Henrietta Harkness was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in October 1918. Her father was a foreman at the Bethlehem Steel Company. Her mother was a dressmaker. Life was very comfortable during the Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945]. She graduated as a registered nurse and went to work in a mental hospital. When she first was called for service, the president of the hospital asked that she not be taken because she was covering the work of about six nurses. That bought her a year before her induction. She entered service in January 1943. She was having breakfast at the hospital when she heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. She was upset and wondered if she would be called or not. As a Red Cross nurse, she was expected to serve in the military. She would have gone had the hospital president not asked for her to be excused. She went to Fort Stuart, Virginia [Annotator's Note: Camp Stuart in Newport News City, Virginia] from January to December [Annotator's Note: of 1943]. Afterward, she was transferred to Tennessee to join the 24th Evacuation Hospital. She was a first lieutenant at the time. Upon entry into the Army, she had no additional training. She was the only one with psychiatric training and experience. The command at Fort Stuart would not release her because of her knowledge even though Harkness begged to go overseas. When she finally was sent overseas in December 1943, she used that psychiatric training. She shipped out on the Queen Mary [Annotator's Note: the RMS Queen Mary]. The ship's captain explained that the ship had been safe in its many voyages overseas, but passengers should make sure and not fall overboard. There was no stopping. During the end of the voyage, the ship zigzagged to avoid being hit by torpedoes. She had to hang on to her berth as a result of the erratic course taken. The passengers did not eat and remained in their clothes until reaching Scotland. Compartments held double the normal passengers in the three or four tier bunks. Food was good though. After Scotland, the outfit went to Cheddar, England. They remained there from January [Annotator's Note: January 1944] until D-Day [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. The hospital staff billeted [Annotator's Note: a place, usually civilian or nonmilitary, where soldiers are lodged temporarily] with local families. There were two or three dry runs prior to the invasion.

Henrietta Harkness [Annotator's Note: an Army nurse with the 24th Evacuation Hospital] left on D-Day [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] but did not reach the beach until it was secure six days after the initial landings. Before reaching the beach, the chief nurse told her staff to remember, if captured, they were to provide the enemy only their name and serial number. Harkness repeated that to herself as she boarded an LST [Annotator's Note: landing ship, tank]. As she reached the boat, a Navy man grabbed her ankles to let her know she was on the last step. The water was deep as the boat reached the beach. A Navy man offered to carry a tiny nurse, but they both fell in the water. Walking up the hill at Omaha Beach [Annotator's Note: Omaha Beach, Normandy, France], a soldier said it was nice to see smiling faces and then told them that five men died where they chose to sit. The hospital staff began to set up their facilities. Tents were pitched by the corpsmen [Annotator's Note: enlisted medical specialist in the US Navy who may also serve in the US Marine Corps], while the women set up cots. Wooden boxes were used for supplies and desks. The only lights available were in surgery. About 20 hours after setting up the hospital, casualties arrived. The largest battle nearby was at Saint-Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô (Saint-Lo), France]. Some German wounded were treated. Some of the men arrived with depression. Harkness was told by a doctor to treat them as she had been taught in her training [Annotator's Note: she had been a nurse in a mental hospital prior to her induction into the Army]. The doctors were too busy with surgery to give her further guidance, so Harkness used the same medication techniques she had adopted in her civilian role. After the men stabilized, she released them to return to their unit. Some were not secure enough to return. One man stayed to assist Harkness. He protected her from an irate German prisoner who spit a pill back at her. She made the call to send men forward or back to the rear. She only had one medication for them. After two or three weeks, the combat situation improved, and those depression cases diminished. Harkness had no issue treating German wounded. Patients reached Harkness after surgery. The surgeon's instructions were on their card for her to implement. She monitored their progress and made the call on when they were released to the front or to be taken back to the rear areas. She had corpsmen and ambulances to assist her in her duties. The ambulances had four bunks in them. Harkness did not know where the patients were being evacuated. It was only after the war in reading a book about the 24th Evacuation Hospital that she discovered the recovering men were taken to Diest [Annotator's Note: Diest, Belgium].

