by Nicole A. Duarte

The city woman, who wrote a book about her Army nurse mother’s Second World War experiences, spoke at the April 29 contributors meeting of The Somerville News held at the backroom of Davis Square’s Diesel Café.

Digging around in an attic one day, Pamela McLaughlin said she discovered a long-forgotten part of her mother’s life when she found a box of letters her mother, then 2nd Lt. Celia Hammond, sent home from the front.

After much careful research, McLaughlin said she reproduced her mother’s letters in “Celia, Army Nurse and Mother Remembered,” a volume melding her family’s past with American history.

Celia Hammond was working as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital on Dec. 7, 1941, and less than a year later, joined the Army Nurse Corps on Nov. 6, 1942, when her daughter was 20 months old, she said. The Army was the only military branch that accepted women with children.

McLaughlin moved to Berlin, N.H., where her mother’s sister, Catherine, cared for her, she said.

Her first conscious memory of her mother is when her aunt took her to the train station to welcome her mother home for the war, she said.

Her mother’s dispatches were in the form of what was called V-mail, she said. V-mail letters were written on special forms which were then photographed, miniaturized, then shipped in bulk back to the United States to be reproduced on cards for the recipients.

Although V-mail writers were warned about sending sensitive information, the dispatches were heavily censored, she said. Even some of her mother’s V-mail letters had passages crossed out with black marker.

The letters document her mother’s tour of duty through North Africa, then on to Italy, she said.

During her years of service, Hammond’s letters recount tidbits about life abroad, the sweltering heat, the pestering insects and
her repeated bouts of hospitalization for hepatitis, gallstones and other various illnesses. Sometimes, the notes were accompanied with her mother’s doodles.

On Oct. 14, 1943, her mother wrote of the first death in the 53rd Station Hospital in Bizerte, Tunisia where she was stationed, she said.  “We have handled over 3,000 patients, which  is an excellent record,” her mother wrote.

Other letters recall little adventures like dining with French friends in North Africa, and are often punctuated with humor and obvious love for those back in America, McLaughlin said.

On July 13, 1943, her mother wrote: “I heard from Catherine and Pammy says, ‘Momma is on the other side of the big puddle,’ and I had to laugh.”

We saw a movie the other night, ‘Philadelphia Story,’ she wrote. “It’s as old as the hills but we don’t mind.”

“I saw the letters as a piece of American history and I didn’t want it to be lost,” said McLaughlin.

On July 12, 1973 a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis Missouri destroyed between 16 and 18 million military records.

After Hammond returned home, she rarely discussed the war with her daughter, McLaughlin said. But, her mother did start to open up towards the end of her life.

McLaughlin said she did not have a clear idea of her mother’s service until she discovered a stack of letters penned by her then 32-year old mother.

"When I started to do the book, my daughter said to me, ‘Come on Mom, who’s going to read Nana’s letters?’” she said. “I gave her the first copy of the book, just before it came out, and she wouldn’t give it back.”

Hammond was sent home because of the compounded effect of her illnesses and a serious shrapnel wound, McLaughlin said.

Whenever she cut her hair in a short style, her daughter could see the 3-inch jagged scar on the back of her neck, the result of shrapnel from a German bomb that tore through her tent, she said.

McLaughlin said her book carefully records the two inextricable halves of her mother. “The thing I remember about my mother was that she was a stay-at-home mom. But she was a nurse until the end. Whenever anyone was sick in the family, she was there praying and helping out.”

A retired elder care professional, she said she decided to turn her mother’s letters into a book to share an important but little-recorded piece of war history. “Nurses never ever got the recognition they deserved.”

McLaughlin said she dedicated her book in loving remembrance to the service men and women who fought during World War II, especially her mother, who passed away in 1989.

“Our World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 2,000 per
day, and we didn’t dedicate a memorial to them until this past May,” she said.

McLaughlin self-published “Celia, Army Nurse and Mother Remembered: A Nurse for the Century,” and it is available in local stores and at the Web site: 1stbooks.com.