Margaret Hollinger, WWII Army nurse, dies

SEATTLE -- As an Army nurse in World War II, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Margaret A. Hollinger volunteered to tend to one of Gen. George Patton's soldiers on the battlefield and ended up lost behind enemy lines.

More than 60 years later, when her family asked her how she made it back to her field hospital, she sat up straight in her wheelchair and looked straight at her nephew-in-law. That's classified, she told him.

"There were three things that were important to Margaret," said her niece, Patty Hollinger Conrard. "Her family, her faith and the military."

Hollinger died of natural causes Jan. 17 in a Seattle nursing home. She was 102.

She was born in 1910 to Austro-Hungarian immigrants in Gladstone, N.D., a railroad town that had no electricity until the 1930s. The oldest of 10, she had to drop out of school for a time to help her family during the Depression, but graduated from Gladstone High School in 1931.

The next day, she left for Bismarck, N.D., where a local family encouraged her to become a nurse. Wanting to earn a living -- nurses at the time typically worked for just room and board -- Hollinger joined the Army Nurse Corps.

As a member of the 120th Evacuation Field Hospital, which followed Patton's troops across Europe, Hollinger found herself on the front lines. She tended to survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp, and helped wounded German soldiers, as required by the Geneva Convention.

After the war, Hollinger received a bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of Washington in 1950 and later a master's degree in hospital administration from Baylor University in Texas.

After serving in the Korean War, Hollinger in the 1960s became one of the first female hospital administrators. Later, she worked for the Washington state Department of Social and Health Services.

Fiercely independent, she never married, but was engaged five times. She lived by herself in an apartment near Joint Base Lewis-McChord until she was 97, visiting her family often.

Burial will be in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.