For Ruby Bradley, unlike many other GIs, military doctors, and nurses, the end of World War II was not the end of her service to the United States. Rather, Bradley chose to stay enlisted in the Army Nurses Corps until her retirement from the military at the rank of Colonel in March 1963. Throughout the rest of her service, Bradley was stationed throughout the United States and around the world, serving with distinction and becoming the most decorated woman in American military history.
This is part III in a Series. Read Part I and Part II here.
After her period of recovery and leave from imprisonment, Bradley served as the Assistant Chief Nurse at the Station Hospital at Fort Myer (now called Joint Base-Myer-Henderson Hall) in Arlington, Virginia. Fort Myer served an important role during WWII, both as a fort responsible for defending Washington, D.C., and as a major center for processing soldiers entering and leaving the Army.[1]
On August 12, 1945, three days before the surrender of Japan, Bradley was transferred to serve as the Charge Nurse/Assistant Chief Nurse at McGuire General Hospital (now the Richmond VA Medical Center) in Richmond. This hospital, which was built in late 1943 and opened in 1944, served as a center for wounded overseas soldiers before their transfer to Army Hospitals closer to their home. Some of its first patients were casualties of the Invasion of Normandy, arriving at McGuire in late July 1944. Working from August 1945 to February 1946, Bradley was transferred from McGuire about a month before the hospital joined the Veterans Administration and began treating veterans that otherwise would have been admitted into a private hospital.[2]
Postcard of McGuire General Hospital, 1947 (Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University Scholars Compass)
Through September 1946, Bradley served as the Principal Chief Nurse at the Station Hospital at Fort Eustis (now called Joint Base Langley-Eustis) in Newport News, Virginia. A very important Cold War era installation, Fort Eustis was made the headquarters for the Army Transportation Corps and School and a port was built throughout 1946 to reflect this major change in the Fort’s role. Bradley likely would have cared for any sick or injured construction workers building this port, which distinguished Fort Eustis from any other domestic Army installation.[3]
Bradley left Fort Eustis to take advantage of an Army training program, studying Nursing Administration at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Her education was briefly interrupted by a year-long tenure as a Nurse Supervisor at Letterman General Hospital’s Medical and Surgical Wards in San Francisco. Soon after she arrived at Letterman, Bradley was promoted to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Regular Army. During WWII, Letterman served as one of the Army’s largest hospitals, receiving more than 73,000 patients in 1945 alone. While the number of patients had likely decreased by the time Bradley served there, she probably cared for Army men who had been injured or sick while serving in the Pacific or East Asia.
Original headquarters of Letterman General Hospital (Courtesy of the National Park Service)
Bradley returned to her studies in September 1948 and earned a B.S. in Nursing Education in January 1949.[4] After earning her degree, Bradley was posted as the Head Nurse of the Officers’ Eye, Ear, Nose, Throat, and Neurosurgery Wards of Walter Reed General Hospital. She held this position from February to September 1949 in what was likely a routine and less eventful peacetime position caring for ill soldiers.[5] From September 1949 to July 1950, Bradley served as the Chief Nurse in the Army’s Base Hospital at Banana River Naval Station’s Joint Long-Range Proving Ground in Cocoa Beach, Florida. This base oversaw missile tests in the early Cold War era, vital for American national security during this period. While stationed in Florida, Bradley received a promotion to the rank of Major.[6]
The June 25, 1950, invasion of Korea meant that the United States was once again at war. For nurses like Bradley, this meant an overseas deployment again. Serving as the Chief Nurse of the 171st Evacuation Hospital, Bradley spent a month at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and a month at Camp Hakata in Kyushu, Japan, before arriving in Korea on September 21, 1950. The 171st Evacuation Hospital served as a larger facility behind the front lines. The hospital cared for wounded soldiers after a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) unit was able to stabilize them enough to be moved to a hospital further away from combat. As the lines shifted throughout 1950, the 171st was moved from Daegu, in the southeast of modern-day South Korea, to Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, to Yeongdeungpo, a city between Inchon and Seoul.[7]
Bradley evacuated Pyongyang in November 1950 due to the rapid Chinese offensive through the Korean Peninsula. During this evacuation, she once again demonstrated her valor and dedication to her patients. Despite the risk to her own life, Bradley refused to leave until every patient and staff member had been safely evacuated. As about one hundred thousand Chinese soldiers surrounded the evacuation site, Bradley managed to board the plane just as the ambulance she had arrived in was destroyed by an enemy shell.[8]
The 121st Evacuation Hospital, Yeongdeungpo, Korea, October 3, 1950. While Bradley was attached to the 171st Evacuation Hospital, her unit likely looked similar during her deployment to Korea (courtesy of the AMEDD Center of History and Heritage)
Bradley was briefly sent back to Japan in mid-December 1950. Until mid-January 1951, she was stationed at Camp Kokura in Kyushu. As the lines in Korea remained fairly stagnant around the 38th Parallel through 1951, Bradley and the 171st Evacuation Hospital stayed in Japan. From January to June 1951, Bradley served on temporary duty as the Assistant Chief Nurse at the 361st Station Hospital in Tokyo, before returning to the 171st, now stationed in Sasebo, Japan.[9]
