Augusta Chiwy

One of the nurses immediately caught Prior’s attention for her pluckiness in the face of one crisis after the next: Augusta Chiwy, a black nurse born in the Belgian Congo whose uncle practised medicine in Bastogne. Prior admired the matter-of-fact spirit of the young woman with no experience of combat who coped so well when thrown into a blood-drenched emergency room to assist him with limb amputations.

Chiwy tended to the wounded at the Rue Neufchâteau aid station and reassured them by the simple act of arriving each day for a month — proof that there would be no surrender and that the front would hold.

Chiwy impressed the GIs, who called her “Sister”, with her practical approach to problems. When her starched nurse’s uniform became too blood soaked, she put on army fatigues, even though under the articles of war the uniform made her appear not a neutral but a combatant. Prior recalled that while the second nurse “shrank away from the fresh, gory trauma, the Congo girl was always in the thick of the splinting, dressing and haemorrhage control”.

Not all the GIs were grateful. “I was very nervous about working for the Americans,” she said, “because some of them didn’t want a black nurse. Those were strange times indeed.” When some US soldiers announced they did not wish to be treated by a black nurse, rather than take offence, Chiwy took it on the chin. Prior was more blunt, telling the ungrateful GIs, “You either let her treat you — or you die.”

In the face of racial intolerance, Chiwy liked to make light of her skin colour. When one day rescuing American casualties from the front line at Mardasson Hill on the north-east of Bastogne, she came under fire from German sharpshooters. Prior jokingly suggested to Chiwy that the German snipers missed because she was only five foot tall and therefore a small target. Chiwy would have none of it. “Those Germans must be terrible marksmen,” she said. “A black face in all that white snow was a pretty easy target.”

Chiwy was on duty on Christmas Eve when German planes unloaded their bombs on the temporary hospital complex, collapsing a three-storey barracks building filled with wounded GIs. Prior had just opened a bottle of champagne. “And I don’t remember if he finished filling the glass, but we heard something screaming coming towards us, and then big bang and all the windows were blown out,” she later said. The explosion knocked everyone to the ground and for a few minutes it was chaos. “The aid station had been hit and was just a pile of bricks.”

On December 26, when the US Fourth Armored Division relieved the Bastogne siege and Hitler’s last ditch effort to turn back the Allied tide was seen to have failed, Chiwy said farewell to her American friends and resumed her life as a nurse. Thousands of Americans were killed or wounded.

She worked at a hospital treating spinal injuries and married a Belgian soldier, Jacques Cornet, in 1950. She returned to nursing privately after the birth of her two children, Alain, now a surgeon and teacher of physics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Christine, a doctor.

However, the story of the young plucky nurse from the Belgian Congo who saved hundreds of American lives became entrenched in the accounts of the Battle of the Bulge. When Stephen Ambrose came to write Band of Brothers, a popular history of how American GIs helped to defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, from D-Day to VE-Day, he created a character named “Anna” based on Chiwy’s wartime experiences. And when HBO turned Ambrose’s books into a TV series, the part of Chiwy, aka Anna, was played by Rebecca Okot.

Chiwy’s contribution to the Allied victory even appeared in a graphic history of the Battle of the Bulge by Wayne Vansant, where she is portrayed comforting casualties in the church crypt. The rediscovery of Augusta Chiwy’s heroic war record 50 years after the event was the work of Martin King, a British historian who, having seen the 2001 Band of Brothers episode featuring her, decided to find out whether she was still alive. She was tracked to an old people’s home near Brussels and turned out to be suffering from “selective mutism”, a condition which made it hard for her to talk about her wartime experiences.

After she had been identified, honours soon began to flow. In June 2011, Chiwy was awarded the top Belgian award for heroism, the Order of the Crown. The same year, in recognition of her courage, the US 101st Airborne gave her the Civilian Humanitarian Award. King made an account of his quest for Chiwy in the 2014 TV documentary, Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne.

Augusta Marie Chiwy was born in 1921, in a Belgian Congo village that is now part of Burundi. Her father, Henri, was a Belgian veterinary; her mother was Congolese. She went to live in Belgium aged nine. In 1940, aged 19, she started to train as a nurse in Leuven, Belgium. Returning home for Christmas in 1944, she recalled: “The snow, oh, the fog!” When Prior found her, she said: “He told me that he had no one left, that his ambulance driver had been killed.”

However, Chiwy played down her importance. “What I did was very normal,” she said. “I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”

Augusta Chiwy, nurse, was born on June 6, 1921. She died on August 23, 2015, aged 94