Title	[Portrait of Bernice Heath, circa 1942]
Date	1942
Date approximate?	yes
Subject headings	World War, 1939-1945 United States. Army--Women
Era	World War II era (1940-1946)
Service branch	Army--Army Nurse Corps
Item description	Portrait of army nurse Bernice Isabel Heath, circa 1942.
Veteran's name	Heath, Bernice Isabel
Veteran's biography	Bernice Isabel Heath (1917-2003) of Portsmouth, Ohio, served as a nurse in North Africa, Europe, Japan as a member of the Army Nurse Corps from 1942 to 1946 and 1948 to 1964 . Bernice Isabel Heath was born on 1 December 1917 in Richmondale, Ohio, to Herbert H. and Beatrice Armsey Heath, a steel worker and and a housewife. Heath graduated from Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1935 and worked in a department store for two years. She attended nursing school at Bethesda Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1938 to 1941, and did general duty nursing for the next year . Heath joined the Army Nurse Corps in September 1942 and was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for three months before being shipped overseas with the 91st Evacuation Hospital. From December 1942 to November 1943, Heath served in Casablanca and Port Lyautey, Morocco; Mostaganem, Algiers; Bizerte, Tunisia; and Palermo, Sicily. In November 1943, Heath was transferred to Falfield, England, in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, and on 10 June 1944, her unit arrived on Utah Beach. Heath and the 91st Evac Hospital then followed the battlefronts through France and into Holland for the Battle of the Bulge. They then moved deep into Germany and were stationed at Wiepke on VE Day in May 1945. After a brief stint in Stuttgart, Heath returned to the United States in November 1945 and was discharged from the service on 9 February 1946 . Heath worked as a nurse in Ohio and Arizona for two years, then reenlisted in the Army Nurse Corps on 22 March 1948. After a few months at Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, she volunteered for overseas duty and was assigned to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1952 Heath was transferred to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, and in 1955 she was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas. Heath then attended nursing administration school at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Following that she spent several years at Fort Knox and in the early 1960s served at Camp Zama in Japan. Heath retired from Fort Knox in 1964 after twenty-two years of service . After her retirement, Heath continued to work part-time as a pediatric and Emergency room nurse in Portsmouth. In 1975 she moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she did volunteer office work at the local Cancer Society. Bernice Heath died on 19 September 2003.
Type	image
Original format	photographs
Image type	Formal portrait
Original publisher	[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified]
Contributing institution	Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries
Source collection	WV0195 Bernice Isabel Heath Papers
Rights statement	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Additional rights information	IN COPYRIGHT. This item is subject to copyright. Contact the rights holder noted above for permission to reuse.
Object ID	WV0195.6.001
Digital publisher	The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304 -- http://library.uncg.edu/
OCLC number	900812055

[Portrait of Bernice Heath, circa 1942]

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