Claire Elizabeth Fearn Papers

Captain Claire E. Fearn served as an active duty nurse in the U.S. Army during World War Two, and subsequently as a Nurse Corps reservist until 1954, when she received an honorable discharge at age 45 per army regulations. Fearn spent all of her post-war career with the Veterans’ Administration and at her retirement in 1973 held the position of head nurse at the V.A. Hospital facility in Palo Alto, California.

The fourth child of a British immigrant family, Fearn was born in Glencoe, Wyoming, in 1909. She completed high school in Evanston, Wyoming, and graduated from the Holy Cross Hospital School of Nursing in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1930. Before enlisting in the U.S. Army in July, 1941, Fearn worked as a supervising nurse at Holy Cross Hospital, took on private duty nursing cases, and was staff nurse for a private Otolaryngology practice in Salt Lake. She moved to California, and for three years was a pediatric ward nurse at the Sacramento County Hospital.

Certainly the most marking of Fearn’s professional experiences was her service in the Pacific theater of the world war, from 1942 to 1945. Beginning in Australia, at the 12th Station Hospital organized at Townsville, Queensland, Fearn also saw tours of duty with the 2nd and 3rd Field Hospitals in New Guinea in 1944, and with the 36th Evac Hospital, the 165th Station Hospital, and the 1st and 2nd Field Hospitals in the Philippines in 1944-45. In addition to patient care and her responsibilities as supervising nurse of the otolaryngology service, Fearn also supervised and instructed corpsmen and civilian nurses and attendants in a number of specialty services and in the general medical and surgical wards. She received the Bronze Star in 1945 for her exceptional devotion to duty in the Philippines campaigns.