This (June 1963, Our Army At War 131) is one of my favorite Sgt. Rock covers by Joe Kubert. Rock's karmic bullet-dodging ability is very much in evidence as usual, and those companions near him seem to imbibe the same characteristic. I like the way the nurse is driving, ducking, and tending to her patient simultaneously. Women are such multi-taskers! As is fairly typical with these Robert Kanigher/Joe Kubert stories, the first half of the tale sets the reader up for the main idea. The story begins with Rock wounded and being brought to the field hospital. His men then recount the circumstances that led to Rock's condition.
Rock needs a blood transfusion (one of Kanigher's favorite strategies?) and he's AB-, a rare blood type. Nobody amongst the Doc and Easy have a compatible blood type, but a wounded army nurse lying on a stretcher next to Rock does. She insists the Doc use her blood to help Rock, and the Sergeant pulls through. Rock gets separated from her before he can summon sufficient strength to speak, to thank her, and to find out her name. Once fully fit, Rock embarks upon a quest to find his nurse savior, but it isn't proving easy even for Easy.
Then Fate intervenes again. There's an enemy breakthrough and Easy are threatened by a group of Nazi tanks. To give the rest of the men time to escape, Rock and his bazooka man, Zack, slow down the tanks, but eventually are caught in the blast of a shell that explodes close by, and Zack is hurt. Rock won't leave his man to die, and hauls him off in an attempt to reach safety. It's then that he comes across the same nurse, this time in a stalled jeep carrying wounded men, and she can't get it re-started. Rock uses the bazooka to try to keep the tanks at bay. However, it's the U.S. Air Force that arrives in the nick of time to scatter the Nazis, but not before the nurse is hit and wounded. Rock gets the jeep going and races frantically to the medical station, where he's able to repay the favor granted him previously, by donating his blood to save the nurse.
With so many of the great comic book writers and artists being vets, it maybe isn't surprising that nurses appear frequently, certainly in war comics and in romance comics with war connections. And there are true stories of brave nurses close to or on the battlefield. The image of nurses provided by this story is again that of the self-sacrificing angel, refusing to seek her own safety if it meant abandoning her patients.

It took me some time to get this book. These Simon and Kirby post code issues are fairly tough to find. The cover is directly related to the nurse romance story that I am interested in here, set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. The art is by Argentinian artist Jo Albistur (signed).

In "Army Nurse", the nurses all love Doctor Roy, but the Doc only has eyes for one of them, and that's Joyce. He's been preparing to pop the question, and does so after a hard day's work. Joyce is over the moon to be engaged to her dream boat.
For some reason Roy keeps quiet about why he seems to always be giving Ruth Duryea assignments to work with him. Sure, he gives some plausible explanations - she's new and needs the training - but it doesn't quite all add up. Suddenly Joyce is snapped out of her jealous fog by the news that Roy's aircraft has gone down, and he's hurt. Joyce immediately volunteers to be the nurse to travel to the crash site. On the way the flak from the North Koreans almost makes her wish she'd stayed back at the camp, but she gets there to find Ruth tending to her intended. This is a bit much for her to take, and she removes her engagement ring from her finger and slips it into Roy's pocket, her dream perhaps over. Setting aside her jealousy, Joyce does the needful. Back at the M.A.S.H. Roy is operated on. However, afterward Ruth flies in and is assigned to the care of the wounded. It is then that Joyce discovers something that changes the whole picture.
Ruth has no romantic inclinations towards Roy. She's already married to the injured sergeant, secretly, because it's against regulations. Doctor Roy Nelson knew and has been covering for them. Joyce realizes what a chump she's been and fumbles in Roy's pocket to get her ring back. He's already ahead of her though, having found the ring there himself. He sees that his position, surrounded by a flock of marriageable, lovely nurses makes life difficult for Joyce, and so he prescribes the only reasonable cure - a wedding.
I like this artwork by Jo Albistur. I think I have another example of his work somewhere. He's mentioned on the Simon & Kirby Museum blog. It reminds me somewhat of Al Williamson's work. The image of nurses presented by this piece include the usual - aspiring for romantic involvement with a doctor, bitchy rivalry, they're all pretty in their nicely starched white uniforms and caps. These are nurses at war so there's bravery and willingness for self-sacrifice. Nice switch to the blue uniform for going out into the battlefield. Ruth Duryea is a redhead for the cover but blond in the story. Panel 7 on page 5 looks like it was intentionally drawn to match the cover, and is a little out of Albistur's natural style as a result (the cover looks Kirby or Simon/Kirby to me).

