Non-fiction review: And If I Perish

I picked this book up at the library because my brother was reading it (we both sometimes share Mom's account for ebooks, so we see what everyone's reading--sometimes it's fun to guess who's reading what) and it looked interesting. I wasn't wrong.

 

Title: And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II

Author: Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee

Publication Info: e-book 2007 Anchor (Original hardback 2003 by Knopf, 514 pages).

Source: Library
 



Publisher’s Blurb (from Amazon): 
In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as U.S. Army nurses. When the war began, some of them had so little idea of what to expect that they packed party dresses; but the reality of service quickly caught up with them, whether they waded through the water in the historic landings on North African and Normandy beaches, or worked around the clock in hospital tents on the Italian front as bombs fell all around them.

For more than half a century these women’s experiences remained untold, almost without reference in books, historical societies, or military archives. After years of reasearch and hundreds of hours of interviews, Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have created a dramatic narrative that at last brings to light the critical role that women played throughout the war. From the North African and Italian Campaigns to the Liberation of France and the Conquest of Germany, U.S. Army nurses rose to the demands of war on the frontlines with grit, humor, and great heroism. A long overdue work of history, And If I Perish is also a powerful tribute to these women and their inspiring legacy.



My Review: 
As long-time readers of this blog probably can tell, I'm a sucker for both women's history and books on the two World Wars. As a book that touches on both women and WWII, this had a good chance of catching my interest, which it did.

The book follows, in a general way, a collection of nurses who served in the European Theater, many of them for the entire time the U.S. was in that war. The first thing I learned was that when the army went ashore in North Africa, the nurses landed with the advance medical teams, only hours after the invasion. That didn't happen again, though the male hospital staff--the doctors, technicians, and orderlies--continued to follow hot on the heels of invasion forces. Apparently it wasn't good optics, as we say these days, to have women landing under fire.

There are a lot of people in this book, a lot of nurses we follow rather piecemeal through the war, and I will confess to an utter inability to keep them all straight. I still got the point about what they did and the conditions in which they did it. North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy--the nurses were there for all of them. That they were also in the Pacific is clear, but isn't developed.

That was the thing that confused me--the book opens with a prologue about a nurse in the Philippines, one who went before the war and stayed to be made prisoner and survive Bataan. This story isn't taken up again--it seems to be left there as a marker, as her younger sister went off to the ETO (and I believe a brother joined the army; they all, amazingly, made it back). I had to wonder if there is or was a plan for another book about the nurses in the Pacific, since apart from the early story of the one nurse, that theater of war isn't discussed.

Reading this is painful at times, and not just when we see the medical teams under fire, or going into the newly-liberated concentration camps. It's also painful to read that these women were given "relative rank," which appears to have been sort of a pretend status--they got called "Lieutenant" but got half the salary of a man, and no right to be saluted by those of lower rank. After the war, they were ignored and forgotten (except, I'm thinking, by some of the men whose lives they saved, and even those don't seem to have ever said much). It was even more painful to read of the treatment of Black soldiers and nurses, treated as though contact with them would result in some sort of contamination. It's a disgusting reminder that our nation has a long history of treating non-whites very poorly indeed.



My Recommendation: 
A good addition to the literature of the war, if at times I did feel it jumped too much from one storyline to another. Certainly these women deserve to be remembered. Might be best read in paper, as this might allow easier tracking of the different women. It would definitely help with the maps, which IMO are never legible on an ereader.



FTC Disclosure: I checked And If I Perish out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

 

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 ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2026 

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