2LT US Army, Irene Ruth Ernst Jennings

Born: April 9, 1923
Died: March 13, 2005

Irene Ruth Ernst (Jennings) joined the US Army Corps of Nurses straight out of Nursing School in 1943. She served in India where things were not always easy for the nurses. Nurses had been stationed in India and Burma to support US and Chinese troops in the push for Southern China. The climate turned out to be a major difficulty. Even though the US attempted to deploy DDT, for every soldier injured, 120 were laid low by disease, especially malaria.¹ The rate of those who fell prey to malaria in 1943 alone was 84 percent.² There was also a mite-born form of typhus that required extensive nursing care, but even with the best care, the mortality rate was over 30 percent.³ This situation could not have given the US Army Nursing Corps much in the way of good morale.

Nor were the Chinese patients at all cooperative. Due to their culture, the Chinese did not accept that any woman, no matter how well-trained, could have authority over a man. This led to a number of problems, foremost among them contagious patients refusing the nurses’ commands to isolate themselves and infecting others due to their wanderings through wards and even into nearby towns.⁴ While some of the problems were certainly serious, some were more of an irritation to the nurses responsible for cleanliness. Supplying your own food was either standard practice in Chinese hospitals, or the meals offered in US Hospitals were not what the Chinese patients were used to eating, and the result was highly unsanitary. “A nurse, assigned to the 20^th General Hospital remembered that her Chinese patients insisted on supplying their own food while in the hospital. The result was ‘orange peels, egg shells, chicken feathers, and vegetable peelings piled high beside each bed.’ Nurses could not keep their seriously sick patients in bed. ‘They wandered off to the bazaar in their pajamas to haggle over fresh vegetables, and live ducks and chickens, which they brought back to the wards and kept under their beds.’”⁵ It was not easy serving under these conditions, but 2^nd Lieutenant Ernst, like all the other nurses, gave her best. She left the Nursing Corps in March 1944.

Irene Ruth Ernst was born in Waukon, Iowa on April 9, 1923, to Karl Julius and Ella Alvina Mae Ernst.⁶ The family moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin sometime before 1931. In that year, she won an educational contest with the recitation of “Who’s Afraid.”⁷ Ernst Jennings attended the Mission House Academy for the Reformed Church of the United States where she was seen at parties and acted in plays including Tom Sawyer and Spring Fever.^{8, 9, 10} After graduation, Ernst Jennings attended nursing school at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. ¹¹ Straight out of nursing school Ernst Jennings served in India.

By August 1946, Ernst Jennings married John Eugene Jennings and lived in the suburbs of Chicago. By 1950, Ernst Jennings had two sons, with two daughters coming in the near future, and was listed as a stay-at-home mom.^12,13 Soon, however, Ernst Jennings was working as a nurse again. She worked for Elmhurst Memorial Hospital and Immaculate Conception High School for over 30 years combined.¹⁴ When she and her husband retired, they moved to New Mexico. Ernst Jennings lost her husband, John, not long after the move. She lost her firstborn son, Michael around that time as well.¹⁵

Ernst Jennings was active in groups for her church all of her life and was still participating in the JOY Group at St. John Lutheran Church in Wheaton, Illinois until her death on March 15, 2005.¹⁶

Images & Documents

The Army Nursing Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service

U.S. Army Center of Military History: “The Army Nursing Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service.” Visited: 21 June 2023. https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.htm

Notes:

1, 2, 3, 4, & 5. U.S. Army Center of Military History: “The Army Nursing Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service.” (p. 29)

6. State Historical Society of Iowa; Des Moines, Iowa; Title: Iowa Birth Records, 1888-1904.

7. Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) [database on-line]. April 15, 1931. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. (p. 2)

8. Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) [database on-line]. May 7, 1937. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. (p. 7)

9. Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) [database on-line]. April 20, 1940. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. (p. 3)

10. Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) [database on-line]. July 16, 1938. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. (p. 6)

11. National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Cadet Nurse Corps Files, compiled 1943 – 1948, documenting the period 1942 – 1948; Box #: 191

12. United States of America, Bureau of the Census; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790-2007; Record Group Number: 29; Residence Date: 1950; Home in 1950: Chicago, Cook, Illinois; Roll: 2953; Sheet Number: 12; Enumeration District: 103-3056.

13, 14, 15, & 16. “Irene Ruth Jennings” Hultgren Funeral Home and Cremation Center. Obituaries.

Featured Image:

2^nd Lieutenant Irene Ernst: https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/90330659/person/130017349773/media/25633fb1-ac5c-4d8b-862c-382dbd58d782?_phsrc=GiD9&_phstart=successSource

​Compiled by A. D. McLean, MA, MLIS. Central New Mexico Community College, retired 2022.

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DVA, Veterans Legacy Memorial