12/09/2025
– first woman to win a purple heart, saving thousands at Pearl Harbor.
This is US Army Nurse Corps Chief First Lt Annie Fox, born in 1893 in Nova Scotia. She was on duty when the first wave of Japanese bombers hit Pearl Harbor at 7.55am OTD in 1941, and her immediate, fearless actions saved countless lives.
Annie served in both World Wars. After emigrating to the US as a child and training as a nurse, she enlisted in 1918 and worked through the influenza pandemic in New York. Opportunities for women were brutally limited back then. Even by 1941, the Army Nurse Corps had barely 1,000 nurses. But Annie pushed forward, serving at Fort Sam Houston, Fort Mason, and then across the Pacific in the Philippines, mastering emergency care long before her arrival in Honolulu.
Just weeks before the attack, she became Chief Nurse at the new 30 bed Station Hospital at Hickam Field next to Pearl Harbor. When the bombs fell directly on the base, shattering buildings just yards from her hospital, she didn’t flinch. With only six nurses on duty, Annie commanded them into action while the walls shook from explosions and machine gun fire rattled the windows. The Japanese planes flew so low she could see the pilots’ faces.
Casualties streamed in within minutes. Burns. Shrapnel wounds. Blunt trauma. Broken limbs. Annie converted every corner of the hospital into a treatment area. When beds ran out, she ordered mattresses onto the floor. She performed triage at lightning speed. With surgeons overwhelmed, she administered anesthesia, assisted in amputations, prepared patients for emergency surgery, and managed scarce plasma supplies.
She repeatedly exposed herself to strafing runs as she moved between wards. She refused to hide even when told to take cover. “I’m not going to hide under a table while my boys are dying out there.” Her calm voice kept terror from spreading. “We have work to do. Keep moving.”
When asked if they should evacuate, she answered without hesitation: “No one is leaving this hospital until every man who can be saved is treated.”
She stayed on duty for hours until the crisis eased, arranging ambulance transfers for the most critical survivors. Hickam Field suffered the highest Army Air Forces casualties of the day, yet the survival rate of those who made it to Annie’s hospital was astonishingly high because she created order in the middle of carnage.
“Rank doesn’t matter today, only how fast you can work.”
In 1943, her Purple Heart was rescinded after the criteria changed to require injury in action. She had risked her life over and over, but because she survived, her medal was taken away and replaced with the Bronze Star. A petty bureaucratic insult that did nothing to diminish her heroism.
She retired as a Major in 1945 and died in 1983 at age 93. When a reporter finally found her decades later, she brushed it all off with one line: “It was just another day of nursing, only louder.”
THIS is what women do in combat.
President Linda Breckle
