The school at Louisville's Bowman Field invented the flight nurse; the first wings ever awarded were borrowed from a general's chest
Bowman Field has been flying since 1919 and is one of the oldest continuously operating airfields in North America. Through the 1930s it was Louisville's airline gateway; Eastern, TWA, and the original Continental all served the field, and the 1929 Art Deco terminal still stands, home today to Bistro Le Relais. But the field's largest mark on aviation came in wartime.
In the fall of 1942 the Army Air Forces opened a rush training program at Bowman for flight surgeons, medical technicians, and flight nurses; the need was so urgent that the first team of nurses shipped out for North Africa on Christmas Day 1942, before the course was finished. When the first class formally graduated on February 18, 1943, no flight nurse insignia existed yet, so the Air Forces' air surgeon, General David Grant, took the gold flight surgeon's wings off his own uniform and pinned them on the honor graduate, Lieutenant Geraldine Dishroon. The graduates wore surgeon's wings with a maroon N soldered on until official flight nurse wings were approved that December. The program was named the School of Air Evacuation in June 1943 and ran at Bowman until October 1944, when it moved to Randolph Field, Texas.
What came out of it changed combat medicine. About 500 Army flight nurses served across 31 medical air evacuation squadrons in every theater of the war. Their transports carried cargo on the way in, so the planes flew without Red Cross markings, legitimate targets; seventeen flight nurses died. In the air the nurse was the medical authority on board, making every call without a physician. By the end of the war the squadrons had evacuated more than 1.1 million patients. Five miles from downtown Louisville, that history is just outside the FBO door.