Vernice Stuart Plumb, Army Nurse in the South Pacific

By David Stuart | Photos Courtesy of David Stuart

Experiences as a World War II Army nurse shaped my dear aunt, Vernice Stuart Plumb. She had a significant impact on me as I grew up. I remember watching the television show M*A*S*H with her in the 1970s and ’80s. That dramedy centered around the doctors and nurses in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, but Aunt Neen, as I called her, told me, “David, that’s just how it was in the South Pacific.” We talked about the horrors of war, the teamwork of caregivers dedicated to the healing of their patients, the shenanigans that helped maintain morale and how she still grieved for the patients they had lost.

Vernice was the middle of my father’s three sisters, born in 1913 in Ripon to Arthur L. “Art” Sr. and Effie Belle Garrison Stuart. My dad was six years younger, but he and Neen were particularly close. Moreover, after the war she and her husband, William H. Plumb, lived in nearby Manteca, so we saw them more frequently than my other aunts and uncles who lived in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Uncle Bill ran the lab affiliated with Dr. Winters’ medical office in Manteca; Aunt Neen was head surgical nurse at Dameron Hospital in Stockton, where the docs called her “Stu.” Later, in retirement, they lived in Stockton.

My grandfather had served in the first World War, but he didn’t talk about it; he applied some skills he had acquired in Europe to his career in law enforcement, first on the San Joaquin County motorcycle patrol, followed by 21 years with the California Highway Patrol. Like most Americans, when World War II broke out, my family members stepped up to serve. My father deployed to North Africa and the Battle of Anzio and the liberation of Italy. My mother’s brother, Uncle Ernie Madsen, was an aircraft mechanic in Europe. My mom drove a forklift at Sharpe Army Depot near Lathrop.

Vernice Stuart enrolled in nurse training at Dameron Hospital in Stockton. She enlisted in the U.S. Army and was shipped to the South Pacific. Her letters home could not disclose the precise locations of the field hospitals at which she worked, but I recall her mentioning the New Hebrides Islands, now the nation of Vanuatu, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In 1942, U.S. Navy Seabees built Naval Advance Base Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides to support the Allies’ battles with Japan in the Pacific. It was the first base built in the South Pacific.

If you have read James Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific or have enjoyed the musical comedy and movies South Pacific, you can imagine some of my aunt’s experiences. Michener’s stories were based on his experiences at Espiritu Santo Naval Base, the Solomon Islands and the Coral Sea. Perhaps nurse Vernice Stuart was an inspiration for the character Nellie Forbush!

Many of Vernice’s patients wrote her letters after they had recovered and left the field hospitals. They were eternally grateful for her care, and most had fallen in love with her. Nevertheless, she married a bronze star-winning hematologist and parasitologist with whom she served, William H. Plumb from Connecticut.

Vernice Stuart Plumb passed in 1985; she and Bill rest at Park View Cemetery near French Camp. After I arrange and copy all the letters and photographs I have from her, I will donate the collection to the San Joaquin County Historical Society archives in Micke Grove Regional Park.