Eighty years ago from Dec. 16, 2024, a major event of World War II began that may not remain in the minds of the average American—the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest between Belgium and Luxembourg from Dec. 16, 1944, until Jan. 25, 1945.

“Seeking to drive to the coast of the English Channel and split the Allied armies as they had done in May 1940, the Germans struck in the Ardennes ForestOpens to Army.mil, a 75-mile stretch of the front characterized by dense woods and few roads, held by four inexperienced and battle-worn American divisions stationed there for rest and seasoning,” according to the U.S. Army.

The surprise offensive was the Nazis’ last desperate attempt to counter the Allied advances on the Western Front that had begun with the invasion of France on June 6, 1944. The prolonged battle was the largest and costliest battle ever fought by the U.S. ArmyOpens to NPS.gov, with approximately 19,000 American soldiers killed, and a total of 82,400 Americans killed, wounded, or captured, according to the Library of Congress.

The battle continues to reverberate to this day with Pearl Harbor Day, the Battle of Midway, D-Day, the Allied invasion of Italy, the retaking of Iwo Jima, and the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the last of which finally ended the war on Aug. 14, 1945.

Katherine M. Nolan of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps was an eyewitness to the severity of the battle casualties from her position at the 53rd Field Hospital that followed service members and their allies as they fought and the wounded froze to deathOpens to Army.mil in a bitter winter season. The platoons of Nolan’s fellow nurses and other medical personnel followed in the path of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. George Patton’s lightning armored tank advance across Western Europe.

Nolan recounted her WWII experiences on Sept. 13, 2008, in a recorded interview collected by the Library of CongressLibrary of Congress webpage.

She initially aimed to be a flight nurse for the Army Air Corps but ended up with the 53rd Field Hospital because the U.S. Army “was desperate for nurses,” before D-Day, she recalled.

It was an experience never far out of her mind forever more. “You forget the names; you remember the wounds. [You] remember what their injuries were, and you remember the faces, but we really didn't get a chance to know them,” she said.

Landing in Europe, Supporting Maj. Gen. Patton

Nolan spent three months in England preparing for the invasion of Normandy.

“We landed on Utah Beach as part of Patton’s Third Army. We were supposed to go over on D-Day and gliders [planes], but they canceled us. We went over a month later, waded ashore at Utah, and we were in pup tents for the first month. Our equipment did not catch up with us right away, so they loaned us out to other hospitals in the meantime, who had all their equipment but had lost personnel in the landings.”

In November 1944, Nolan’s field hospital was supporting Patton’s 84th infantry division, and her life revolved around the division’s wounded.

“We were … with [Patton] him when he broke out of Normandy and raced across the peninsula to Brittany. We were with the third, fourth and ninth armored divisions, initially, and we went from France to Belgium and then to the Netherlands.”

The nurses worked out of pup tents at a Catholic school in the Netherlands. “The nuns invited the nurses to move into the convent with them. So, we were really living in luxury for about three weeks,” she said. Then they moved to a schoolhouse in another Dutch town. “Once the desks were removed, and they brought in the cots and set up the IVs and everything, it worked pretty well,” Nolan recalled.

They had been operating out of tents since landing on Utah Beach. “When we got to the Netherlands, we were transferred to the Ninth Army” under General William Simpson. “That was the last time we were in buildings for a long time. We went from [the Netherlands] back to Belgium, and we were caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, and we were out in tents,” Nolan recalled.

“It was the coldest winter of the century and … was unbelievable that soldiers were dying, freezing to death in their foxholes, not even being killed by enemy action. And we can imagine what it was like when we were freezing in the tents and the poor guys out in the foxholes” were, too.

The patients were on cots “in big [canvas] ward tents, and we had a pot belly stove at each end, which we had to keep stoking. And of course, it didn't really keep it that warm, but it kept it warm enough, at least to keep them from freezing,” Nolan said.

‘Closest’ to the Front Lines

“The field hospitals were the closest to the front lines, so we moved all the time, [every] five to seven days. Every time an outfit went on the line, we'd move up right behind them, because we were with the clearing stations where they would bring the wounded from the battlefield,” Nolan said.

The chain of evacuation was “if they could be transported, they would take them back to an evac hospital. If they were non-transportable, they needed surgery immediately and shock treatment immediately” at the field hospital. “We got mostly chest and belly wounds,” she said.

The wounds the field hospital saw were often related, at least in part, to the heavily wooded terrain of the Ardennes Forest, according to Nolan.

