World War II: The woman’s view

Lynn Doan

Friday, May 28, 2004 | 3:31 a.m.

May 31, 2004

Emily Lewis Wiseman was nursing soldiers on a plane shortly after D-Day when all four engines of their C-54 quit between Iceland and Newfoundland.

Her sergeant calmly turned to face his crew of 12 Army flight nurses and said, "This is it." That's when Wiseman, a second lieutenant, began to pray.

"I was terrified," said Wiseman. "The plane was falling off toward the left wing."

A few long seconds later, Wiseman said she heard the "cough, cough, cough" of the motors starting, and suddenly the plane was up and running again.

A few plane jitters soon became nothing for the World War II veteran, now 84, who went on to assist the wounded in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, endure the coldest winter in Europe's modern history, trail Patton's Third Army in France and witness a plane accompanying hers crash into the side of the Empire State Building.

For her service, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day on Sunday, the Normandy Memoire, a French commemoration of D-Day, will honor Wiseman.

In 2002 women comprised 4.4 percent of World War II veterans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

At a time when women were expected to look over the households as their men went off to war, Wiseman left Little Rock, Ark., to join the Army Nurse Corps and traveled outside the United States for the first time in her life.

"My country needed me," said Wiseman, who was 23 and unmarried.

Months later she was stationed in England, where she tended to wounded soldiers who were being flown to less crowded hospitals in Scotland, Iceland, Newfoundland and sometimes the United States. Unless weather was bad, Wiseman said, her "ambulance planes" flew into New York City, where she always spotted the Statue of Liberty before anything.

She flew alongside 11 other nurses and a male sergeant on planes that were largely unprotected.

On one trip to New York in July 1945, Wiseman's plane flew past another aircraft that seemed headed for disaster.

"I saw it circling around the city because it was too misty to land," Wiseman said. "I remember thinking that it was flying too low."

The U.S. bomber that Wiseman saw that day would be the first and only plane that has ever crashed into the Empire State Building. Fourteen people were killed in the crash, and more than two dozen more were injured.

"The crash cleared the air so you could see the parts of the plane falling apart, and my patients were horrified," said Wiseman, who hurried to the scene after her plane landed. "When I got there, it was absolute bedlam."

Wiseman had seen much more destruction after D-Day, when her unit began crossing the channel to Omaha Beach at least three times a day, bringing gasoline for troops in France and carrying the wounded back. She could only describe the scene as "sad," recalling the gore and shortage of stretchers.

At that time her most difficult challenge was yet to come. In December 1944, the coldest winter on record for Western Europe, Wiseman was sent to Liege, Belgium, where she crossed battlefields at night to give aid to the wounded.

She remembers hearing bombs whizzing past overhead, as the Germans targeted France.

"When the bombs stopped buzzing they'd drop," Wiseman said. "So we just prayed that they'd keep buzzing."

But bombs were not Wiseman's largest worry. The winter air was so cold that soldiers' feet began to freeze.

Wiseman's husband, John Lewis, who was a private in the war but did not know Wiseman, remembers the bitter cold. "We had pot-bellied stoves, which were an engineering nightmare. When you stood in front of these stoves, your backside was frozen and your front side was burning up."

Even dressed in sheepskin pants and boots, Wiseman began to have difficulties standing, and her sergeant commanded her to drink a canteen cup of black beer.

"I'll tell you now, I'm not a drinker, but I woke up the next morning feeling real good," Wiseman said.

After Belgium, Wiseman followed Gen. George Patton's Third Army to France. Out of appreciation, Patton would send bottles of champagne to her unit.

"He called us his nurses," Wiseman said.

She was in Paris as the Allies defeated the Germans. She recalled riding in the back of a Jeep and receiving hugs and kisses from civilians running up from the sidewalks.

After the war she was promoted to first lieutenant and settled down with her first husband, Charles Wiseman, in Reno, where they raised three children.

In 1972 Wiseman's husband was killed in a car accident. She married Lewis two years later and moved to Sacramento.

Wiseman and her daughter-in-law, Christena Wiseman, will go to France, where she will take part in ceremonies at St. Mere Eglise, Omaha Beach and Arromanche. Prince Charles of Britain and French President Jacques Chirac are expected to attend, and President Bush has been invited, Wiseman said.

Emily Wiseman said she is flattered by all of the recognition but is also a little embarrassed.

"I don't deserve all of this," she said. "I say give more medals to the infantries, the rangers and the flying pilots I worked with."