(Genevieve at far left)

Genevieve Ristau and Betty Niegsch, spry, lively veterans of World War II, have been friends from a very early age. Since attending fifth grade together at Chicopee Grade School they have been inseparable. Few people have experienced as much as these women during their lives. Both grew up in the southeast Kansas area and attended area schools. Both also joined the military at a very young age. It is hard to imagine two young nurses from southeast Kansas in the South Pacific; but in fact, these women are two of a few remaining survivors that witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

Note: Genevieve and Betty were interviewed jointly. Genevieve was interviewed in the first part of the interview, and Betty was interviewed in the second part. Interruptions are indicated by italics.

Part one - Genevieve Ristau

(Italics indicate words said by Betty)

I was born in Midway, Kansas, coal-mining town, southeast of Pittsburg, August 27, 1923. My mother’s name was Maude Redd and my dad’s name was Ernest Robison. My dad worked at the mines and my mother did *[house] work. My childhood was very good. I attended Midway Grade School, Chicopee Grade School, Cherokee High School, and then I went out to Mount Carmel Hospital for my nurses’ training. [Betty and I have been friends] since we were ten years old. Fifth grade. Chicopee.

[I joined the military] because they were short of nurses and really it was something to do other than what we [had] been doing for three years. Because [of Pearl Harbor] everybody was going to war. There was an article in the Joplin paper telling about this family and what they were doing and Pearl Harbor; and he **(the son) was only seventeen years old, and when he got to be eighteen he went down and he joined. His father was very mad because they lived on a farm. They finally said, “Okay.” Everybody went. Those that didn’t go stayed home and worked at the defense plant.

Not only that, we were in our last year of nurse’s training and we became cadet nurses, and they (the cadet nurses) participated with the army nurse’s corps. There were several nurses [from Mount Carmel that joined]. We had about three or four doctors from Pittsburg that went [also]: Dr. Erickson, Dr. Benner, [and] Doctor Carter.

I don’t even think I discussed it (my decision to join the military) with them (my family). They didn’t say too much about it. I joined with her (Betty) and she joined with me; so, that was that. [I] reported for duty 17^th of November ’44 at Camp Carson. I was a second lieutenant.

[On an average day we would] get up, and when you’re a nurse, you know, it’s the same old routine. You get up and go to breakfast and go to board (a list of patients to be seen), and work on the board until it’s time to get off. Well, I had nights a lot. Nights were twelve hours, days were eight. [The men working there treated us] fine. Doctors were nice, orderlies were nice. No problems. [I made] two hundred fifty [dollars a month]. I sent a hundred dollars home. It wasn’t very much, but it was enough.

[For food] we had green butter, we had green syrup, we had green pancakes. Our food, a lot of our stuff came from Australia, our food supplies, and it wasn’t very good. In fact, I ate oatmeal and I hate oatmeal; but I was hungry. We didn’t have milk; we didn’t even know what fresh vegetables were. We weren’t allowed to eat vegetables over in Japan because they used human waste to fertilize, and you weren’t allowed to eat it. [Our diet consisted of] hash, spam. We went and bought a lot of bananas, and mangos, and pineapple and we made fruit salad until my mouth broke out and I had to quit eating it ‘cause of the acid.

We had barracks [to sleep in]. There was thirty [women] in ours. Yeah, about thirty in our barracks. We had our space [in the barracks]. You had a cot and you had your mosquito bedding, then you had your bed roll which was put on your bed to sleep on. Then you had your foot locker that you carried with you all the time. That foot locker would be put down at the foot of your bed, and that was what you lived out of. We wasn’t allowed to [bring many things]. Where would we put it? I still got my foot locker.

We had uniforms. We had dresses to wear; but they were army dresses, and then we had uniforms that we wore to work. And then we had suntan khaki pants and khaki shirts that we wore at night, because of the mosquitoes. You had no buttons, no zippers. No nothing. You put them on, you tied them, and boy were they neat. The hats, they laced in the back. That’s what we worked in. Then at night, we worked in those, they were khaki pants, boots.

