Ukrainian American flight nurse honored at D-Day ceremony

BEDFORD, Va. - Ukrainian-American World War II Flight Nurse Evelyn Kowalchuk was honored here at the D-Day Memorial dedication on June 6 attended by President George W. Bush.

A native of Newark, N.J., U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Kowalchuk served 37 years ago in the 818th Medical Evac Transport Squadron, logging numerous missions tending the wounded as they were evacuated to English hospitals from the beaches at Normandy.

As a young nurse, she joined the Army in 1942. After completing military training at Bowman Field in Kentucky, she was transferred to an air base and hospital in England.

Even the most extensive training could not have prepared the soldiers and nurses for the horrors they would encounter. "They were scared." Mrs. Kowalchuk said of the wounded soldiers they picked up. "They didn't cry ... they were just so glad to be on an American plane. There was this one time I let a young soldier, who was bleeding to death, just rest his head in my lap while I sang him an old Ukrainian lullaby. He just needed to fel that closeness," she said.

After the war, Mrs. Kowalchuk married and raised two sons, while serving as a public school and health nurse in New Jersey. She now resides near Bedford, selected for the site of the memorial because it suffered the largest number of deaths per capita in the D-Day invasion.

Now retired at age 81, she volunteers at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation and at a local hospital, knits sweaters for a relief agency and tutors elementary school children in reading.

Mrs. Kowalchuk is looking forward to hosting a reunion of 11 surviving flight nurses from her squadron in July.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 22, 2001, No. 29, Vol. LXIX

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