The arguments and warnings about race mixing had no impact on Frederick whatsoever. He and Elinor continued their after-hours dates. But their luck ran out when one of the guards caught Frederick sneaking around one night. Whatever made-up excuse he tried to give didn’t work, and he was severely beaten by the officers, who also shaved his head as an additional act of humiliation.1 When prisoners were caught sneaking around where they were not supposed to be their punishment could mean solitary confinement and a diet of water and bread that lasted for days to physically weaken their bodies and fill their heads with paranoid thoughts.2 Frederick may have endured this along with his beating.

Elinor never got caught, and if the American guards suspected her, they didn’t bring her up on charges. She, unlike Frederick, never mentioned receiving a reprimand about her forbidden relationship, nor did Gwyneth ever recall Elinor getting into trouble. In all likelihood Frederick lied to protect her by giving some alternative reason as to why he was roaming around.

Not surprisingly, Frederick’s beating wasn’t enough to deter him, and he never stopped his romance with Elinor. Their decision to stay together represented a deep sense of courage, passion, and defiance.

Although Elinor had found a lover to soften the edges of her segregated wartime service, black nurses were still very much isolated and bitter about their experience at the POW camp. The U.S. government shamelessly asked more nurses to volunteer for the war effort even while the Army Nurse Corps continued to keep its enlistment numbers of black RNs very low. It was a clear message that the military would rather remain short-staffed than incorporate black nurses into the medical units that treated all Allied soldiers, white and black, regardless of race.

Toward the last year of the war, after D-Day and the bloody Battle of the Bulge, the number of wounded American men reached dangerous levels. With lives at stake, the relegation of black nurses to POW camps while they were needed elsewhere finally began to get the attention of more than just Negro newspapers and Mabel Staupers.

Albert Deutsch, a reporter for P.M., a New York–based daily paper, wrote a damning piece on December 26, 1944, in which he slammed the military for its treatment of eager black nurses. “Nine thousand bewildered and bitter graduate nurses watch with wonder the Army’s frantic call for nurses which excludes brown-skinned Angels of Mercy,” wrote Deutsch.3