Tribute to Nurse Anna Mae Hays: First Female General in the US Army

Anna Mae Hays started as a frontline Army nurse in World War II and retired in 1971 as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and the first female general in the US Army. She died on January 7, 2018. In between, she pushed the Corps through a hard era of modernization and used her standing to improve service conditions for every woman in uniform.

Early years

Hays was born to Daniel and Mattie McCabe on February 16, 1920, in Buffalo, New York. Both parents served in the Salvation Army, and service, faith, and music ran strong through the family. She played piano, organ, and French horn and wanted to study music after high school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The money was not there, so she turned to nursing, a field she had been drawn to since childhood.

She enrolled at the Allentown General Hospital School of Nursing in 1939 and in 1941 became the school's first student to earn her Diploma in Nursing with Honors. That same year the US entered World War II, and in May 1942 Hays signed up with the Army.

World War II and Korea

In January 1943 she shipped out, and instead of Europe she landed in India with the 20th Field Hospital at the head of the Ledo Road, the route cut through the jungle to Burma. Conditions were brutal. Every building except the operating room, lab, and X-ray was bamboo with mud floors and leaf-frond roofs. "The heavy rains would pour seven-eight inches of water in 24 hours during the monsoon season. You can imagine the mud problems," she recalled. "Doors were weaved bamboo with no closures. It was quite an experience when a sacred cow or a jackal would run through a ward or the nurses' quarters." Once, treated in the hospital herself, she spotted a cobra under her bed and calmly asked a guard to shoot it.

Most patients came in with malaria and typhus, this in the years before antibiotics, and much of the staff went down with dysentery, dengue, or malaria themselves. The hospital also took casualties from Merrill's Marauders fighting in Burma, who arrived caked in mud and lice, often too unstable to clean up before surgery. "I can vividly remember the many amputations of extremities due to gas gangrene. That, of course, couldn't be treated in those days," Hays said. "I, as a 22-23-year-old girl, was very upset because of the many amputations but, of course, there was nothing else that could be done." There was some relief: a British club about two miles out where they danced once a week, with pilots traveling as far as 50 miles through the jungle to spend a few hours with the nurses.

After the war she stayed in the Corps and became one of the first nurses deployed to the Korean War in 1950. She judged the 4th Field Hospital in Inchon worse in many ways than India. Over 14 months, she and 31 other nurses cared for more than 25,000 patients, with as many as 700 admitted in a single night, sometimes running hours in the operating room on three hours of sleep. "We had no water. It was so cold we wore whatever clothing we could. And because there was almost no firewood it was almost impossible to keep warm." She also noted the advances since World War II: antibiotics, whole blood, and rapid helicopter evacuation. As in India, she spent off-duty hours playing a field pump organ for church services, including on the front lines.

Leading the Corps

After Korea, Hays moved through roles as director, head nurse, and chief nurse at various Army hospitals and completed a course in Nursing Service Administration. She earned a bachelor's in nursing education in 1958 and a Master of Science in Nursing in 1968. In 1956 she married William A. Hays, who ran sheltered workshops employing people with disabilities; he died only six years later.

She was named assistant chief of the Corps in 1963, promoted to Colonel in 1967, and soon after became Chief. This was the Army's most active stretch in Vietnam, and Hays led the Corps through one of the most stressful periods in US military history, traveling to Vietnam three times to check on the roughly 4,500 nurses stationed there. Facing a nursing shortage, she put more than 30 Army nurses on recruiting duty and won approval to send Corps nurses to civilian schools for graduate and doctoral education, which doubled as a recruiting incentive. New training programs for nurses and paraprofessional staff followed.

She also drove real personnel-policy change for women in the armed forces: ending the automatic discharge of pregnant servicewomen, allowing women with younger children into the Army Nurse Corps Reserve, and granting husbands of female members the same privileges long given to wives of male members.

In June 1970, President Richard Nixon promoted Hays to brigadier general, making her the first female general in the US Army, a step made possible by a change in legislation just three years earlier. At the ceremony she said the stars "reflect the dedicated, selfless, and often heroic efforts of Army nurses throughout the world since 1901 in time of peace and war."

On her retirement in 1971 she received the Distinguished Service Medal at a Pentagon reception. "One day being responsible to The Surgeon General for 21,000 men and women, and then the next day, not having any responsibility, is quite an adjustment to make," she said. She stayed active in the Corps, in professional affairs, in her hometown, and in retiree groups, and in 2012 was named one of Lehigh County's outstanding citizens of the 20th century during its bicentennial.

Hays died on January 7, 2018, from complications of a heart attack, at 97. Three days later, by order of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, the state flag flew at half-staff at the Capitol Complex and all state facilities in Allentown in her honor.