With the Battle of Okinawa raging around her in 1945, a tiny woman named Omi Jensen flew to the fiercely contested Japanese island to care for wounded U.S. servicemen.
Jensen, of Wheat Ridge, was one of only 122 women during World War II who earned Flight Nurse Wings. She was part of a pioneering group of Navy nurses who flew into Pacific battle zones on evacuation aircraft and cared for badly wounded Marines as they were flown to safety thousands of miles away.
Jensen’s nurses were officially designated VRE-1 but were nicknamed “Hell’s Angels” by the servicemen she and her colleagues aided.
On each evacuation trip, one nurse and one corpsman treated up to 35 wounded soldiers.
On Thursday, Jensen, now 87, recalled how the medical planes would fly eight hours from Guam, spend 20 minutes on a war-scarred airstrip on Okinawa, then roar back into the air for the return trip.
Jensen remembers, her eyes twinkling, how during a three-month period, the “Hell’s Angels” evacuated 9,600 wounded from Okinawa, where the number of casualties was more than twice that of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal combined.
“They had lots of head injuries, burns and amputations,” said Jensen, who was 24 at the time.
But never were there complaints. “They were interested in me getting them home.”
To ease the trip for the wounded, there was food, morphine and sleeping pills.
Jensen’s most vivid recollection is kneeling on the floor of the plane helping the soldiers in the lowest of the four berths and then pulling herself up to help the men in the top berths.
“I talked to them, wanted to know where they were from, if they were married,” she said. “I would go around to the amputees because I wanted to offer to make phone calls to their families . . . because (the loss of a limb) would be a sudden shock to their loved ones.”
More help than the medicine, she said, was the food. The sheer logistics of battle — where men had little time to do anything but fight — left the wounded famished.
“They never talked about the fighting. They never talked about their injuries. Just about food and going home,” she said.
Jensen said the nurses, most of whom have since died, were a close group and were proud of what they did. In Jensen’s house are dozens of war photos, including a series showing the “Hell’s Angels” learning judo.
On Tuesday, the Navy Nurse Corps will be 100 years old, and the Navy is recognizing Jensen and her colleagues for their pioneering efforts.