Given the rapidity of the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) offensive in late 1950 and the high rate of soldiers wounded in action during this period, treating soldiers in Japan made sense. The period Bradley spent in Japan saw a higher rate of soldiers wounded in action. Compared to the total Korean War average casualty rate of about 2,100 men wounded per month, December-July 1951 saw an average of about 2,720 men wounded per month. With the possibility of the lines collapsing quickly as they did earlier in the war, it would have been logical to evacuate GIs who were able to be moved to Japan where they could be treated safely.[10]
In July 1951, Bradley was moved to the Eighth U.S. Army as an Assistant Nursing Consultant before her promotion to the Chief Nurse of the Eight Army’s Medical Section. In this position, she supervised about five hundred rmy nurses throughout Korea. During this period, in July 1952, she was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Bradley continued to serve with the Eighth Army until the end of June 1953, only a couple of weeks before the armistice that ended hostilities in Korea was enacted in early July. She was given a full-dress honor guard ceremony when she left Korea, becoming the first woman to receive this salute.[11]
Upon her return to the United States, Bradley was stationed as the Chief of the Nursing Division for the Third U.S. Army at Fort McPherson, Georgia. She held this position from August 1953 until June 1958. During this period, the Third Army’s role was a training mission, designed to prepare soldiers for the potential outbreak of any Cold War-era hostilities. While it is unclear whether Bradley participated in or oversaw any medical training exercises or simply cared for soldiers who might have gotten sick while stationed at Fort McPherson, she nonetheless held an important role in keeping American soldiers in the Third Army prepared for potential deployment. In March 1958, near the end of her time in Georgia, Bradley was promoted to colonel, becoming one of the first Army nurses to hold a permanent rank.[12]
In July 1958, Bradley was deployed overseas for the final time, this time to the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe in Heidelberg, Germany, where she once again served as the chief nurse. Bradley likely arrived during a period of high activity on the base. Two weeks before her deployment to Heidelberg, on July 15, President Dwight Eisenhower deployed U.S. Army Europe forces to Lebanon in response to instability within the Middle Eastern country. While Bradley remained in Germany through her deployment, her first few weeks on the job might have been consumed with overseeing the nurses in the Middle East as American troops completed their approximately four-month mission around Beirut.[13]
In addition to Lebanon, the other major hotspot for conflict was Berlin. In November 1958, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev insisted that the U.S. leave the western half of the divided city, something that was interpreted as an ultimatum by Washington. As tensions rose between the two great powers throughout 1959, 1960, and 1961, Bradley and the rest of the U.S. Army Europe forces in Heidelberg would surely have been on high alert and prepared to act if necessary. Bradley left Germany in late April 1961, just over a month before eruption of the Berlin Crisis, the most acute escalation of American-Soviet tensions over Berlin since the 1948 Berlin Airlift. In October 1961, a couple of months after the August 13th erection of the Berlin Wall, American and Soviet tanks faced each other on either side of the diplomatic checkpoint between East and West Germany. After one of the tensest moments during the Cold War, the tanks were ultimately withdrawn after diplomacy conducted by President John F. Kennedy.[14]
Ruby G. Bradley, Colonel, U.S. Army Nurse Corps Director, Nursing activities, Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas (Wikimedia Commons).
By the time that the Berlin Wall had gone up and tanks had moved towards the checkpoint, however, Bradley was far away from Europe. When she left Heidelberg, she became the Director of Nursing Activities at Brooke Army Medical Center in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In 1946, Fort Sam Houston became the center for Army Medicine, with the relocation of the Medical Field Service School, U.S. Army Surgical Research Unit, and other Medical Department organizations. Bradley was likely responsible for training the next generation of Army nurses, a fitting way to end her long and storied career.[15]
Ruby Bradley retired from the military on March 31, 1963. In her 29 years of service, she earned 34 medals and citations, becoming one of the most decorated women in U.S. Army history. Among her many honors, she received two Legion of Merits, two Bronze Stars, two Army Commendation Medals, and a Florence Nightingale Medal – the highest international honor of the Red Cross.[16]
While her service to the country was complete, Bradley’s service to the people of West Virginia continued for nearly twenty years. She returned to Roane County, WV where she worked as the supervisor for a private-duty nursing service until her final retirement in 1980. In 2002, she passed away at the age of 94 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.[17]
While she traveled around the world during her military service, Ruby Bradley never forgot her origins in West Virginia. Outside of the Roane County Courthouse in Spencer stands a monument to Bradley, and a bridge over Spring Creek in the town is named in her honor. In 2023, the nearly century-old Colonel Ruby Bradley Bridge was replaced with a new bridge, ensuring that, for those living in her hometown, her legacy will endure for years.[18]
Monument to Ruby Bradley, Spencer, WV (Courtesy of the Historical Marker Database)
For more information about the military history of the Korean War to understand the context of Ruby Bradley’s experiences and service, please visit the excellent article about the war on the U.S. Army Center of Military History website: https://history.army.mil/Research/Reference-Topics/Army-Campaigns/Brief-Summaries/Korean-War/