Richmond Register, Ky.
Published: September 12, 2012
RICHMOND, Ky. — “You ever had a general kiss you on your forehead?”
This is the question 90-year-old Corporal Nell Martin Campbell has been asking her nurses since two Army generals and other “top brass” visited her at Baptist Health in Richmond (formerly Pattie A. Clay) on Aug. 25.
Campbell is a WWII-era female Marine from Waco, who was recently hospitalized after a fall that left her with eight broken ribs, bruised organs and a punctured lung. Her grandson, Lt. Col. James R. Martin, was among the visitors, who were in town for a commander’s conference conducted at the Blue Grass Army Depot.
During the visit, Maj. Gen. Robert Stall bent over Campbell’s bed and kissed her forehead, a moment “she will never forget and will relive forever,” said Dinah Martin, Campbell’s daughter-in-law.
“The realization that two generals and others had altered their plans and made it a priority to visit her was like medicine,” Dinah said. “It was a real morale-booster.”
Campbell was one of the 18,000 women Marines who were enlisted during WWII between 1943 and 1946, James Martin said.
That number was reduced to just a few thousand near the end of the war, until 1948 when Congress voted to give women “full-fledged status in the military,” he said.
Before 1948, the enlistment of women in the military was more of a “war-time, stop-gap measure” and they were not intended to serve for long terms, James said.
After training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Campbell was sent to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, where women Marines operated the military bases while every able-bodied Marine man was engaged in combat.
“Without women stepping up to the plate in WWII, there was no way those stations could have stayed open,” James said.
During the WWII era, women soldiers had catchy nicknames like “WACS” or “WAVES,” which are both acronyms for women in the Army and Navy respectively.
But, when asked what women Marines would be nicknamed, Gen. Thomas Holcomb said in the March 27, 1944, issue of Life magazine: “They are Marines. They don’t have a nickname and they don’t need one. They got their basic training in a Marine atmosphere at a Marine post. They inherit the traditions of Marines. They are Marines.”
So when James Martin joined the military at age 17, he asked his grandmother if she had been called something like a WAC or a WAVE. She seemed to take offense to his question, he recalled.
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