“Photos from Hollandia N.G. 1944”: World War II Combat Nurse Beulah Johns’s ‘Everyday’ Scrapbook Testimony of War and Recovery

“Well, Diary, Restricted no more . . . . Hope you pass the censor to get to Alma for confidential peeping.” ~ Beulah Johns, last lines of her 1942-43 diary

In July 1942, 36-year-old nurse Beulah Johns left her rural Western Pennsylvania hospital to join the ranks of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which had enlisted only 1000 nurses prior to 1941 and exploded to 59,000 nurses—almost entirely women crossing national and workplace boundaries—during the war. While in training, Johns wrote a detailed diary of her service, and upon being sent to what she called the “Asiatic Blue Ribbon Campaign” at Hollandia, New Guinea, in 1944, she compiled a rich scrapbook of 85 photographs, 7 sketches, and numerous notes and captions—devising an alternative mixed visual and verbal life-writing document to tell her own story of trauma, healing, testimony, travel, and adventure. Represented among the images that make up this haunting scrapbook are a mix of soldiers suffering acute combat injuries, amputations, and chronic tropical fever conditions. The outdoor medical tent compound is visibly rustic, and the scrapbook is organized largely by ward numbers, indicating a nurse’s working perspective in creating the book. Mixed throughout are images of Johns and her fellow nurses caring for monkeys and stray cats, plus several joyful photos of nurses playing with local children who visited the compound. Johns’s notations and careful photographic selections tell volumes about nurses’ and patients’ experiences of war in the Pacific theater, and they simultaneously bear witness to the steely perspective that she shared with 59,000 other combat nurses, lending significant insight into the working lives of a new class of enlisted women that was created through the experience of World War II. My archival discovery of this unknown diary occurred as part of a small grant I received to study and develop an online archive repository for women’s “everyday” diary drawn from little-studied archives, and in this essay, I read this never before studied volume of alternative life-writing through a feminist New Historicist lens in order to illustrate the crossing of intersecting borders of nation, gender, genre, work-life, testimony, and archival process.