Ebba (Hanson) Loveridge, 93, spends much of her time in her Round Pond home hooking intricate rugs. She gives classes on the art and has many students each summer. Most people who meet the ever-smiling Loveridge have no idea that she is a veteran of World War II and the Cold War in Germany.
Loveridge attended the first grade at Round Pond school, speaking only Swedish. Her sister was the only companion she could understand. He father came to the United States from Sweden when he was 14 years old at the end of the First World War.
After the family farm on Rock Schoolhouse Road was destroyed in a fire in the 1920s, the Hansons relocated so Ebba’s father could work in Massachusetts. The Hansons kept their Maine connection by building a summer camp on the old property. They visited very summer until 1968 when they raised a new home on the foundation. The youngest Hanson girl lived there until her death in 1995.
Loveridge studied hard and eventually completed nursing school. Following graduation, she went to work at Boston City Hospital. On her first shift in Obstetrics at Boston City, she remembers that 12 babies were delivered in a four-hour period. “The war was on and everyone was getting married and having babies,” she said.
Ebba Loveridge was working as a nurse in Massachusetts when she and three of her colleagues enlisted in the war effort. “Everyone was helping,” Loveridge said. “We wanted to help our boys.”
In April 1943, she arrived in Richmond Army Base. There were two barracks for the nurses; one for southerners and one for northerners. Her Army Air Force training was “how to wear a gas mask and how to march up and down a ramp. We needed to learn to follow orders, I guess. They were always saying ‘No. Your other left,'” she said, laughing. That was the full extent of the military training the nurses were given.
“It was enough to know how to use the masks, in case we were gassed or in a fire and to know enough to move fast,” she said.
Loveridge deployed to England on the ship Westport in July 1944. It was a fast ship that traveled without military escort, zig-zagging across the Atlantic to avoid capture. The ship, full of newly commissioned women, did fall prey to a common affliction of the day: gossip. One of the nurses saw something off the bow of the ship, probably a fish, told another, and by the time the word got to the Captain, the fish had become a German U-boat.
After a firm reprimand, the nurses learned the meaning of the popular slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” It was a lesson they took seriously, Loveridge said.
The Westport landed at Glasgow, Scotland. Americans, particularly women, were not very popular there, according to Loveridge, but the women of Glasgow tried to welcome them. “The ladies brought us some kind of meat pies. They were probably a big deal to them, but the things were just awful,” she said. “We ate them anyway.”
The 103rd General Hospital nurses were sent to Kangaroo Corner, which had been home to an Australian unit, near Tidworth and Andover, southwest of London.
The General Hospital was a spider design serving 2000 patients. Each ward had 22 beds and six wards composed a unit. There were medical, psychiatric, orthopedic and surgical wards. Loveridge worked mostly in the orthopedic and surgical wards.
Typically, she worked 11 hours on night duty with one and a half day off per month. Travel into London was prohibited because of the danger.
“We went out with a soldier for dinner, once in awhile,” she said,” The first thing I always asked was to see a picture of their children. Those pictures came out fast, and we understood each other. Most of the boys were just homesick and they did love to talk about their kids.”
She remembers the Russian soldiers who were sent to them after being liberated from German POW camps as “such jolly boys, like our own soldiers.”
The men arrived in heavy casts designed to keep them immobile rather than to heal their broken bones. Each of these casts has to be cut off and replaced with proper casts. Loveridge says that most of them spoke no English at all, but one young man about to go under anesthesia had learned the phrase ” Hiya Babe,” which he delivered with enthusiasm.
“He made us laugh,” she said,” The Russians were not anxious to go home. They had been told not to be taken alive. They didn’t know what would happen when they got home.”
Alex, a young Russian patient, made her a thank you gift. He was a German prisoner of war, wounded after Victory in Europe Day. He used the silver from a coin he had and fashioned a ring made of silver with a heart at the center that she has to this day.
It was sometimes dangerous for the nurses. Loveridge had extensive experience with psychiatric patients and was often on those wards. One day a tiny Italian woman escaped her restraints while the nurses were feeding other patients. Loveridge went to catch her, but the patient turned, grabbed Ebba’s arm and pulled it out of the socket.
A trail of patients had followed Loveridge down the hall and watched as she took her own arm and shoved it back into her socket. The woman ran to the end of the hall while her nurse was occupied, and broke a window. Then she headed back toward Loveridge, who managed to grab the woman again and keep her restrained until help arrived.
After the war in Europe ended April 8, 1945, the 103rd dispersed. The personnel were sent back to the US to await assignment to the Pacific theater. They were given leave after coming back from England for 30 days and Loveridge went back to Walpole, Mass. On Aug. 14, when Japan surrendered, Ebba’s father celebrated by passing snuff around.
Ebba didn’t try it but her cousin Ruthie did and sneezed so much they thought they would have to take her to the hospital.
As a civilian, Loveridge worked at Bedford VA Hospital, which was a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. She reenlisted in September 1948.
Sent to Germany this time, Ebba Hanson met William Loveridge in Bremerhaven, where he was station manager for Armed Forces Network Radio. They married Leap Day 1952 in Berlin by the Bürgermeister, then returned to Bremerhaven to be married again by the chaplain.
Loveridge and her husband have one daughter, Vicki. After William’s death, Ebba began to think of Maine again and decided to move back to the place of her summers and early childhood. She bought “Ebba’s Farm” in Round Pond in the late 1980s and settled back in Lincoln County to stay.
Capt. Loveridge, like many women in the years around World War II, has vivid memories of both joyful and heartbreaking times in the theater of war. She mostly remembers the gratitude and joy that surrounded her service in the hospitals.
“The soldiers were so happy to be with us. They played pranks on each other and acted like what they really were, just boys.”
She talks about them all with a smile on her face. Captain Loveridge and others like her, offered comfort, care and a reminder of home to thousands of homesick people from many lands.
“Everyone wanted to help in any way they could,” she said,” The country unified in this effort. We pitched in and I was proud to be a part of it.”