Hayti, Mo., woman was first D-Day nurse

After paratroopers and soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Margaret Stanfill of Hayti, Mo., waded ashore to tend to the injured.

A lieutenant with the U.S. Army Nurses Corps, Stanfill was the first American nurse to arrive ashore.

Wire service accounts of that day reported that Stanfill and other nurses arrived by barge and "waded ashore while battle-weary soldiers blinked in astonishment."

Stanfill went to work immediately setting up dressing stations and medical tents to care for the injured. She cared for many of the injured paratroopers who were among the first to attack the Germans during the battle.

Stanfill was a 1938 graduate of Hayti High School and a 1940 graduate of the nursing program at Baptist Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

She served in the U.S. Army Nurses Corps, following Allied troops from North Africa into Sicily, England and at Normandy. After the war, she married Wick Moore, an Army captain she'd served with in North Africa. The couple settled in Texas, where she still lives today.

-- Southeast Missourian