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Julia Herrick, a biophysicist working at Mayo Clinic, was invited by the U.S. War Department to conduct research on radar. In 1942, she was granted a leave of absence by Mayo Clinic to allow her to become a civilian working at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. During her nearly three years of research, she was also assigned to the Radio Direction Finding Receiver Subsection of the Equipment Subsection at the Evans Signal Laboratory at Bradley Beach, New Jersey.
Her research focused on radio direction finding. Her team was charged with designing a direction finder that could be transported in a small vehicle of a size and weight three men could set up and make operational within twenty minutes. Development began in August 1943 and concluded in August 1945. The project was successful for its intended use of radiocommunication direction finding, and she and her team found that "it may also have important application to homing and navigation for position finding for rescue operations.”
[break] Julia Herrick’s path to radar research began early in her career. She was born in 1893 in North St. Paul and after completing a bachelor’s degree in math from the Universityof Minnesota in 1915, Julia Herrick taught high school math, chemistry, and physics in Pine City and Ely, and in Minneapolis at a private high school later be known as Blake School. She returned to the Universityof Minnesota, and in 1919, after completing a master’s degree in physics, she became head of the physics department at Rockford College, Illinois.
Frustrated by the lack of funding for her physics lab and changes in the curriculum that discouraged students from taking physics, Julia applied to the Mayo Clinic. In 1927, she was accepted as a fellow in biophysics at Mayo Clinic. By 1931, she completed her doctorate and became an associate in experimental surgery and pathology, conducting research in Mayo’s Institute of Experimental Medicine. She studied the impact of ultrasound on bone and made important contributions to the development of the thermistor, a device used for physiologic thermometry by biophysicists, anesthesiologists, and experimental surgeons. She had thirteen years of experience working in the field of biophysics when the war broke out. When Dr. Herrick first arrived at Fort Monmouth, she was assigned to a technician with a few college credits and a couple of years of experience in electronics, Gustav Shapiro. He said Julia “was a fish out of water, but a smart woman. She had a lot of mathematics, and that’s why they assigned her to me. She was able to supplement what I didn’t know. I started to work on cavity resonators (what did I know about cavity resonators?) I had the feel, but not the mathematics. Between the two of us, we managed to figure things out.”
He also got to know her personally and learned about her family. “Dr. Herrick came from a Minneapolis banking family. There were three children, two sons and she was the daughter. When the father died, he left control of the bank to her because he trusted her common sense more than that of his sons. She was a smart gal in her late forties I would say, and prematurely gray. She was an extremely good looking and appealing woman and it was very easy to get along with her. She had the common touch. We once had a Thanksgiving party at our house and played charades. When it was her turn to act out something, she took a long-stemmed flower in her hand and stretched out on the floor facing the ceiling with her eyes closed. She was enacting ‘Massa in the cold, cold ground.’ She was a regular person.”
Julia was considered an excellent, hard-working member of the Signal Corps research team. By all accounts, she was a dedicated, strong woman, and yet on September 13, 1944, Julia reported to the infirmary “nervous and crying.” She had just been notified that her nephew, a paratrooper, had been killed in the Normandy invasion.
After returning to Mayo Clinic in 1946 from her military assignment, Dr. Herrick continued research on the biological effects of microwaves, ultrasound, physiologic thermometry, and the circulation of blood. She began to study engineering as well. She joined the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and became the first editor for the Medical Electronics Professional Transactions. Throughout her career, she published over 130 articles and attained full professor status at Mayo Clinic. After retiring from the clinic in 1958, at age sixty-five, Dr. Herrick began working for NASA in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, contributing to its space research programs during the first years of its formation until 1965, when she returned to the Midwest.
On May 3, 1945, two weeks after President Roosevelt’s death and days after Mussolini is killed in Italy and Hitler commits suicide in Berlin, two nurses from Minnesota entered Dachau Concentration Camp outside Munich. The smell of rotting flesh hung in the air. Box cars packed from top to bottom with dead bodies sat along the tracks and roads that had brought two hundred thousand people to enslavement and where nearly forty thousand prisoners died during the twelve years it was open. More bodies were stacked in piles outside the crematorium. Beads of rain ran off of the motionless faces. Dead dogs lay in kennels, shot by American soldiers after prisoners warned them the starving dogs were trained to attack. The Army restored water, light, and disposal systems that hadn’t been working for several days, contributing to the deplorable conditions. German people in the area helped load the bodies onto carts to take them outside of the gates for internment in mass graves.
[break] The 116th and 127th Army Evacuation Hospitals converted the German S.S. barracks, scrubbing them down with creosol, emitting another pungent smell that Dorothy Wahlstrom and Vera Brown would remember for the rest of their lives. Dachau began holding 10,000 prisoners, but by the time the Allied forces arrived, the camp had grown to 35,000 prisoners, most of them severely undernourished and ill due to the overcrowding and poor treatment. The 116th and 127th Evacuation hospitals were set up to accommodate 1,200 patients each. They brought x-ray equipment, a pharmacy, two operating rooms, a sterilizing unit, and a dental clinic.
[break] Even the living looked near dead: skeletal, shaved heads, large protruding eyes. Some did not move, either too weak or scared. Typhus was rampant. DDT teams dusted daily to try to stop the spread of typhus via lice and rodents. Nearly a third of the prisoners had tuberculous. Patients were first dusted with DDT and six hours later given a thorough bath, dusted again, put in pajamas, catalogued, and assigned to a ward. Malnutrition was the largest problem and many prisoners developed diarrhea when they began eating nutritious food.
