Reba Z. Whittle

First Lieutenant Reba Zitella Whittle (1919 to 1981) was an American military nurse who served in the United States Army Nurse Corps during the Second World War. Born in Rocksprings, Texas, she trained at the Medical and Surgical Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio and was commissioned in June 1941, working first as a ward nurse. In 1943 she trained as a flight nurse at the Army Air Forces School of Air Evacuation, learning to treat pain, bleeding and shock in flight without a physician, and she flew forty missions with an air evacuation squadron based in England. On 27 September 1944 her casualty evacuation aircraft was shot down near Aachen. She was captured and worked among burn patients and amputees in German prisoner of war hospitals, and she is recorded as the only American military female prisoner of war in the European Theater.