"Natalie become one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in both wars." Natalie Vivian Scott |
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Natalie’s anxieties over Adolph Hitler, the war clouds over Europe, began dominating her correspondence by the mid-1930s. By 1940, well before Pearl Harbor, she sought re-entry into the Red Cross for overseas work in war hospitals. Her age, over 50, made her ineligible (35 being the maximum). Yet she organized DeGaulle Clubs, led refugee fundraising, and joined the Mexican medical corps, all for the war effort. Finally, after U.S. entry into the war, the Red Cross put her to work again. Natalie became one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in both wars, her overseas service continuing for three more years after the war. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, without Natalie’s knowledge, began publishing her letters as a war diary, Natalie not informed by her friend Martha Robinson who fed these letters to the paper. New York author Genevieve Parkhurst made a small book of Natalie’s North African war letters in 1944, but the publishing was cancelled when the war ended though Natalie’s translation of Paul Renaud’s eyewitness account of D-Day, Saine-Mére Eglise: First American Bridge Head in France, was published in late 1945. Moving
forward with the troops as the war progressed, Natalie served in North
Africa, Italy, France, then her mobile evacuation hospital plunged into
Germany with the invading forces of the U.S. 7th Army,
tending to the wounded soldiers, refugees and concentration camp
survivors. She witnessed the collapse of Germany, then boarded a
troopship for the Pacific, her expectation to accompany U.S. forces in
the invasion of Japan. Though
the war ended with the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Natalie remained in devastated Asia, serving until 1948 in the
Philippines and Japan, two years in Korea as upheaval and war threatened
the troubled country. Newcomb
'09 Perhaps no one on earth better understood the tragedy and heroism of this historic period, more immersed themselves within its challenges, or more effectively identified, embraced and took responsibility for the great causes at hand. Natalie has been characterized in a sense as a sort of Forest Gump, who always seemed to be present where intriguing events occurred, a witness upon the major world events, calamities, personalities of her era. But unlike Gump, the articulate and activist Natalie Scott made these historic moments her passion, recorded what transpired in remarkable high quality journalism, adopted them as her personal causes, one small woman with great initiative and inner joy changing the madness of the world around her.
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Sunday, August 07, 2005