CaptainLillian Kinkella Keil (November 17, 1916 – June 30, 2005) was a highly decorated AmericanWorld War II and Korean Warflight nurse. Keil made 250 evacuation flights (23 of them transatlantic) during World War II and 175 evacuation flights during the Korean War, becoming one of the most decorated women in American military history.[1][2][3]
Biography
Keil was born in Arcata, California.[1] She was raised in a convent after her father abandoned her mother and their three small children. Watching the nuns tend to the sick is what drew her into nursing.[1]
Immediately following high school, Keil attended the nursing program at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco and became a registered nurse.[4]
She was among the first flight nurse graduates of the Army School of Air Evacuation at Bowman Field, Louisville, Kentucky.[2] Captain Keil served in London by the summer of 1943 and at Omaha Beach after the June 1944 D-Day invasion.[1][2] She was among the nurses who tended the wounded of George S. Patton's Third Army as it drove across France.[1][2] Her older brother, SSGT John J. Kinkella served with the Army 184th Infantry Division in the South Pacific and was killed in action on February 4, 1944, at Kwajlein Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. She arranged to have her brother's remains repatriated after the war and he was interred at Golden Gate National Cemetery in September 1949.[1]
After the war, she returned to being a United Airlines stewardess, but reenlisted when the Korean War broke out, this time in the United States Air Force.[2] She was one of only 30 Air Force nurses stationed in the Far East.
In all, she flew 175 air evacuations out of Korea, to go with her 250 in World War II,[3] for a total of 425.[1][2] It is estimated that she tended over 10,000 wounded in her military career.[1][2]
In 1954, she met Walter Keil, a former Navy intelligence officer during World War II.[1] After only six weeks, they married, and when she became pregnant in 1955, she received an honorable discharge.[1] The couple settled in Covina, California, where she continued to work as a nurse.[1] They had two daughters. When she was the subject of a 1961 episode of the TV show This Is Your Life, the show drew one of its ten highest mail responses.[2]
