WWII Reunion: Red Cross in Wartime

As part of the National World War II Reunion held on Memorial Day weekend on the National Mall in Washington, the Library of Congress Veterans History Project sponsored several programs presenting compelling accounts of WWII history.

Speaker Biography: Riki (Ruth) Belew's first assignments with the American Red Cross were in clubs for the troops in North Africa: near Algiers, in Oran, and at the Casablanca Officers' Club. Crossing the Mediterranean in the nose of a B-17 bomber during a terrific storm, she began service at a series of Red Cross clubs in Italy. She remembers being stationed near a Staging Area on the outskirts of Naples and dancing with hundreds of men a night.

Speaker Biography: Helen Thompson Colony served as American Red Cross Recreation Club Director in India and Burma. She ran clubs primarily for Army Air Force pilots, many of whom were flying the dangerous route "over the Hump" (the Himalayas) into and out of China. "We lost thousands of men flying the Hump," she has said, "and Red Cross worked very hard to help keep their spirits up." Later she became one of the Red Cross workers escorting war brides to this country and training them on route about American customs and procedures.

Speaker Biography: Mary P. Sullivan O'Driscoll served as one of the famous American Red Cross Clubmobilers during World War II. Her first assignment was distributing coffee and doughnuts on the docks of Greenock, Scotland. Later, she joined a team running a Clubmobile that served the 8th Army Air Force in East Anglia, England. She has written about the coldest winter on record in England, December 1944, when "we were working 17 hours a day serving coffee and doughnuts to the ground crews of six airfields plus the pilots and their crews who could not fly missions to Germany due to the bad weather." After D-Day, her unit moved to France to provide Clubmobile services to the troops on the European continent.

For more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feat...