The Baylor Line Foundation’s motto is, “There’s a story for every Baylor grad” and I believe it. But some stories don’t have a happy ending.
Some stories don’t have an ending at all.
This is one of those stories.
I stumbled across a one-paragraph notice mentioning Helen A. McCullough in the July 21, 1944, edition of The Lariat while researching another story:
“First Lieutenant Helen A. McCullough, daughter of Mrs. Inez McCullough of Wichita, Kansas, and graduate of the Baylor University School of Nursing, has been awarded the purple heart. During the bombing of her hospital on March 29, then stationed on Anzio Beachhead, a bomb fragment struck Lt. McCullough in the chest. Lt. McCullough was attached to the Baylor University Hospital Unit (No. 56 Evacuation Hospital Unit) and saw action in both North Africa and Italy.”
I dropped the other story and went in search of McCullough. A short article on Helen by Yaima Villarreal for a site that chronicles the history of the historic 56th Evacuation Hospital notes that she was born on July 28, 1913, in Pratt, Kansas. She graduated from high school in 1930, then worked for a local retail store. Villarreal writes that in 1938, McCullough enrolled in the nursing program at the Baylor University College of Medicine in Dallas.
She first appears in the 1940 Baylor Round Up in the pages devoted to the Baylor School of Nursing. The small, postage-sized photographs reveal a dark-haired young woman with piercing dark eyes, the barest hint of a smile. Her credits in the Round Up are short but telling: “Pratt, Kansas, Devotional Chairman, Sunday School, 1940; Social Vice-President, BSU 1941.” She’s also featured in a light-hearted photograph with several of the student nurses posing by a ladder. Villarreal says that McCullough graduated from Baylor in 1941, and that her first job was as “Assistant Head Nurse to the Night Supervisor at Baylor University Hospital.”
With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the onset of World War II, McCullough promptly enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and was awarded the rank of Second Lieutenant. From there, she was assigned to the famed 56th Evacuation Hospital, Baylor University Medical Center-affiliated army medical unit that included many Baylor graduates, including doctors, nurses, and support staff. The 56th followed the U.S. Fifth Army through the bloody North African campaigns before being assigned to the hastily organized, ill-advised landings on Anzio Beach in central Italy, beginning on January 22, 1944.
Historians have long studied the series of missteps taken by allied generals at Anzio, where stout German defenses trapped an entire American army on a barren, virtually defenseless beach for months. Winston Churchill later said of the campaign, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale,” as exposed American and British troops were pounded by German artillery (including the massive German 280mm railway gun known as “Anzio Annie”) and endured constant strafing and bombing runs by the Luftwaffe. The battle for Anzio beach was fought along a lengthy front line, but no rear. Situated just six miles from the front, the men and women of the 56th Evacuation Hospital suffered with the soldiers.
The Texas Collection has detailed files on the heroic history of the 56th, including accounts detailing the day-to-day operations for the duration of the hellish four-month campaign. Eventually, American casualties at Anzio reached nearly 24,000 (with another 9,000 British casualties), and most were funneled through the 56th and other evacuation hospitals, where dedicated men and women worked feverishly in the most primitive and dangerous of conditions.
Villarreal writes that the 56th main tent hospital regularly came under fire and suffered a direct hit by a German bomb on March 29, 1944. Several medical personnel were killed or injured, including McCullough, who suffered a serious shrapnel wound in the right lung. She was treated by the surviving doctors and eventually evacuated to another hospital away from the front.
McCullough’s ordeal was chronicled in a prominent story in The Wichita Eagle on May 8, 1944: “Purple Heart is Awarded Wichita Nurse for Wound: Lieut. Helen A. McCullough Hospitalized Following Battle on March 27; Is Serving in Italy.” The article notes that Helen was “one of the first Kansas nurses to be awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received in enemy action in Italy.” She was one of eight nurses so honored. The article said the initial information came from her brother, J.E. McCullough of Wichita.
A page 1 article from The Wichita Beacon, June 23, 1944, featured an interview with McCullough from McCloskey General Hospital in Temple, Texas, where she continued her recuperation. “I didn’t feel it,” McCullough said of the bomb fragment. “I knew I was hurt, but was so interested in my patients I didn’t feel it at the time. I just couldn’t realize it. But I spun around and fell and realized I was really hurt after a time.”
In addition to the Purple Heart, the European theater ribbon, and two battle stars, McCullough was also promoted to First Lieutenant during this period. A subsequent article dated July 22 reported that she would be assigned to McCloskey after she completed her 30-day furlough. Still another article from September 21, 1944, in The South Gate Press featured a photograph of a smiling McCullough receiving the Purple Heart from Col. Florence A. Blanchfield, superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps.
The next mention I could find of Helen McCullough appears 14 years later near the end of a long article detailing the latest additions to the staff of the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City in Fall 1958. It’s here that we learn she had been hired as an assistant professor of general nursing. The Sooner Medic, the yearbook of the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center from 1959, has a picture of her with the caption: “Helen A. McCullough, R.N., M.A., Prof. Diploma, Assistant Professor of General Nursing.” Her hair is shorter and grayer, but she still smiles just as brightly for the camera.
But in February 1960, just a few months later, in another article about the several more new hires at the OU Medical Center, McCullough is said to have “resigned” her position – with no reason or explanation given.
Then, nothing for 24 more years.
The final reference I found is from the website FindaGrave.com, which includes a photograph of her simple marker in Greenlawn Cemetery, Pratt, Kansas: “Helen A. McCullough, July 28, 1913-March 20, 1984, Capt. WW II Anzio”
And that’s where my story abruptly ended. During my research, I had grown attached to the plucky, courageous nurse from Kansas who had survived the horrors of Anzio Beach. I systematically searched my usual go-to sites for more information: The Texas Collection’s digital copies of The Baylor Line, The Lariat, The Round Up and other Baylor-related collections. I tried Ancestory.com, Fold3.com, Newspapers.com, Legacy.com and others.
With the help of Sylvia Hernandez, the Archivist and Assistant Librarian at the Texas Collection, I searched BARD (their archival database), The Newspapers.com World Collection, the Texas Digital Newspaper Program through the Portal to Texas History (hosted by the University of North Texas), TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online), SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context), and various military websites.
At last, and despite some personal trepidation, I signed up for the AI-driven ChapGPT search – and even took a tutorial so I could better search for references to Helen.
Nothing.
Not another reference to Helen A. McCullough: no obituary, no wedding announcement, no new employment position, no indication of when she was promoted to captain, nothing between 1960 and her passing in 1984.
Perhaps someone reading this knows the rest of the story – you can reach me through The Baylor Line Foundation. I’d love to think that McCullough’s story has a happy ending, that she just retired and lived a long, fulfilling, and uneventful life.
Or perhaps because of her dedication to her profession, she moved to ease the suffering of those in need at one of the many hotspots or disasters plaguing the world in 1960 – the often bloody independence struggles of a host of nations in Africa, the beginnings of the modern civil rights movement in the United States, and the world’s usual array catastrophic fires, famine, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis … Or perhaps McCullough just retired to a quiet farm in Kansas, as far away from the sounds of war as possible.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know. In a perfect world, she passed surrounded by friends and family, taking her scars and medals with her, and the memories of the people she touched and the lives she saved.
Some stories don’t have a happy ending.
Some stories don’t have an ending at all.
But I believe that some stories, like the story of Helen A. McCullough, are worth telling – and remembering – anyway.
