Enterprise woman one of three female WWII veterans on Honor Flight

When she stepped onto a troop transport ship bound for Europe as a 22-year-old Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps nurse, Mary Lucile Smith Cain entered World War II.
More than 60 years later, she joined other veterans aboard the Wiregrass Honor Flight to see the memorial built to honor those served in the war.
Cain was one of three female World War II veterans on the recent flight to Washington D.C. Her daughter, Mary Sue, served as her escort. Both women described the visit to the nation’s capital as “awesome, an opportunity of a lifetime.”
The trip’s purpose was to give war veterans an opportunity to see the memorial built in their honor. Fundraising efforts throughout the Wiregrass allowed the 95 veterans to travel free, and each traveled with an escort to assist them throughout the day.
The welcome that awaited the Wiregrass group upon arrival in the Washington area was “unexpected” and “a pretty emotional experience,” Cain said. “All kinds of people were there to welcome us and they thanked us for our service.”
From the airport, the group boarded buses to travel to the World War II Memorial, located between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Two archways, representing the Pacific and the European areas in which the war was fought, overlook a circular pool with fountains at each end.
Pillars at each end of the memorial represented the United States, its territories and the District of Columbia, Cain said. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, himself a decorated World War II combat veteran, and U.S. Rep. Bobby Bright greeted the Alabama group.
The group laid a wreath at the memorial’s Alabama column, Cain said. Printed on the wreath’s ribbon was: “In Honor and Memory of the ‘Greatest Generation’ Wiregrass Honor Flight.” Yes, Cain said, she thinks it was the “Greatest Generation.”
“Not because I’m in it,” she said. “Those of us who joined the military did so because we wanted to lend a hand to our country. That’s just what you did, without giving it a second thought.” It wasn’t just those in the military who offered their country a hand, Cain said, describing the rationing of goods that was voluntarily conducted in the United States.
“People just went without for the good of their country,” she said. “We believed the Bible and tried to follow it. Trying to do the right thing: It’s just what you did.”
It was “doing the right thing” that initially prompted the young nurse from Quincy, Fla., to join the recently created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in December 1943. “My father had just died and it was always his thought that he wanted to have served in World War I,” she said.
Among Cain’s photos from her recent trip is one of a plaque inscribed with the words of Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, director of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, which later became the Women's Army Corps: “Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women. This was a people’s war and everyone was in it,” the plaque reads.
“And that the way it really was,” Cain said, describing her voyage into war aboard the troop ship on which Cain was one of 75 women. The other passengers on the 14-day voyage were 5,000 military men.
“They had armed guards protecting us,” she said with a smile. “I got so seasick.”
During her two years of military service, Cain was stationed in France and in Berlin, Germany.
“We put the first American hospital in there,” she said. “There was no heat in it and we were so cold.”
Her wartime memories include taking her laundry to French women who washed the items by hand and scrubbed them on rocks in local streams and rivers. She didn’t learn to speak French or German, she said. “I needed to, but I didn’t.”
She and her fellow nurses were “afraid” when they learned about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death while she was still overseas. “We were not old enough to have the sense to know that the country would still go on,” she said.
When her two-year military commitment ended in December 1945, Cain said she was given the opportunity to re-enlist, but she chose to return to the United States.
She returned home to Quincy with only her family to welcome her, Cain said.
“We didn’t get any kind of welcome back. We just came home.”