With a cover date of March 1953, Quality Comics True War Romances 6 features a nurse cover story "My Forgotten Mistake."18-year old office worker Lucy is in love with Jack Foster, who seems not to notice her at all. Lucy surmises it must be her girlish appearance. After all, everyone at the office calls her 'Angelface' because of it. So when the office workers decide to throw a party in honor of Jack leaving to join the forces, Lucy decides its time to demonstrate that she's really a woman. She 'tarts' herself up with a revealing dress and is instantly noticed by every male as she walks in. Instead of dancing with Jack, however, she uses the attention given her by Carl when his animal instincts are activated upon the sight of Lucy's shapely form, to make Jack jealous. Due to her inexperience, however, the effect on Jack is not quite what she intended. Jack is quite disgusted by her brazen display, which shatters the image Jack had of Lucy. He had previously been attracted to her, but restrained himself because he knew he would be going into the forces, and didn't want to start something he couldn't follow through with if he was killed in action. Lucy sees the truth too late to prevent Jack leaving with a very revised view of Lucy as a person, one that is no longer desirable. So this is Lucy's mistake, the kind a young person can make and which can potentially ruin what might otherwise have been a wonderful life. In an attempt to move on with her life, Lucy goes back to school and qualifies as a nurse two years later.
Lucy gets a job in an army hospital, where a wounded soldier takes a fancy to her, but Lucy still has no interest in any man except for Jack Foster, who by some cosmic coincidence, turns up as a patient at the very same hospital. However, he no longer recognizes or remembers Lucy, or anything from his past. He's suffering from amnesia as a result of a wound. When the doctor finds out Lucy knows Jack, he assigns her the task of helping him regain his memory, so she takes him to his former workplace. But nothing stirs, except for Lucy's anxiety. Jack finds Lucy attractive, but the irony is, if she succeeds in helping him remember his past, he'll recall his impression of her as a shameless flirt.
Lucy has matured in the two years since she last knew Jack, and also possesses a dedication to her work as a nurse. Her sense of obligation to the well-being of her patient over-rides her desire for Jack not to remember her in a negative light, and so she arranges a re-enactment of that very same office party held before Jack left to go to war. The scheme works, and Lucy exits rather than go through that rejection by Jack all over again. Back at the hospital she thinks she's alone when expressing her anguish out loud, but Jack followed her there after the office gang told him how she sacrificed her chance with him so that he would be well again. Jack realizes what a prize chump he's been and declares his love for Lucy. Thank goodness for that! She's a good person and finally got the break she deserved. She's a good nurse too, and she might not have become one had it not been for that 'mistake' two years earlier. And then she wouldn't have been at the hospital to help Jack regain his memory! Fate seems to have planned it that way!
The image of the nurse here is something good and pure, a step up above the ordinary. Lucy is a version of the self-sacrificing angel, who puts her patient's well-being before her own. She made an innocent mistake as a girl, but did something good to make amends, even though she was not guilty of real wrongdoing. As a nurse, her life was free of reproachful actions - those belonged to her pre-nurse past. Overall a positive image of nurses and of the reformatory and uplifting power of nursing on the individual who becomes a nurse. The story also suggests success in romance associated with becoming a nurse, with the nurse likely to be the object of the romantic attentions of male patients, particularly those in the military. This is the between-the-lines stuff that's not mentioned in the nursing recruitment ads that often accompany nurse romance stories in comics. That suggests to me that the nursing profession was not only paying for their ads to be put in romance comics, but part of the deal was that there was a nice nurse romance story in the book as well, one that said things that the nursing ad couldn't really say directly. I mean, how would it look if the nurse ad said, "Become a nurse and you're sure to get a handsome hunk ask you to marry him!" The romance story can say that in so many words and pictures without stating it directly.

While nurses can pop up in all kinds of comics besides those in the romance genre, they are relatively frequent characters in war comics. This isn't surprising - the nursing profession as we know it began with Florence Nightingale tending soldiers in the Crimean War, and Clara Barton and other Civil War nurses in the USA. Those "ministering angels" gave nursing one of its most powerful images, but the proximity to battle also led to them being seen as heroic. World War I involved massive recruitment campaigns for nurses that utilized these two images of nurses. The earliest (that I know of) nurse lead character in comics was the very adventurous Myra North, Special Nurse - a syndicated newspaper comic strip that ran from 1936 through 1941. Nurse Myra also appeared in what are now very rare and expensive comic strip compilation comic books published by Dell in the late 1930s. While always available when needed, Myra's nursing skills took a back seat to her penchant for international intrigue and detective work, which often placed her in a war zone.

War comics tend to stick to the need for nurses to tend the wounded, which may land them in a backup role assisting the hero, hence the same combo of ministering angel and heroic nurse. This seems to be the case with "Battle Nurse" in OOAW 78 (DC, January 1959), although the story is essentially a romance in a war setting. The cover art is credited to Irv Novick in the Grand Comics Database. The juxtaposition of the hero, the nurse, and the wounded soldier is the military equivalent of the doctor - nurse - patient relationship that has its origins as an analogy of the respectable Victorian middle class family. Beautiful cover - very dramatic. The story is written by Bob Kanigher, who also occasionally wrote love stories, with art by the duo of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. A fine example of their work.
Stan and Jennie are lovers, but it's WWII and Stan is a G.I. leaving for the front line. Jennie insists she'll be seeing him, but To Stan that means she's always there in his thoughts, even when the going gets really rough. Eventually he's in London on leave, standing on a street corner remarkably like the one near where my grandmother grew up! It's there that he thinks he sees Jenny, but it's someone else (Wonder Woman in disguise I think!).