The wards within the hospitals each held 120 patients, with two nurses to staff them during the day and one at night. The patients were Polish, Russian, and French. Some were priests. Jews were brought for experimentation and extermination. Forty nationalities were represented. Language was sometimes challenging for the nurses and patients. Soon patients were well enough to serve as translators. In one ward an Austrian doctor, quite ill with typhus, helped translate. The also started helping each other as soon as they were strong enough.
[break] Emma Dorothy Wahlstrom was born in Gibbon, a small farming community in southcentral Minnesota in 1918. Her family moved to Clear Lake, Wisconsin, in 1925, and she graduated from high school there. Dorothy completed her nurse’s training in St. Paul at Bethesda Hospital School of Nursing in 1939. After working at Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children, Dorothy joined the Army Nurse Corp on July 23, 1941. She was assigned to the 127th Evacuation Hospital, which was activated in March, 1944 at Camp Bowie, Texas, a unit of the Fourth Army Division. They trained there, including caring for German POWs hospitalized in six wards of Station Hospital at Camp Bowie. They left for Europe by train on January 8, 1945, a trip that would eventually land them at Dachau.
Vera Brown had been assigned to the Dachau liberation after being part of the 27th Evacuation Hospital. She had been in Paris for VE Day and saw the celebration: people “swinging from the upper floors of the Opera House. They were so happy the war was over, they didn’t know what to do with themselves.” She also saw the French people dragging prisoners of war down the street unmercifully. She had been with the 103rd General Hospital in Perham Downs, England, an hour outside of London, where the unit was set up in a rush, a sure indication that the invasion of France was about to take place. Two days after D-Day the hospital accepted a “flood of wounded young men.” Vera administered anesthesia, mostly sodium pentothal and relaxants; sometimes nitrous oxide. They couldn’t use some of the more effective gases because they were explosive. They worked around the clock trying to save men whose arms and legs had been shot off. Those who had been shot in the abdomen usually died. The nursing quarters were cramped, cold, and damp. Several of the nurse contracted tuberculosis while they were there. It was after these intense assignments that Vera Brown joined the evacuation hospitals at Dachau.
Vera had wanted to be a nurse from childhood. She pretended to wear a uniform and took care of other kids. Her dad discouraged her saying she would have a career of emptying bedpans. She did her nurse’s training at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul. She loved the work and they offered her a job at graduation in 1942, promising to pay her $70 a week. When she did see that amount in her paycheck and found she was struggling financially, Vera joined the Army, where she could make $70 a week and get her room and board. She was assigned to Ft. Snelling, where she proudly wore her blue Army uniform. She was at Ft. Snelling until March, 1943 when she was transferred to Fort Warren near Cheyenne, Wyoming and then eventually posted overseas.
[break] During their six weeks at Dachau, Dorothy and the staff of the 127th evacuation hospital cared for 2, 267 patients, most of them requiring treatment for a combination of diarrhea, malnutrition, typhus, and tuberculous. 246 of their patients died. The 116th hospital admitted an additional 2,057 patients, almost all of whom had typhus and were malnourished. 190 of these patients died. Dorothy felt as if they could not escape death. In the mornings, as she came to the hospital, seven or eight stretchers were lined up in front of each ward with those who had died during the night. Dorothy and the staff of the 127th Evacuation Hospital stayed at Dachau until June 17, 1945. In addition to everything they witnessed was the knowledge that Dachau was only one of the Nazi twenty-seven concentration camps and 1,100 satellite camps. And although nearly 40,000 people perished there from 1933 to 1945, over 2.3 million men, women, and children – Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, resistance activists, homosexuals, and other perceived enemies of the Third Reich were imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, and abused. 1.7 million of them died across the all of the camps and satellites. More disturbing is the knowledge that the 1.7 million who died in the camps are only a portion of the estimated six million Jews who were killed by Nazis, shot in their homes, streets, ditches and fields.
The evacuation hospitals were there while others celebrated the liberation of Paris and VE Day throughout Europe. The entire time they were there, the American flag flew at half-mast for President Roosevelt. Dorothy, Vera, and the other nurses were not the only women at Dachau when it was liberated. Elisabeth May Adams Craig, a journalist writing for the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, originally from CooSaw Mines, South Carolina was there. Elisabeth began as a super model for Vogue magazine and then she studied photography. Now behind the camera, she became a U.S. Army correspondent for Vogue during World War II and visited four concentration camps, including being at Dachau when Dorothy and Vera were there. On June, 17, 1945, the 127th evacuation hospital moved by motor and train to Camp Philadelphia in France, where they were stationed for two months caring for war casualties as troops began returning to the United States. They returned to Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and the unit was deactivated November 30, 1945 in Ft. Benning, Georgia. Dorothy remained with the Army Nurse Corp for another year until August 3, 1946, completing five years of service before being discharged at Fort Sheridan, Illinois.
Vera remained at Dachau for three months before she was reassigned to a women’s hospital near Wiesbaden. Finally, in December 1945, she had enough points to be discharged. She boarded an Italian freighter so full they had to sleep in shifts. They encountered a severe storm in the north Atlantic and the ship pitched back and forth. They could see the propellers come out of the water and one of the portholes burst. They landed in New York after fourteen days and Vera took a train to Fort Des Moines for discharge, By the time she arrived, she had the flu, but once her paperwork was complete, she left in the car with her sister and brother, who had come to get her. One their way to Morris they were caught in a terrible snow storm. They drove as far as they could but eventually had to abandon the car and walk the last three and half miles in the storm. A big celebration had been planned to welcome Vera home, but it was three o’clock in the morning when they arrived and everyone had gone home. [break]