Henrietta Harkness [Annotator's Note: an Army nurse with the 24th Evacuation Hospital] was sent to Nijmegen, Holland after Saint-Lo [Annotator's Note: Battle of Saint-Lô, 7 to 19 July 1944 in Saint-Lo (Saint-Lô), France]. They took over a modern Dutch hospital. That was great after the tents. They put the sisters down in the basement and took care of them. Harkness had a stay in the hospital for pneumonia while there. The facility was in the middle of shellfire from the British and Germans. Harkness bunked with Katie Foster [Annotator's Note: US Army First Lieutenant Katherine "Katie" Foster]. Harkness confided in Foster that she feared the hospital would be hit by the fire. Foster reassured her but Harkness asked for another place to sleep. When a doctor agreed to relocate Harkness, they walked to her new spot with sniper fire barely missing them. The next day, the hospital was hit. Harkness' bunk looked like a tank rolled over it. A doctor who was talking to a nurse was identifiable only by his dog tags. The nurse was hurt but she recovered. If Harkness had remained in her wing, she would not have survived. Next was the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. While in Holland, the nurses wanted ice cream so badly that they saved their sugar and sent it to a factory that subsequently was bombed. They never got their ice cream. She never treated civilians but at Omaha Beach [Annotator's Note: Omaha Beach, Normandy, France], French citizens offered to do her wash. She gave the French soap to use and in repayment, the locals gave her good French bread and vegetables. The nurses saw Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] the day after it was liberated. They rolled right through in a truck, but Harkness did spend a week there after the war. The staff of the hospital was told that they were going to the Pacific. They were happy they dropped the bomb [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] and they did not have to go. She reached home two days after Thanksgiving [Annotator's Note: 22 November 1945]. During the war, Harkness was in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. At the end of the war, her hospital was situated on the Russian and German front. The staff helped manage trains between the two former opponents because of each side's reluctance to return the rolling stock. They took care of casualties. The Russian prisoners all had TB [Annotator's Note: tuberculosis, a bacterial disease of the lungs]. Harkness asked to be removed from them. A lady even had a baby there. Harkness feared the woman would give her baby TB. The former inmates spat all over the place. She treated few casualties who did not speak English. Some injuries resulted from friendly fire. Harkness had a run-in with a Red Cross worker when the girl refused to give Harkness a toothbrush and toothpaste. The worker said her supplies were for enlisted only [Annotator's Note: Harkness was a first lieutenant at that point]. It irked Harkness but later the worker gave her the requested items. When Harkness replaced what she was given, she gave the worker extra and asked her to provide it to any officers who request the items in the future. Another incident happened with candy bars. Harkness only had K-rations [Annotator's Note: individual daily combat food ration consisting of three boxed meals] and the candy looked very good. A worker refused to give her one. Later, the men who were being treated by Harkness provided her with a stack of their candy bars. Harkness did not donate to the Red Cross for a long time after that. Harkness wrote letters for the G.I.s just like the Red Cross worker was tasked to do. Harkness has a book called "They Called Them Angels" [Annotator's Note: "They Called Them Angels: American Military Nurses of World War II" by Kathi Jackson, 2006] that talks about the hospital and the good performed by nurses in the war. Harkness realized she was saved when Germans walked toward their hospital with rifles over their heads. The American commander told them to drop their equipment and to continue walking beyond the hospital. Up to that point, the hospital was surrounded on three sides by the Germans. Despite a knowledge that she could be killed, she never ran for foxholes under fire. The Germans had prepared their positions in the hedgerows [Annotator's Note: man-made earthen walls that surround a field that are often overgrown with impenetrable vegetation] before the invasion [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. After the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945], Harkness was invited to a get together down the road. A major escorted her. On the way, the officer handed her a weapon. He told her to use it if she had to. She was afraid to breath. Continuing to the party, a sentry challenged them and asked for recognition. The major was agitated at the guard. It turned out that the soldier had been told to stop anyone if he heard a woman's voice. The fräuleins [Annotator's Note: German women] had been joining G.I.s [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] in their pup tents. After all of that, Harkness refused to go to the party.

Henrietta Harkness [Annotator's Note: an Army nurse with the 24th Evacuation Hospital] was trained in Virginia for a year but none of the instruction involved guns. There were Red Crosses over the hospital, but a dog fight occurred overhead injuring a nurse. Few staff members were hurt during the war. There was a lot of syphilis [Annotator's Note: sexually transmitted venereal disease] among the G.Is [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier]. Penicillin Annotator's Note: an antibiotic] was introduced but the men gave her a hard time for the multiple injections they were required to receive. The members of the hospital staff returned to the United States piecemeal. She traveled home on the United States. On the return home, she was allowed on deck unlike the trip to Europe on the Queen Mary [Annotator's Note: the RMS Queen Mary]. After arrival, the Red Cross provided them with free milk for their trip to Fort Dix [Annotator's Note: Fort Dix, New Jersey]. She wondered if they knew she was an officer. Harkness was discharged as a first lieutenant at Fort Dix. After the three months of terminal leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], she was promoted to captain. She went back to nursing in a hospital. She later went to work for a doctor, got married, and had a family.

When she returned home, Henrietta Harkness heard the complaints of people about various material things. She compared their lifestyle to the British who had suffered heavily in the war. It bothered her. She had left things with the British that she could not use. The Americans were very generous. When she had a 72-hour pass [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], she had to spend half of it in an air raid shelter. She did not see much of London [Annotator's Note: London, England] while it was being bombed. She found out when she got on the beach [Annotator's Note: she landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France six days after the commencement of the D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944] what it was like. She was in England for six months before the invasion. Little bombing occurred near her there. One bomb was dropped but it was filled with sand. While in England, she had additional training in nursing and how to treat patients. When planes came overhead, Harkness would not flee to a foxhole but would stay on her cot repeating Hail Marys [Annotator's Note: a prayer used mainly by Catholics]. She did not worry about it. It was good to liberate France and Italy even though she did not participate in the latter. It was good the United States participated in the war. The Berlin Wall [Annotator's Note: a guarded concrete barrier that physically divided Berlin, Germany from 1961 to 1989] installation by the Russians was not acceptable to Harkness. After the Wall came down, her diplomat son took her into East Germany. It looked like a different country. The city of Leipzig [Annotator's Note: Leipzig, Germany] was rebuilt. She visited Germany in 1999. Harkness had no issues with working with the corpsmen [Annotator's Note: enlisted medical specialist in the US Navy who may also serve in the US Marine Corps] or patients while a nurse in wartime. She experienced no shortage problems. The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is important for the younger generation. Not enough history is stressed in school today. Harkness had to memorize the Declaration of Independence [Annotator's Note: pronouncement adopted 4 July 1776 by the American colonies declaring their independence from England] when she was a student. The nickname given to her by her father was Panzer Pic because her maiden name was Piccirilli. She does not remember being called that [Annotator's Note: a daughter offscreen reminds Harkness of the nickname and they laugh]. Harkness is 91 years of age. She remembers a German woman asking the nurses to give her an SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel or SS—a Nazi paramilitary organization] pin that belonged to her husband if the Americans found it. The Americans moved her out of the house. Meanwhile, Harkness liberated six glasses but later it was reduced to two after she gave some to other nurses.