More than 59,000 women served in the Army Nurse Corps between 1941 and 1945, in every theater the war reached, from the beaches of Normandy to the gates of the Nazi camps. They worked in field hospitals and evacuation hospitals, on hospital ships, and in the internment camps where they themselves were held, often in direct danger. They were among the first American women decorated for valor. Some reached Dachau and other camps in the days after liberation, and what they wrote down became part of the earliest record of what was found there.