I was a medic and I had [to treat] malarias, dengue; I had a lot of pneumonias and ulcerations, and lice. It was (hygiene was a problem) because we lived in barracks with about thirty girls in a barrack, and then we had outside bathrooms and outside showers, and we just had to be careful. There was a lot of hepatitis over there. In fact, I had hepatitis. A lot of girls were coming in from the jungle, you know nurses, and they were putting them in the hospital, but I was already in there. I had hepatitis, and they had hepatitis. Six weeks or more I was in the hospital.

They (medical techniques) were good. [Our medical supplies] were very much so [adequate]. As far as my wards went there was, we had enough. I had two wards and there were about thirty-five patients in a ward. We were busy.

[For relaxation], well, we went to uptown in Manila. I mean we went swimming, we went to dances, we had nightlife there. We went to the nightclub. [We were allowed to date], but only with officers. If they caught you with an unlisted man, you wouldn’t get kicked out; but they restricted you to the barracks. You wasn’t allowed to go out. One time they caught us. Oh, they caught us.

[The worst part of my military stay was] going overseas, and [the] thirty some days on that boat. Thirty days on a boat. We were traveling from San Francisco to—we didn’t know for sure—but, we landed in Manila. That’s what we did. See, that boat was a menace. Betty: [There were] over 5,500 people on that ship. There was three hospital units on there. It was a huge luxury liner. They (the company that owned the liner) leased it to the government: S.S. Monterey.

[There were] twelve to a room. When you got into your bunk, you had to slide in because they were so [small]; and then we had that many in that room. Everything was standing in line. Everyday at one o’clock, or two, they made you run up to the deck and stand with your helmet on and your Mae West (life preservers), and all your stuff on because that was a drill. They made you do that because they never knew when somebody was going to [torpedo the ship].

First day we were all seasick. First night out of harbor everybody was seasick. Boy, that was terrible. We didn’t have Dramamine or nothing, all we had was…our little guy who waited our tables would give us crackers. Well, see, we had nice restrooms and a tub. I don’t remember ever having to stand in line for it. I don’t know what we all did.

[My most memorable moment was] getting into Manila and seeing the whole place blowing up; and then going to Japan, and seeing what we saw there in Hiroshima. Just dust.

There should have never been any [doubt about whether to drop the bomb]. It should have been done, and it was done; and how many thousands of boys and women were saved ‘cause we got to come after they dropped it. Then the war was over and they started sending everybody home; but if they didn’t drop that bomb, we wouldn’t have got out of there.

[I saw] just a lot of debris, dust [in the aftermath of the explosion]. There was only a few buildings left standing, and that was all. We didn’t see any people. I don’t know [how I was changed that day], I really don’t. I guess the atom bomb is terrible to use and it should never be used again; but then, we were the first ones to do it, and you can’t fault the United States for doing that, or somebody’s gonna come drop it on us.

[I won] two battle stars [for my service]. [To win a battle star] you have to be in the area where they’re having their battles. See, when we were in Manila they were still fighting in Manila, and you could see them and hear the guns and stuff. There were dead Japanese lying in the streets, but you could hear them. They wouldn’t let us go out when we first got there. They restricted us to our area. Then, after a while, they did let you go out; but you couldn’t go out unless you had a armed escort.

I wish I would have [kept a diary]. I keep thinking I wish I would have kept a diary from the first day to my last day. Then my letters that I wrote home to my mother, she kept them all; and then she passed away and then my dad and my sister burnt them. That was that.

[I retired] July of ‘81. [I left the military] ‘cause it was time for me to get out and get another life. [After the military], I did private duty out here at the hospital, then I went to army ammunition plant in Parsons. Then I was a health nurse; and that’s been about it.

*[] Indicates implied meaning, words not said by Genevieve

**() Indicates clarifying words or phrases

Interview conducted by Rick Paul on December 7, 2005

Part Two - Betty Niegsch

(Italics indicate words said by Genevieve)

[I was born] January 2, 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. Came back with my parents when I was six months ‘cause they lived here originally, and they went to Chicago. I’ve been here ever since I was six months old. *[My mother’s name was] Edna Young and [my father’s name was] Frank Rondelli. My dad worked for the WPA, and we had to get some things from the government. They had canned meat and things like that that we did for part of this time, and later on, when Roosevelt became President and put in the WPA, they got to working, and they got paid for that. I think President Roosevelt was our turning point, I really do. It **(the WPA) was started by the government to give people jobs, and they fixed roads and built sidewalks. We lived in Chicopee, a little bitty town about four miles south of Pittsburg, and [the WPA] built the sidewalk for the kids who walked a mile to school. [I attended] Chicopee Grade School, Saint Mary’s Grade School, I went there four years, then Chicopee and Cherokee High School.

