Shown here, in the February 12, 1945, issue of Life magazine is U.S. Army flight nurse Lt. Victoria Pavlowski, giving a glass of juice to Pvt. Charles V. Reusch, who is being evacuated from Leyte to a hospital in Hawaii. Lt. Pavlowski, described by the magazine as “young, courageous, and pretty,” was among the first class of flight nurses, and was working the 18-hour round-trip flight evacuating injured servicemen from the Pacific theater.

The Life article was penned by Shelley Smith Mydans, who with her photographer husband had been captured in Manila and spent two years in a Japanese internment camp. (We previously wrote about her capture.) She described the group of nurses as “very young, almost like college girls, sitting cross-legged on their beds, smoking and laughing. Their make-up was fresh, their nails brightly polished and their man-sized khakis and flight suits less baggy than the modern coed uniform.”

Lt. Pavlowski went on to marry another officer, and retired from the Army some 20 years later as Maj. Victoria Dragoui. She was profiled in Warrior Medic magazine in 2011, from which the picture at left is taken. She died in 2010 at the age of 98.