“The forest is so heavily wooded, the trees are so close together, it's almost like you're walled in,” she said. The Germans “would fire their artillery up into the branches, and it would explode up there,” and then the GIs would “have all the shrapnel and everything falling down on them, but the branches and everything else were coming down and burying them,” Nolan explained.

On Christmas Eve, the field hospital was ordered to evacuate all patients and moved to go into Germany. 

State of the Wounded and Nurses’ Intensive Care

During the heights of action, “the wounded would be coming in for maybe 24–48 hours, even longer—nobody ever took a break until everybody was out of surgery and no more wounded [were] coming in,” Nolan said.

When first brought in, “almost all patients were in deep shock. Sometimes, there weren't even any vital signs obtainable. We'd have to cut down through the tissues to find a vein to put blood and plasma in.”

“The shock teams did this … but when they didn't show up … our own personnel would form the shock team, and I usually worked with the shock team when that happened,” Nolan said.

In the shock ward, “we’d get them stabilized. First, they cut off all their clothes and just have a blanket under them and over them, because we had to check and make sure that we found all their wounds. If it was a bullet wound, we'd have to try and find the exit wound, because if there wasn't an exit wound … it was still in the body.”

“As soon as we got them stabilized, they’d go quickly to X-ray and then right into surgery, and they operated on them right on the litters,” she said.

“They weren't moving them from one position to another. They’d just take the litter off the ambulance, set it up on sawhorses—that's where we’d do the shock treatment—and then carry them on that [litter to] X-ray, then right into surgery. And the surgeons got used to operating down on that low level on stools on the litter,” Nolan explained.

“We’d keep them maybe five to seven days, [until] as soon as they were able to be transported ... Then, we’d send them back to an evac hospital.” Usually, those hospitals had an airstrip to fly out stabilized patients. “In the beginning, they took them back to England, to the general hospitals there, and then, as the invasion got into the cities … they were able to take over buildings large enough for a general hospital,” Nolan said.

97% Survival Rate

“Our patients were in very serious condition, and … we were not expected to have a good survival rate in the field hospitals, but we did. We had a 97% survival rate,” Nolan recounted. “If they got to the field hospitals, they had an excellent chance of making it all the way home.”

Nolan made a point of saying the high survival rate was due to a number of factors, two of them being the excellent surgeons and dentists who served in the field hospital and the rapidity of care.

“We had the best surgical teams available from the finest medical facilities in the United States, teams from Johns Hopkins and Mass General and the Mayo Clinic and other excellent facilities. So, they really had the best, the best surgeons in the world, early” after being wounded.

“We even had dentists, and the dentists have never been recognized, I don't think, for what they did. You … think that they're just going to be filling teeth … instead of that, they spent more time in surgery, wiring jaws and assisting the neurosurgeons,” Nolan said.

The War Goes On

The Battle of the Bulge didn’t end hostilities, far from it. The war “went on and on and on” for Nolan until Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945.

“We thought it was over after the Bulge, and it wasn't. In fact, the Germans just fought harder than ever … and they brought everything that they could into the fight at that point,” she noted.

The daily hardships took their toll. In addition to living often in small pup tents, “we carried our own food, even though it was lousy. K rations and C rations,” also known as tinned precooked food. “We had no fresh vegetables or fruits or dairy or anything for, you know, a year and a half,” Nolan recounted.

When the war in Europe did end, Nolan, then a lieutenant, remained on duty until November 1945, when the U.S. Army pulled her and her fellow nurses out in a matter of less than a day, which she found very difficult psychologically.

“We didn't even have a chance to say goodbye. We just one day, we're told, pack up, be ready to leave in an hour, and we were gone. They pulled all the nurses out. We had all gone over together. We joined the 53rd Field Hospital at Fort Bragg,” now Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

The ‘Hardest Part’ Was ‘The Ones We Lost’

Asked what the “hardest part” was about being an Army nurse and the continuous exposure to suffering, Nolan unhesitatingly said: “The ones we lost.”

“Sometimes, everybody would just work so hard to keep them alive. That was our fight—to keep them alive. And when you work for hours and hours on a patient, and you finally get them to the point where they seem to be stabilizing and think, ‘They're going to make it’ … but once in a while they wouldn't.”

The wounded at the 53rd “were the best patients you'd ever have anywhere. They were so appreciative of everything, every little thing you do … and they were so brave, and they were so unselfish,” Nolan said. “They committed to ‘take care’—if they could speak at all—'of my buddy first. I can wait,’” Nolan said, and “they were just as bad off” as their buddy “or worse.”

“They were our heroes … we nurses really felt that we were privileged to be the ones to be there for them, because they were the ones between us and the enemy.”