[Nurse’s training] was three years. We had to live there. [We lived] up above the hospital; they (the nurses) had a whole floor and we got one night out a month. One night. Genevieve: You got up at seven in the morning; and sometimes you didn’t go to bed ‘till seven that next morning, if they needed you. There was no state laws, no state regulations. They worked us like dogs. If he [the doctor] worked twelve hours, you worked fourteen hours, whatever, and we got five dollars a month.

Like she (Genevieve) said, we went to Wichita, and we were working there almost like we were in training. We had heard that they were going to start drafting nurses if more didn’t start joining. So we decided that we might as well go ahead and join. My mother was very upset and was really, really upset over it. My dad, he had joined the Navy; my dad was in the Navy. Of course, they were separated. She didn’t like it at all.

I wasn’t eager to get away from home. In fact, I didn’t really care if I went over, I almost didn’t get in with her (Genevieve’s) group. They put us all in a room, and they said you can go together. They kept calling different names, and we had the 311^th General Hospital, 312^th, and 313^th. There were so many went in each group, and you were gonna go. I think I almost didn’t get in with her because I was sitting there, and I really didn’t want to go overseas. I think [you (Genevieve) persuaded me to join]. You brought it up, and we decided to go.

I left two weeks before she did. They called me two weeks before they called her. I missed basic with her, so I had to work in their hospital there ‘till my basic training; and then she got shipped to Camp Crowder. We were at Camp Stallman for just a short while ‘till they shipped us out. Camp Stallman, California. Getting out of the service it was reversed. She got out before me, so we had the same amount of time.

(At the camp) They prepped us to go up the ship on a rope. [We also had to go through] the gas chambers. You went through a gas chamber just like, and it was real gas. One of the girls that was with me, her mask was leaking a little bit and she got gassed. They had to send her home. It (the gas) would kill you. They hurried up and got her out of there. They had us climb beneath walls, and you had to put your helmet on and put the strap in your teeth so you could hold them. The girl above me kicked my helmet; I think she broke my neck. That whole thing went, and I almost fell off of that net coming down; but we had to practice that. You had to hike and do the whole nine yards. It wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have to shoot a gun or anything. They didn’t show us anything like that. When you’re a nurse, you didn’t do all this stuff, and whenever you go in there it was run here, run there, run here, and we had an hour of drill every day at Camp Carson, our base.

[From Carson we went to] Crowder. That (Camp Crowder) was a shipping area for all the men that worked on telephone lines and radios and stuff that was the training area. Soldiers used to come up here on the weekends. This town was full, and we had the Navy here, stationed here. Glider pilots, and we had the Navy here. There was military around Pittsburg. You had to get a pass [to come to Pittsburg]; and you had to be off duty, and if we had to work, we had to work.

I tell you sometimes I remember going and laying down. If you was on nights, it was about twelve hours and you didn’t get off, just worked night after night. What did we have, four wards through the night or six? I don’t remember. You had to go up and down. You were the only nurse, but you had ward men, and they would help you with different things—giving medicine and stuff like that—but you did all the overseeing of all that and taking care of the malaria patients. Then we could go down to the market. Like in Manila, they had markets, open markets, and they had shop things where they had people embroidery, made stuff, and we’d trade with them. They made those clogs and things that we wear now. I’d never seen them except in Manila. That was the first time we’d ever seen them so they must have come from over there. You know, your slip on clogs. Thongs came from Japan. I got a pair from Japan. I’d never seen those before. They had these mostly open markets; they didn’t have stores or anything.

