The reality, however painful, was that segregation in the military was considered acceptable behavior throughout the United States. A 1942 survey of white soldiers from the North and South revealed that the majority of them shared similar attitudes about segregation in the army regardless of region. White enlisted men from the North showed a strong prejudice against sharing recreational facilities with Negro troops; white soldiers from border states showed an even stronger dislike; and whites from the South showed the strongest prejudice of all. There were a few marked differences depending on education level—the more educated people were, the more liberal they tended to be in their attitude about segregation. But overall, very few objected to the segregated status of blacks.11

Elinor and Gwyneth bided their time, uninterested and listless. Fortunately, there were horses at Camp Florence, and the two women would ride trails together at sunset. But they were mostly confined to the hospital, trying to keep themselves busy. The POWs were generally in good physical health, but an appendectomy or other surgery was necessary from time to time. And some prisoners came down with common colds and viruses that required checkups and bedside nursing. At times a new crop of prisoners from Europe or North Africa arrived with malaria and would have to be sequestered. There was a 7:30 a.m. “sick call” every day, which entailed a march to the hospital for anyone seeking medical treatment, and there were routine physical examinations performed every two months, primarily to check for scabies, hernias, and venereal disease.12

Still, the thirty to forty black nurses who were stationed at Florence were largely underutilized. They also had no social outlets to cope with the loneliness of military life. If trying to find establishments that served them was challenging, dating was almost impossible. There were no black soldiers at Camp Florence. “There wasn’t a Negro man within a hundred miles of that camp. Everyone was white, except for us,” said Ora Hicks, a black nurse stationed there.13

The nurses’ interactions with the opposite sex came in the form of friendly conversations with a few of the doctors from the North. But even those innocent encounters could backfire, as Dorothy Jenkins learned.

Jenkins was around the same age as Elinor when she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she attended nursing school at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college in Texas, because there weren’t any nursing schools in Oklahoma that admitted black women at the time.

After she completed her nursing degree, Jenkins joined the Red Cross at the encouragement of her nursing instructors. Like Elinor, she became energized by the idea of serving her country in World War II. Army nurses were also paid much better than civilian nurses, a fact that black women could not overlook considering how much less they were paid than their white counterparts.