Peter1469
08-29-2015, 10:20 PM
No, Augusta Chiwy (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/augusta-chiwy-forgotten-african-nurse-of-battle-of-the-bulge-dies-at-94/2015/08/27/8ff843ec-4bfb-11e5-84df-923b3ef1a64b_story.html) was not formally a Soldier. But she served. RIP.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/08/26/Obituaries/Images/Augusta%20C471440620881.jpg?uuid=9vl99kwwEeWAwhBup _uA1A
For decades, stories circulated among veterans and historians about an African nurse who tended to wounded and dying American soldiers in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the bloody campaign through the Ardennes in the winter of 1944-1945 that became the last major German offensive of World War II.
“Band of Brothers,” the 2001 TV war drama based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s best-selling book, referenced a nurse from Congo. But no such nurse was identified and celebrated until nearly seven decades after the war — when the Belgian king granted a knighthood, and the U.S. government awarded a high civilian honor (http://www.army.mil/mobile/article/?p=71150), to Augusta Chiwy.
Ms. Chiwy (pronounced she-wee), 94, died Aug. 23 at a nursing home in Brussels. The cause was a heart attack, said her son, Alain Cornet. She was credited with ministering to hundreds of men during the Battle of the Bulge, so named for the brief and ultimately unsuccessful German penetration of Allied lines.
As a volunteer nurse — amid unremitting shelling and in sub-zero temperatures, with inadequate food and little rest — Ms. Chiwy was said to have helped rescue the injured, dressing their wounds, bathing them and boiling snow for water. On Christmas Eve, she nearly lost her life when a bomb hit her makeshift aid station in the besieged town of Bastogne.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/08/26/Obituaries/Images/Augusta%20C471440620881.jpg?uuid=9vl99kwwEeWAwhBup _uA1A
For decades, stories circulated among veterans and historians about an African nurse who tended to wounded and dying American soldiers in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the bloody campaign through the Ardennes in the winter of 1944-1945 that became the last major German offensive of World War II.
“Band of Brothers,” the 2001 TV war drama based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s best-selling book, referenced a nurse from Congo. But no such nurse was identified and celebrated until nearly seven decades after the war — when the Belgian king granted a knighthood, and the U.S. government awarded a high civilian honor (http://www.army.mil/mobile/article/?p=71150), to Augusta Chiwy.
Ms. Chiwy (pronounced she-wee), 94, died Aug. 23 at a nursing home in Brussels. The cause was a heart attack, said her son, Alain Cornet. She was credited with ministering to hundreds of men during the Battle of the Bulge, so named for the brief and ultimately unsuccessful German penetration of Allied lines.
As a volunteer nurse — amid unremitting shelling and in sub-zero temperatures, with inadequate food and little rest — Ms. Chiwy was said to have helped rescue the injured, dressing their wounds, bathing them and boiling snow for water. On Christmas Eve, she nearly lost her life when a bomb hit her makeshift aid station in the besieged town of Bastogne.