My mother didn’t like that.”)Before joining the Army, the farthest Marian had been from her Oil City, Pa., home was Ohio. On D plus 10 — 10 days after Allied forces landed in France — a 22-year-old Marian and her comrades boarded a landing craft headed for Omaha Beach. For the rest of the war, Marian and the 45th Evacuation Hospital pushed through France and Belgium, past hedgerows that gave the landscape an alien appearance to the Pennsylvania native. Marian Rebecca Sebring Elcano — Army nurse, Legion of Honor recipient — died of congestive heart disease. “It meant a lot to her, that part of her life,” her daughter Mary Elcano said of the time Marian spent in the war.

Source: Washington Post October 07, 2020 21:12 UTC