"Millie" Milsted, Lt. Commander Navy Nurse Corp - Served with Nimtiz in the Pacific
By Deborah Burkett
Once I heard of Millie Milsted, I knew I wanted to include her in my book East Texas Piney Woods Spunky Women, 1830s-1950s, Spirited Individuals Who Made a Difference.
The details of her story were first brought to my attention when Kathy Abbott presented a program to our Texas Federated Wednesday Study Club in Jacksonville. I was enthralled. Imagine a tall, lean East Texas woman nicknamed, "Legs", with the good looks of a 1940's movie star, rising to the top echelons of the Navy Nurse Corp during World War II and with a connection to Jacksonville, as well.
Lucille Helen "Millie" Milsted was born January 5, 1910, in Newton County, in a small community called Deweyville which had been established as an East Texas sawmill site in 1898. Given this woman's distinguished career in the Navy, it's ironic that Millie's hometown was named after an admiral in the United States Navy, George Dewey, who was victorious in the Battle of Manila Bay the same year the town was founded.
Even as a very young girl, Millie was strong; she had to be to survive an abusive father and the hard times of the Great Depression. Due to unstable conditions at home, Millie and her five sisters lived with various relatives throughout East Texas. Millie's aunt and uncle, Clyde and Martha Abbott, opened their home in Jacksonville and Millie became like a sister to their son, Jack. Because Mr. Abbott worked for the railroad during the Depression, he was financially able to put Millie through nursing school.
At eighteen years of age, Millie enrolled at the Beaumont General Hospital School of Nursing (aka St. Theresa's Hospital School of Nursing) and studied there from Sept. 1928 to Sept. 1931, becoming a registered nurse. Family records confirm that starting in December 1932, Millie worked at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas as an operating room technician and nurse. During World War II, Millie proudly served in uniform as part of the Navy Nurse Corps.
Interesting to note the United States Navy Nurse Corps was officially established by Congress in 1908; however, women had been working unofficially as nurses aboard Navy ships and in Navy hospitals for nearly 100 years. At the end of World War I when Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, over 1,550 nurses had served in naval hospitals and other facilities at home and abroad, including wartime hospitals in the United Kingdom and France. But recognition as commissioned officers did not come until World War II. Preparation for that conflict saw the Nurse Corps grow, numbering nearly eight hundred members serving on active duty by November, 1941, plus over nine hundred inactive reserves.
Historically, women lent their expertise whenever and wherever needed during a conflict. In the early days of our country, they were loading muskets and tending to the wounded and World War II was no different: women wanted to do their part. Many women, such as Millie, graduated nursing school and were not only eager to participate but qualified to do so.
And under whose command would Millie eventually serve? None other than Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was one of the most influential military leaders and had initially voiced opposition to and questioned the viability of women in uniform. General Dwight David Eisenhower was also an early skeptic. But their resistance disappeared once women had a chance to 'show what they could do'. As the war progressed, Eisenhower and Nimitz became staunch supporters of women in uniform.
Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. Ten days later Chester Nimitz was selected as Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet and was promoted to Admiral. He took command December 31st in a ceremony on the top deck of the submarine USS Grayling. The change of command ceremony would normally have taken place aboard a battleship, but every battleship in Pearl Harbor had been either sunk or damaged during the attack. Assuming command in the Pacific at the most critical period of the war, Admiral Nimitz successfully stopped the Japanese advance despite the shortage of ships, planes and supplies. Women, such as Millie, did their part in the Pacific as well.
In Millie's 41 years of military service she amassed quite a resume, a legacy worthy of remembering. She joined the U. S. Navy in 1941 as an operating nurse and served 20 years in active duty. She then served 21 years in the USN Reserve. She received 9 medals in all. In 1935, she was on the nursing staff at the Nix Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. Established in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression, Nix was the first of its kind in the country--a complex containing a hospital, doctors' offices, even a parking garage. Today the medical facility has expanded and continues to provide excellent care.
As stated earlier, during WW II, Millie served in the Pacific. In 1952, she was transferred to a military hospital in Yokosuka, Japan, and worked in a critical care unit caring for injured NATO Troops for a little over two years. She was commissioned a Lieutenant Commander in the Nurse Corps on April 1, 1953. She retired from the Medical Department of the Navy (Navy Nurse Corps) November 30, 1961, in Great Lakes, Illinois. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, Millie was Nursing Service Team Leader 1962-1963, and then Head Nurse of the Surgical Nursing Service March 1963 through May 10, 1966.
Kathy Abbott shared, "Once Millie started crying when she talked about the wounded on a hospital ship…'we had beds stacked 5 high aboard the ship…nursing was different then...I climbed the ladder to tend to the boys in my starched whites, my cap, shoes and hose...'"
Millie never married and when Katy Abbott asked her if there was ever anyone special, Millie replied, "There was once, but during the War he flew off one day and never returned..."
Lieutenant Commander Lucille Helen "Millie" Milsted lived to be 94 years old, passed away in 2004. She had resided in Hemet, California, until the age of 91 when she moved to Jacksonville, Texas, to be close to family. Millie's request was to be cremated and her family thought it appropriate her ashes be scattered at sea--a fitting burial for this dedicated Navy Nurse.
Lucille Helen "Millie" Milsted
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After WWII in 1947, Millie (R) in her office at the U.S. Naval Hospital Chelsea, Mass.
Millie, near retirement