Sue S. Dauser

Sue S. Dauser was an American nurse who served as the fifth Superintendent of the United States Navy Nurse Corps and guided it through the Second World War. Born in Anaheim, California, on 20 September 1888, she graduated from the California Hospital School of Nursing in 1914 and became a Navy nurse in September 1917, serving at Naval Base Hospital Number 3 in the United States and in Edinburgh, Scotland during the First World War. In the 1920s she served aboard several ships and in postings in Guam and the Philippines, and she tended President Warren G. Harding during his fatal illness in 1923. Appointed superintendent in 1939, she supervised the wartime expansion of the corps from 436 members to over 11,000 by 1945. In December 1942 she received the temporary relative rank of captain, the first woman to hold that rank in the history of the US Navy, and she was awarded the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. She died on 11 March 1972.