CPT Agnes J. Mangerich Oral History

title:

CPT Agnes J. Mangerich Oral History

creator:

Mangerich, Agnes (Jensen) (1914 December 3 - 2010 May 3)

subject:

Army Nurse Corps

description:

Agnes J. Mangerich (Jensen) was born on December 3, 1914 in Superior, Wisconsin. She was working at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan when, around ten months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, she joined the Army Nurse Corps. The Army was already ramping up for the possibility of joining the war, so even before the attack they were putting out calls for new nurses. She was serving at Fort Benning, Georgia when the attack happened, so she chose to stay in the service rather than get out after a year. She had just missed the window to serve in the Philippines due to sickness, so she went to the European theater instead. They landed in Bizerte, Tunisia and stayed there for around a month before moving north to Catania, Italy after the invasion of Italy began. Her squadron of air nurses was sent to the east coast of Italy, but there was very bad weather while they were flying and it through the instruments off. They had been in the air longer than the flight should have been, but the pilots didn’t say anything to the nurses so they didn’t know what was going on. They crash-landed in Albania, which was occupied by Germany at the time, and were found by resistance forces who got them away from the plane. They walked for two and a half days to get to a town called Berat, where people thought they were an entire invasion force. As they continued moving, they would have to hide alongside the road whenever they heard German tanks or trucks nearby. Because of this, they began taking foot trails that were higher up in the mountains to go from town to town. On the first of December, they met up with an officer with the British forces and his mission group told the US Army the names and serial numbers of all the nurses and soldiers who had crashed. They moved between nearby towns so they weren’t settled in one place too long but could also get to the airfield within a few hours. After they heard the Germans and Albanian partisans were no longer fighting nearby, they continued moving south. When they made it to the coast, they met up with a British launch boat on it and were taken to their original duty station in Italy. They spent two months in Albania by the time they made it to the coast in January 1944. When she left the service in 1946 Mangerich had reached the rank of captain, and for her service she was awarded an American Defense Service Medal, American Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal. A transcript of the 1995 audio interview is available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Unknown

date:

2013-02-06

type:

Moving Image

format:

DVD-R

identifier:

1223; 2013.1223

source:

SAFN | CLIR - Recordings at Risk

language:

English

relation:

057677

coverage:

World War II (1939-1945) | 1941-46

rights:

Unrestricted