No Time for Fear summons the voices of more than 100 women who served as nurses overseas during World War II, letting them tell their story as no one else can. Fessler has meticulously compiled and transcribed more than 200 interviews with American military nurses of the Army, Army Air Force, and Navy who were present in all theaters of WWII. Their stories bring to life horrific tales of illness and hardship, blinding blizzards, and near starvation---all faced with courage, tenacity, and even good humor. This unique oral-history collection makes available to readers an important counterpoint to the seemingly endless discussions of strategy, planning, and troop movement that often characterize discussions of the Second World War.
Diane Burke Fessler wrote her first book, No Time For Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses of World War II, to honor the nurses of the 1940s. Her aunt was an army nurse who wrote letters every week from her stations overseas and led Fessler to want to write about her. After attending a reunion of the 166th General Hospital in 1989 with "Auntie Raine" (Lorraine Krause Taylor), she interviewed and wrote the oral histories of more than 200 nurses, whose stories had not been told. Covering all theaters of war, the nurses told of their overseas assignments, including the first flight nurses, women at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines, and African-American nurses who served in a segregrated U.S. Army.
Diane Burke Fessler grew up in Chicago, graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Journalism, and lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is an editor for Primer Publishers. She contributed a chapter about women in Arizona during the 1940s to a book titled Arizona Goes To War: The Home Front and Front Lines During World War II, published by University of Arizona Press.
