U.S. Honors Belgian Nurse for Valor in World War II

A Belgian nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II was given an American award for valor on Monday.

The nurse, Augusta Chiwy, who is 93, received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service medal from the American ambassador, Howard Gutman, in a ceremony at the military museum in Brussels.

“She helped, she helped and she helped,” Mr. Gutman said. He explained the long delay — 67 years — in presenting the award to Ms. Chiwy, saying it had been assumed that she was killed when a bomb destroyed the hospital where she worked.

More than 80,000 American soldiers were killed, captured or wounded during the battle.

Ms. Chiwy had volunteered to work in an aid station in Bastogne, where thousands of wounded and dying American soldiers were being treated by a single doctor in December 1944 and January 1945.

Ms. Chiwy combed the battlefields, often coming under enemy fire, to find the wounded in the deep snow, Mr. Gutman said.

“What I did was very normal,” Ms. Chiwy said at the ceremony. “I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”

The Nazis had hoped that their surprise attack in the Ardennes, in southern Belgium, would help them reach the port of Antwerp and cut off the advancing Allied armies. Bastogne, a market town and critical road junction, was quickly besieged.

The Americans at Bastogne, led by paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, found themselves surrounded. During the siege, Bastogne was shelled heavily and reduced to ruins. But the American troops there resisted fiercely, and the town did not fall.

Another Belgian nurse — a friend of Ms. Chiwy’s, Renee Lemaire — was killed, along with about 30 patients, when a bomb penetrated a basement where she was tending to the wounded.

Col. Joseph McGee, who commands a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division based at Fort Campbell, Ky., said that to the wounded soldiers, Ms. Chiwy was a “goddess.”

“Men lived and families were reunited due to your efforts,” he told her at the ceremony. Read the full story here.

Source: New York Time