Army Nurses, Camp Lee, Virginia photograph

The Quartermaster School had operated at Camp Lee since October 1941, when it relocated from Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where it had been housed since 1928 in increasingly overcrowded quarters.

The Army Nurse Corps had grown 942 nurses in June 1940 to a peak of more than 57,000 in August 1945. Formal four-week basic training for newly commissioned Army nurses had been authorized only in July 1943, when Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell of Army Service Forces directed instruction in Army organization, military customs, field sanitation, defense against air, chemical, and mechanized attack, personnel administration, and property responsibility. The standard ANC basic-training centers were Fort Meade, Fort Devens, Halloran General Hospital, Camp McCoy, and Brooke General Hospital, though smaller detachments of the program existed, such as that at Camp Lee.

References

"The QM School — Past and Present." Quartermaster Foundation. Originally published in The Quartermaster Review, May–June 1946. https://quartermasterfoundation.org/the-qm-school-past-and-present/.

Sarnecky, Mary T. A History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

U.S. Army Center of Military History. "Highlights in the History of the Army Nurse Corps: Chronology." Accessed April 27, 2026. https://www.history.army.mil/books/anc-highlights/chrono.htm.

U.S. Army Center of Military History. The Army Nurse Corps. CMH Pub 72-14. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History. https://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/72-14/72-14.HTM.