional 36-months to an accelerated 30-month program.

An aggressive recruitment program ensued targeting primarily high school graduates, but college girls were also recruited. The program’s selling point was that cadets would obtain free education in a proud profession and provide an essential service to their country. Appeals to join the Corps reached millions of newspaper and magazine readers, billboard viewers, radio listeners, and movie patrons around the country.

For example, Eastman Kodak sponsored a full-page advertisement in Life magazine touting the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps as a way to serve the country in a war job with a future. The ad suggested that young women who could qualify as Cadet Nurses were lucky girls in many different ways, with the opportunity to wear smart-looking uniforms – one for summer and another for winter.

Following the surrender of Japan in August 1945, President Harry Truman set October 5, 1945, as the final date for new student admissions to the program. At the time, 116,498 students were still in training and 3,000 more were admitted for the fall and final term. Student nurses were providing 80% of the country's nursing care in more than 1,000 civilian hospitals.

In a January, 1945, speech before the House Committee on Military Affairs, Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr., said, "In my opinion, the country has received and increasingly will receive substantial returns on this investment. We cannot measure what the loss to the country would have been if civilian nursing service had collapsed, any more than we could measure the cost of failure at the Normandy beachheads."

Do you know someone who participated in the Cadet Nurse Corp?

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Marilyn Turk loves to study history, especially that of lighthouses and the coast of the United States. She is the author of Rebel Light, a Civil War love story set on the coast of Florida, A Gilded Curse, a historical suspense novel set on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1942, and Lighthouse Devotions - 52 Inspiring Lighthouse Stories, based on her popular lighthouse blog. (@ http://pathwayheart.com)