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Contact Info
Home Town Shepardstown
Last Address Washington, D.C.
Date of Passing May 12, 1971
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
As superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps from 1943 to 1947, and the first woman to be commissioned in the regular army of the United States, Florence Aby Blanchfield was among the most respected nurse leaders of the twentieth century. Devoting a significant part of her illustrious career to serving her country, Blanchfield's military experiences included meritorious service in World War I and World War II.
Born April 1, 1882, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Blanchfield was one of eight children of Joseph and Mary Anderson Blanchfield. Her goal to become a nurse was achieved in 1906, when she graduated from Southside Hospital Training School for Nurses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Blanchfield's early employment history includes positions in private duty nursing, hospital nursing in Pennsylvania and the Panama Canal Zone, and industrial nursing for the United States Steel Corporation. In 1917, she joined the Army Nurse Corps, left for France with Base Hospital #27, and served as acting chief nurse of Camp Hospital #15.
Following separation from the military in 1919, Blanchfield returned to Pennsylvania for a brief period and re-entered the Army Nurse Corps in 1920. Over the next fifteen years, Blanchfield completed assignments across the United States, and in the Philippines and China. In 1935, she joined the United States Surgeon General's staff in Washington, DC, and was named superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps in 1943. World War II generated a critical need for nurses and under the leadership of Blanchfield, the corps was expanded from approximately 1,000 to a force of 57,000 nurses. In recognition of her devotion and contributions, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1945.
Although Blanchfield successively held the ranks of First Lieutenant (1920), Captain (1939), and Lieutenant Colonel (1942), those ranks were relative in nature. Nurses were denied the rights, privileges, and pay enjoyed by male commissioned officers. Appalled by this inequity, Blanchfield struggled to achieve full military rank for nurses. In 1947, the Army-Navy Nurse Act authorized placement of the Army Nurse Corps in the regular army with equal pay and privileges for commissioned nurses. On July 18, 1947, Blanchfield was commissioned in the regular army by General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Following her retirement in 1947, Blanchfield remained active as a consultant and author. She promoted the establishment of specialized courses of study and influenced the development of a program in nursing administration for army nurses. In 1951, she received the Florence Nightingale Medal of the International Red Cross for her service to humanity. Blanchfield died on May 12, 1971, and was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. As a final tribute to this extraordinary nurse, the Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield Army Community Hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was named in her honor and dedicated in September, 1982.
Florence Aby Blanchfield was one of eight children born in Shepardstown, West Virginia to stonemason Joseph Plunkett Blanchfield and Mary Louvenia Anderson Blanchfield, a nurse, in 1882. She graduated from Southside Hospital Training School for nurses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1906. Following graduation, Blanchfield migrated to Baltimore where she worked as a private duty nurse and pursued further education in operating room supervision and technique at Dr. Howard Kelly's Sanitarium and Johns Hopkins University. Blanchfield subsequently returned to Pittsburgh as operating room supervisor at Southside Hospital and Montifiore Hospital. In 1909, she became superintendent and director of a training school at Suburban General Hospital in Bellevue, Pennsylvania.
Blanchfield got her first taste of foreign duty in 1913 when she worked for six months as an operating room nurse and a anesthetist at the Ancon Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. Upon her return to the states, she worked at the United States Steel Corporation in Bessemer, Pennsylvania and attended the Martin Business college. In 1916, Blanchfield again changed positions and again became superintendent of nurses at Suburban Hospital in Bellevue.
With the outbreak of war in 1917, Blanchfield joined the University of Pittsburgh Medical School unit, Base Hospital #27, and served as acting chief nurse from August 1917 to January 1919 in Angers and in Camp Coetquidan, France. Following the war Blanchfield left the Army Nurse Corps and settled briefly back at Suburban General Hospital.
Undoubtedly, she enjoyed her military experience as she returned to the Army Nurse Corps eight months later in 1920. Thereafter followed a number of brief assignments at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, California; Camp Custer, Michigan; Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana; Sternberg General Hospital and Camp John Hay in the Philippine Department; Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington D.C.; Fort McPherson, Georgia; Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; Fort William McKinley in the Philippines; and Tientsin, China.
In 1935, Blanchfield returned to Washington D.C. to the office of the superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps where she would remain for the balance of her career. When initially in the superintendent's office, she assumed responsibilities for personnel matters in the corps. Subsequently she became assistant superintendent in 1939 and acting superintendent in 1942 when Flikke was absent from duty due to ill health.
On 1 June 1943, Blanchfield took the oath of office as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps. She served in this capacity until her retirement in September 1947.
