Title	[Operating room staff on D-Day, 1944]
Date	1944-06-06
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	Estelle Garner Ptaszynski (left) and other medical staff stand above a patient in an operating room of the 305th Station Hospital on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The nurses are wearing the brown and white seersucker field hospital uniform.
Veteran's name	Ptaszynski, Estelle Garner
Veteran's biography	Estelle Garner Ptaszynski (1917-2006) of Seagrove, North Carolina, a member of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) from 1943 to 1945, also served as a surgical nurse for many years at hospitals in Connecticut and North Carolina . Estelle Garner Ptaszynski was born on 7 December, 1917, in Seagrove, North Carolina. She attended Elsie Academy in Robbins, North Carolina, and Campbell College in Buies Creek, North Carolina. She graduated from nurse’s training at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1940 and became a surgical nurse in the hospital’s operating room . In January 1943 Ptaszynski joined the Army Nurse Corps. She spent eight months at Camp Butner near Durham, North Carolina, and then went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Kilmer in New Jersey for overseas training. Ptaszynski sailed to England on the SS Mauritania with the 305th Station Hospital in September 1943. She spent several months with the hospital on the Longleat Castle estate near Warminster, England, before moving to Oxford for one month. Ptaszynski moved with the hospital to Southampton in the spring of 1944 and remained there until August 1945. She returned to the United States and was discharged from Fort Bragg in November 1945 . Ptaszynski met her husband, Ed, while in the service. They married in February 1946 and moved to Connecticut, where they lived for twenty-nine years. Ptaszynski resumed her work as a surgical nurse when her children reached elementary school age, and continued her nursing career for several years after the family moved back to North Carolina and settled in Troy. Ptaszynski died in 2006.
Place	Southampton (England)
Type	image
Original format	photographs
Image type	Work photographs
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	WV0033 Estelle Garner Ptaszynski 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	WV0033.6.003
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	900810451

[Operating room staff on D-Day, 1944]

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