?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(WORLD WAR TWO.) Photo album, and letters of Lt. Gilda DeCapita, an Army nurse. 38 items: one scrapbook, 30 Autograph Letters Signed to sister Clara and other family members (3 of them V-Mails, a couple incomplete), and 7 pieces of ephemera. Various places, 1942-1945
Gilda Marie DeCapita (1917-1999) was born in Youngstown, OH to Italian immigrants, and trained as a nurse. She joined the army's Nurse Corps as a lieutenant in December 1942, and was initially stationed at Fort Bliss, TX. She was briefly at the prisoner of war camp at McAlester, OK and then at Camp Maxey, TX in late 1943, and then went overseas by March 1944 to England and Wales. By 15 October she was "somewhere in Belgium," and was the head nurse of the 16th Field Hospital for the Battle of the Bulge. She had a long career as a nurse and educator after the war.
The album contains approximately 195 photographs mounted on 15 album leaves, 11 x 9 inches, bound with string into a plain limp cloth binder. The photographs are mostly small snapshots with tidy typed or manuscript captions. Laid in is one 9½ x 7½-inch portrait of DeCapita taken in Texas. The first leaf is filled with pictures of the family back home in Youngstown, and the remainder documents her life from 1942 to 1945. Included are shots of some of her Texas hospital patients; one is captioned "The colored patient above was skin-grafted from head to toe following accidental burns. Yes, I'm proud of him; because he did survive my 2 to 3 hours of daily work on him; for three months at that. My aching back!" Also shown are the wedding of a colleague at Fort Bliss; an excursion to Juarez, Mexico; and shots of numerous civilian and military friends in England and Belgium. One leaf shows the damage of Liege, Belgium after the Battle of the Bulge: "A cemetery with fresh graves, broken bridges and torn down homes, and two buzz bombs every 20 min., while we worked long hours ankle deep in mud expanding our tented hospital. . . . Who's brave 12 miles behind the lines? I never saw a sadder bunch of scared nurses and doctors in all my life (including myself)." One page shows V-E Day in Brussels, others show subsequent celebrations in Liege, and some other shots show post-war travels in Switzerland and France in 1945. The final image is a tourist postcard of the Statue of Liberty which greeted her boat upon returning: "Yip-yip hooray! November 10, 1945."
DeCapita's correspondence is lively and enthusiastic. Her 7 September 1944 letter describes a celebrity visit: "Ohio congresswoman [Frances Payne] Bolton came to our camp. She pushed the bill thru to make us officers. So she takes a picture with me. I'm wearing bobby pins in my hair & a rain coat down to my ankles. Never looked worse in my life. The kids are still laughing about it. That'll make our camp paper, I'll bet!" Later, while waiting to be discharged on 7 July 1945, she joked "Maybe if you remind Mrs. Bolton (Ohio congresswoman) that she met me in Lison, France & that I want to come home. . ."
Many of DeCapita's letters describe the awkward dating life of an Army officer; she had a long series of failed dates with hard-drinking Southern lieutenants. Her Italian heritage is not often in evidence in the letters, but on 16 November 1944 she wrote "Aunt Mary wrote me a beautiful letter in Italian & I understood every word of it, too!"
Like most World War Two letters, these don't offer much detail on military operations because of censorship, but we get a taste. On 16 November 1944 in Belgium, she wrote "tomorrow I'm going to work in a tent hospital where mud is knee-high." She sent a short note on 29 December 1944, just as the German offensive was being thwarted in the Battle of the Bulge: "Taking time off between raids to tell you that I'm still kicking (mere grace of God). . . . Right now please explain to friends that writing under these circumstances is difficult." She was able to tell more on 17 May 1945: "We had it pretty rough in December & January. Some nights we'd have 64 or more buzz bombs fall around us. Our hospital was hit once & twice it was strafed by an airplane on Christmas Eve & New Year's Eve. We worked very hard at that time! On December 21st the Germans were 9 to 12 miles away from us, & we were packed ready to leave at a moment's notice with one little bag."
On 17 May 1945 she told her mother: "I celebrated V.E. Day in Brussels till 4 a.m. These people just went crazy. Dance & drink in the streets, shake our hands, kiss us, buy us drinks and everything. I'll never forget it. Even the children got drunk."
A folder of ephemera includes DeCapita's 1946 certificate of service, her 1945 photo ID, the obligatory printed thank-you note from Harry Truman, and two copies of a folding 29 x 21-inch broadsheet map and unit history of the Advance Section Communication titled "ADSEC in Action."