Florence Blanchfield was an excellent choice to be the seventh superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps. The "Little Colonel," so called because she was only 5' 1" tall, was thoroughly conversant with the workings of the superintendent's office and familiar with all the key people in the Surgeon General's Office. Her assistants confided that Blanchfield could "keep her mind on eight things at once,. . . she has the memory of a super Quiz Kid for facts and figures."
Another account credited Blanchfield with being a "good scrapper." It related that Blanchfield "can fight with bulldog tenacity to obtain or revise regulations that will benefit her Corps." Her extensive and varied military background contributed to her very successful leadership as well. Also referred to as the "soldiers' nurse" because of her passion for the welfare of the ordinary soldier, Blanchfield was one of the finest leaders the Army Nurse Corps has known.
She died on 12 May 1971 and was interred in the nurses' section of Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Among a myriad of other honors, Blanchfield received the prestigious Florence Nightingale Medal of the International Red Cross in 1951. In 1982, the hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky was given the name of the Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield Army Community Hospital. This has been the only instance where a Medical Department Activity (MEDDAC) has been named after an Army nurse.
Florence Nightingale medal
World War I
From Month/Year
April / 1917
To Month/Year
November / 1918
Description The United States of America declared war on the German Empire on April 6, 1917. The U.S. was an independent power and did not officially join the Allies. It closely cooperated with them militarily but acted alone in diplomacy. The U.S. made its major contributions in terms of supplies, raw material and money, starting in 1917. American soldiers under General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), arrived in large numbers on the Western Front in the summer of 1918. They played a major role until victory was achieved on November 11, 1918. Before entering the war, the U.S had remained neutral, though it had been an important supplier to Great Britain and the other Allied powers. During the war, the U.S mobilized over 4 million military personnel and suffered 110,000 deaths, including 43,000 due to the influenza pandemic. The war saw a dramatic expansion of the United States government in an effort to harness the war effort and a significant increase in the size of the U.S. military. After a slow start in mobilising the economy and labour force, by spring 1918 the nation was poised to play a role in the conflict. Under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson, the war represented the climax of the Progressive Era as it sought to bring reform and democracy to the world,[citation needed] although there was substantial public opposition to United States entry into the war.
Although the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, it did not initially declare war on the other Central Powers, a state of affairs that Woodrow Wilson described as an "embarrassing obstacle" in his State of the Union speech.[26] Congress declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire on December 17, 1917, but never made declarations of war against the other Central Powers, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire or the various Co-belligerents allied with the central powers, thus the United States remained uninvolved in the military campaigns in central, eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
The United States as late as 1917 maintained only a small army, smaller than thirteen of the nations and empires already active in the war. After the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1917, it drafted 2.8 million men into military service. By the summer of 1918 about a million U.S. soldiers had arrived in France, about half of whom eventually saw front-line service; by the Armistice of November 11 approximately 10,000 fresh soldiers were arriving in France daily. In 1917 Congress gave U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans when they were drafted to participate in World War I, as part of the Jones Act. In the end Germany miscalculated the United States' influence on the outcome of the conflict, believing it would be many more months before U.S. troops would arrive and overestimating the effectiveness of U-boats in slowing the American buildup.
The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland and submarines to help guard convoys. Several regiments of Marines were also dispatched to France. The British and French wanted U.S. units used to reinforce their troops already on the battle lines and not to waste scarce shipping on bringing over supplies. The U.S. rejected the first proposition and accepted the second. General John J. Pershing, American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) commander, refused to break up U.S. units to serve as mere reinforcements for British Empire and French units. As an exception, he did allow African-American combat regiments to fight in French divisions. The Harlem Hellfighters fought as part of the French 16th Division, earning a unit Croix de Guerre for their actions at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Séchault.
Impact of US forces on the war
On the battlefields of France in spring 1918, the war-weary Allied armies enthusiastically welcomed the fresh American troops. They arrived at the rate of 10,000 a day, at a time when the Germans were unable to replace their losses. After British Empire, French and Portuguese forces had defeated and turned back the powerful final German offensive (Spring Offensive of March to July, 1918), the Americans played a role in the Allied final offensive (Hundred Days Offensive of August to November). However, many American commanders used the same flawed tactics which the British, French, Germans and others had abandoned early in the war, and so many American offensives were not particularly effective. Pershing continued to commit troops to these full- frontal attacks, resulting in high casualties against experienced veteran German and Austrian-Hungarian units. Nevertheless, the infusion of new and fresh U.S. troops greatly strengthened the Allies' strategic position and boosted morale. The Allies achieved victory over Germany on November 11, 1918 after German morale had collapsed both at home and on the battlefield.