They (Filipinos) were happy to see the Americans. They really were under siege. The Filipinos, they really hadn’t had a lot of training. I don’t know, they really didn’t have as much as we’d had over here. So, it was hard. It was very hard. They washed their clothes, they’d take our laundry, pick it up and wash them down at the river on rocks and things and flat iron them. They’d just come back so pretty. This one little Filipino girl wanted to come home with me. In fact, she had somebody write a letter when I got home, and she wanted to come over here and live with me. Of course, I was just young and couldn’t take care of her. I imagine [she was] maybe fifteen, sixteen (years old), Rufina. I felt sorry for her, but I was living with my mother, my grandma, and my little sister. We didn’t have anything. A lot of those Filipino girls really come out good because the girls would give them their clothes and makeup and things like that. They really had it good. Sometimes if you had perfume or something you could give them that. She liked me. They sure could do your clothes. You’d see them pounding down by the river. They didn’t have electric washing machines and all that stuff.

[The worst part of the military was] just being away from home and being so far away and that part of it. I didn’t mind the, you know we had to have uniforms and all that stuff, which was okay. And our work, as far as that goes, we didn’t have to work quite as hard as we did in training; but just being so far away from home I think that was one of the worst things. I missed my parents. My mother especially, and my family.

My mother did [write me often] and she’d send things; one time I asked her and she sent me a can of corn. They could send things. Sometimes we get them, and sometime we didn’t. She wrote quite often. My dad once in a while, but he was in the Navy. He was in South America. Half the time I didn’t hear from him.

[My most memorable moment was] being on that ship leaving the harbor. That was the biggest moment for me, seeing all of San Francisco black as coal late at night. If you can imagine a city that big, no lights at all. On a ship with around 5,500 people. The only thing I’d ever been on was a rowboat in the park on a pond. I can remember crying, I told Genevieve, my tears was running, “I’ll never see America again.” I said, “I’ll never see it,” and then we got out there and we hit a storm and it took the big ship, just tossed it, just like it was a little ball. There was three hundred of us on the ship and we had guards. That was a memorable moment, when that water was sloshing all over. We were too sick to do anything about it, except she (Genevieve) did get some help.

The only danger was on that ship. One night, well one time on that ship, they got word from Tokyo Rose. She was on the radio all the time, and she knew everything. [She said] they were going to bomb this S.S. Monterey. They knew there was a bunch of nurses on it; and that night we all, everybody that could fit, got way up on top as high as you could get. Now, I don’t know what difference that made. We were going to be bombed unless they was underneath for some reason, but that was the only time we felt real danger. Not only that, we got up one morning and we was in a convoy. We were in the middle and there were warships all around us. Aircraft carriers, you can’t imagine! I bet there was a hundred ships, and we were in the center of it.

This ship we went over. They had one whole unit that was going over to Manila, and they were really young. We thought they were kids, two years difference, but there was a whole battalion of them. We heard later, down in Manila, that three fourths of them they sent them out in the jungles, and they had green lieutenants—they were green—and three fourths of them got killed. They got ambushed.

At one point in time, too, we got transferred to 262^th station hospital down at Santo Tomas prison. She and I went to that, we were in there. That was where this Japanese general…in the prison they called him the “White Angel.” He used to dress in white, and he was real cruel to the prisoners. We were up in the hills, they wouldn’t let us go. Santo Tomas University, where we was, at the hospital, back in the back area back there was where they had prisoners of war. The Japanese kept them there. Downstairs in that area they had a torture room, and I wouldn’t tell you what they did to them. This one, they said, he cut somebody’s toe off.

I went to a big trial. What was the name of that admiral? Yamashita? He was a war prisoner, and they had a big trial there in Manila and I went. There was a church and he put all the people in this little town in the church, and then they set it afire; and then, when they came out, they shot them. The Japs. Oh, they were mean.

We had the boys [in the hospital] that was in Bataan and Corregidor. The Death March. We had those boys in our hospital at the end of the war. Down in Manila I worked on a ward with a lot of jungle rot. They called it jungle rot. Ulcers, and they had the itch (scabies). We didn’t have gloves; we just used our hands for soaks and things like that. One Filipino, we took care of Filipino soldiers too, he came in and his face was all scabs and the pus was dripping from his ears had hardened. We started putting packs on him, and cleaned, and fixed him. By that time he was starting to heal, but they picked up that stuff from, I don’t know where it come from, in the jungle.

