RIP Ruth, You'll be missed

I am writing about Ruth. Ruth was a member of my American Legion Post. She was wheelchair bound and she was a hero to many. She was an Army Nurse during WW2. here is her story.

Ruth Motter Puryear volunteered for military service in 1943.
Three days into the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, Army Lt. Ruth Motter Puryear went running down the ramp of a transport pointed at Omaha Beach and sank into water over her head.
Two soldiers came to the aid of the petite Army nurse. With one on either side holding her out of the water, she made it safely to shore, where she scooped up a handful of sand that became a cherished memento, said her daughter, Robin G. Puryear of Atlanta.
Mrs. Puryear, who also would serve in the Battle of the Bulge and be among the first Army nurses to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, died Friday in a veterans hospice facility.
She will be honored Sunday at a funeral at 2 p.m. at the Huguenot Chapel of Woody Funeral Homes, 1020 Huguenot Road. Burial will be at Dale Memorial Park.
The 96-year-old native of Hanover, Pa., graduated from the Garfield Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Washington after an aunt advised her to learn to do something in which she could take care of herself.
On the return leg of a cross-country trip, she saw Robert Mason Puryear plowing behind a mule near his Boydton home. They married in 1937 and moved to Richmond.
They volunteered on the same day for military service in 1943. He left for the Pacific with the Navy. She sailed for England with the Army Nurse Corps.
After coming ashore in France on June 9, 1944, Mrs. Puryear served with the 107th Evacuation Hospital, which followed the Allied advance toward Germany.
By Dec. 10, her unit had set up their tents at Clervaux, Belgium. On the night of Dec. 16, she and a tentmate were readying themselves for the camp's holiday party. As they chatted across the blanket-walls dividing the unit's toilet facilities on the edge of the camp, Mrs. Puryear suddenly shushed her companion. She could hear voices -- voices speaking in German, her daughter said.
"We've got to get out of here!" she told her tentmate. They ran back into camp to find that the party had evolved into an emergency evacuation. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
"We left everything," Mrs. Puryear recalled in a 1994 Richmond Times-Dispatch interview. "All our clothes, our supplies. We just had on what we had on and left. We left everything except our patients."
In subzero weather, they loaded 400 wounded onto trucks -- 12 to 14 to a truck -- and to the tops of Jeeps, her daughter said.
At one point, they set up their hospital in a French ch?teau.
"They set up the morgue on the lawn. They put planks on the steps and drove their Jeeps into the grand hall. The ballroom was the operating room," her daughter said. "My mother said she was hanging IVs and plasma bottles on the horns of the animal heads mounted on the wall."
During another stop, a 7-year-old boy wounded by shrapnel in his shoulder was brought to their unit. The surgeon said they'd have to amputate his arm, "but my mother got in the surgeon's face with her bandage scissors and said, 'Don't you dare cut off his arm. He'll need it to rebuild his country,'" her daughter said. The grown-up boy and Mrs. Puryear had a joyful reunion in 1986.
Horror was in store on April 22, 1945, as she was among the first Army nurses to enter Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
"I shall always remember the heaps of dead bodies lying near the crematorium, the bodies were skin and bones, many had black and blue marks and broken bones where they had been beaten," she wrote in a unit history. She was mortified to see children's bodies stacked like firewood, her daughter said.
"Even more horrible . . . was the sight of the 'living skeletons' that we saw in rat-infested buildings. They [the prisoners] were all too weak to walk . . . some were children 5 to 15 years old," she wrote.
After the war, she worked as a civilian nurse until she retired in 1973. Spurred by the memory of unwanted children stacked high at Buchenwald, she and her husband decided to adopt "a child that nobody wanted" -- her daughter, Robin.
Her husband died in 1967.
For about 10 years, beginning in the 1980s, Mrs. Puryear accepted invitations to speak about her experiences. As time went on, her focus shifted from talks about life as a World War II nurse to bearing testimony to the reality of the Holocaust.


I didn't realize how much of a hero she was until about a year ago. I knew she was an Army Nurse but never knew of her exploits until she told me to sit and she told me about the concentration camp.

Ruthie.... you will be missed. I am sorry I missed your funeral.