BERYL HARRIGAN TRODD
Age: 88
Hometown: St. Maries, Idaho
Residence: Cathedral City
Military branch: U.S. Army Nurse Corps
Years served: 1943-1946
Rank: First lieutenant
Family: Husband Joseph Trodd (deceased; was a Navy commander during the war), two sisters, Kathy Harrigan of Olympia, Wash. and Dorothy Vaughan of Sacramento.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II Wednesday through Sunday through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Joe Rickey of Palm Desert.
More
U.S. Army Air Corps Nurse Beryl Harrigan Trodd treated hundreds of shattered bodies and traumatized psyches during her two-year tour of duty in England during World War II.
Shortly after graduating from Sacred Heart School of Nursing in Spokane, Wash., in 1942, Trodd and a group of friends enlisted in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.
“We decided this is what we should do because our country was at war and we were trained (nurses).”
Their first uniforms “must have been designed by a jealous Army wife,” Trodd said with a laugh.
“Alice-blue skirt, powder blue shirt, black ties, navy blue jacket trimmed in maroon.”
Later, they were issued the traditional — and much preferred — olive drab uniforms.
Once the hospital where she was stationed in Washington was up and running, it started received patients from Alaska, she said.
These were men who were fighting in the Aleutian Islands who had suffered broken bones, bullet wounds and other injuries during combat.
“We pinned Purple Hearts on a lot of them,” she said.
In early 1944, she received orders to go overseas.
She hopped a ship in Boston and traveled with 2,000 other nurses across the Atlantic, bound for Liverpool, England.
Although they were unaware of the military plans at the time, “they were getting ready for D-Day,” she said.
The nurses were packed in staterooms, 10 to a room, and the soldiers on the ship bunked under the stars.
“The tank corps company enlisted kids slept on top of the deck,” she said.
After landing, the nursing corps was sent to Wales, where “we took over a British hospital and started getting ready for patients,” Trodd said. “By the troop activities, we knew D-Day was coming.”
Soon, injured men began flooding into the hospital.
They were shipped across the English Channel from France and transported by train car loads to the hospital.
“We had one qualified surgeon,” she said.
The men she treated included members of the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions and soldiers from Gen. George Patton's Third Army, she said.
Trodd, who worked in the operating room, saw horrific injuries.
“You didn't think about it,” she said. “You had a job to do, and you did it.”
“We worked for three weeks around the clock,” Trodd said. “We worked hard and we worked long hours. We took our turns sleeping.”
Trodd was later transferred to 83rd General Hospital in England, where for the next year she served in the psychiatric ward.
“The chief nurse came to me and said, ‘I understand you've had some psychiatric experience,'” Trodd said.
Trodd answered that yes, she did have training, and with that, “I was the head psychiatric nurse,” she said.
What is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, was at that time referred to as “battle fatigue,” she said.
“We had all kinds of battle fatigue,” she said. “They (the men) were pretty good during the daytime, but when the night hours came, they would go off their rockers, really. They would hear the noises (aircraft flying overhead), and they were frightened.”
She spent most of her time on night duty, talking to and calming terrified 18- and 19-year-olds.
The patients also received medication as part of their treatment.
“Psychiatry was in its infancy,” she said.
The medication most frequently handed out was phenobarbital.
Phenobarbital, a barbiturate, slows the activity of the brain and nervous system and is used to treat or prevent seizures. It is also used, short-term, to prevent insomnia.
During World War II, it was used for its sedative effect.
“It was a different environment. It was a different time. It was a different time in medicine,” she said. “They didn't have the psychiatric medication they have today. We used whatever was available.”