Like I said, we mustered in Chicago, that’s where we ended our Army career. I was with these girls, and we were walking across the street to go to headquarters there. This truck come along there, and stopped right in front of us on the sidewalk there; and this guy jumped out and ran over and he grabbed me and he knew who I was. He says, “Look at my leg. Looks just the same as it did over there.” I had no idea who he was. He had a sore on his leg over there, and it still was there when he got here. He says, “You took care of me over there.” He kinda scared us when he jumped out of the car and run over there, but he had this what they called jungle rot. So, it was quite an experience.

I think the most memorable thing was whenever we closed our hospital to get ready to go over to Japan with the invasion. Then they dropped the bomb, the war stopped; and then we closed our hospital. They started bringing all these prisoners of war back, and we had to open our hospital to take care of them. They’d hide things under their pillows. They didn’t have to here, but they still did that. They were so malnourished. They were supposed to eat little bits at a time. This one [soldier] got in line, and he went and ate, and they said he got in line again—another line—and ate again, until he got sick. But he was so hungry. If you eat too much, you tear your system up. They had to watch him. When you eat bugs for a meal. I imagine when they brought them in they kept the PF’s in the dining room open twenty-four hours for them. They were real good to them; but it was a shame. This one boy was on what they called the “hell ship.” They (the Japanese) picked them up in Manila, and took them to Japan; and they had them down in this hole. They tried to get up the thing, and they’d stomped their hands. They said they got so thirsty they even drank urine.

At the hospital I was at in Nagoya, we was right next door to the mental ward. They had a guy in there who thought he was Gary Cooper.

Going into Manila and seeing all these ships in the harbor, that was another memorable moment ‘cause I’d never been out of the United States. Going to Hiroshima, flying in the C-47, we flew from Manila to Japan. We went over the ocean and a C-47 only had two motors, and they dumped all our belongings in the middle of this. They had metal seats on each side, and that was it, you were in there. I looked out, we was sitting there, she and I reading one of those little pocket books, and I looked out and says, “You know that propeller stopped going out there.” We were over the ocean. That’s a memorable moment too. We went in on one propeller, and we landed at Iwo Jima. We had Thanksgiving Dinner there.

Iwo Jima, where they had the big battle. See, they’d already dropped the bomb and it was nothing but red clay there. We landed at the Japanese Naval Base. They stationed us there in Japan. When we went to this place (Iwo Jima), it was like Annapolis here.

One day the head nurse asked if we wanted to go over there (Hiroshima). So we says, “Sure.” We all piled in a big army truck and we went there, and it was just devastation. You could see just a wall here and a building up here. The ground was intact, but everything else was rubble. It was dust. Everything evaporated. The whole city. I picked up that vase in there and brought it. I picked that up in the rubble, that was after the bomb. I had a whole stack of stuff; they was making fun of me so I just dropped it. They said, “Don’t you know that could have radiation on it?” Well, we didn’t know anything about radiation. We were in there and we didn’t know anything about radiation.

They had a room full of sabers and guns. They let us in there and pick two. Brought home a saber and a Japanese gun. I got a gun and a saber, and then the kids broke that. It was one of them swords. We got separated there. She (Genevieve) went to one hospital. We worked there, what, two or three months in those hospitals. Course the war was over by that time, but we were getting people, you know, that weren’t quite ready to go home right away. We had to take care of them there, and then they’d be shipped home. I mustered out in Chicago.

I did too. Fort Sheridan.

[After the military] I did private duty. Back then hospital work was kind of, they didn’t have too many RN’s working through the hospital. What was there was there, and we did private duty for a while; and then I worked out at Mount Carmel. My husband, I knew him before; and he’d come home, and I got married the next year and just worked at the hospital here. I retired in 1990. Worked a lot through the years.

I wouldn’t trade all that for a million dollars. I know there’s people still alive that’s been over there and all that too; but we never did in all our time back here, we’ve never met anybody that was over there.

*[] Indicates implied meaning, words not said by Betty

**() Indicates clarifying words or phrases

Italics indicate words said by Genevieve

Interview conducted by Rick Paul on December 7, 2005