Content area
Full Text
Though their contributions to the Navy cannot be measured in ships sunk or enemies engaged, Higbee and her nurses were as essential to victory in war as any military element.
On 13 November 1944, for the first time in history, the U.S. Navy named a warship after a woman: Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee, the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps (NNC) and first woman to receive the Navy Cross. The destroyer, the USS Higbee (DD-806), mirrored her namesake's resilient, unwavering, and energetic nature, earning an unprecedented eight bronze battle stars in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.1
The real-life Higbee was a pioneering and devoted nurse who joined the Navy in 1908, when women generally were unwelcome, underpaid, and denied official rank. Over the next 14 years, she nevertheless rose to become the superintendent of a fledgling nurse corps and directed its evolution from infancy to permanence. She also recruited, trained, and managed thousands of nurses during two of the 20th century's worst humanitarian crises: World War I and the influenza pandemic of 1918. Higbee institutionalized the role of women nurses in military medicine; established the NNC as a professional, battle-hardened, and accepted part of the naval service; and advanced the status of women in the military. Together, her accomplishments altered the course of U.S. military history and contributed to the nation's readiness and warfighting capabilities.
One of the Sacred Twenty
Lenah Sutcliffe was born in 1874 in Chatham, New Brunswick, Canada, and immigrated to the United States after finishing formal schooling. In 1899, she completed nursing training at the New York Postgraduate Hospital and began working as a surgical nurse.2 She later married retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel John Henley Higbee and could have lived a comfortable and conventional life as a nurse and wife had two events not intervened: Her beloved husband passed away on 18 May 1908, and almost simultaneously, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a naval appropriations bill authorizing the establishment of a nurse corps.3 Higbee's new status as a widow allowed her to apply to the NNC, which required applicants to be 22 to 44 years old and unmarried.4
Why Higbee chose to join the Navy is unclear, but it could not have been because it was easy. She submitted a...