The flight nurses of the Pacific who saved thousands of Marines

As U.S. Marines desperately crawled, ran and slipped toward the entrenched Japanese on Iwo Jima in February 1945, U.S. Naval and Marine planners were met with another pressing issue: how to get the wounded out of the exposed, shifting black volcanic sand and off an island little more than four miles long.

On March 6, 1945, the Navy found its solution in Jane Kendeigh and her 11 fellow…