#Story
Elizabeth Ann Richardson: One of Four Women Honoured at Normandy American Cemetery
Elizabeth Ann Richardson is one of four women buried in the Normandy American Cemetery. During the Second World War she volunteered in the American Red Cross.
Elizabeth was born on 8 June 1918 in Akron, Ohio. In 1940 she graduated from Milwaukee-Downer College and worked for an advertising agency. Like many young Americans, she was against the United States’ involvement in Second World War.
However, her wish for non-military US commitment soon changed after the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941 on Pearl Harbor. In May 1944, willing to help her country, she left her advertising job in Milwaukee and volunteered in the American Red Cross.
After six weeks of training as a nurse in early July 1944, she sailed to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth. She was assigned to the Clubmobile units of the American Red Cross, where her main mission was to raise the morale of US troops returning from the battlefield by serving doughnuts and coffee to the soldiers and discussing with them.
In February 1945, Elizabeth was transferred to France, where she continued her mission. After the end of the Second World War, on the morning of 25 July 1945, at the Havre airport, she took the two-seat military aircraft ‘Piper Club’ to visit the headquarters of the Red Cross in Paris. However, the pilot struggled to fly because of a thick fog, and the plane crashed near Rouen. Elizabeth and the pilot, Sergeant William R. Miller, attached to the 9th USAAF (Air Force), lost their lives. She was only 27 years old.
After being buried for more than two years in the military cemetery of Saint André-de-l'Eure (Evreux), the US authorities finally decided in 1948 to transfer the body of Elizabeth on the Normandy American Cemetery.
She is now one of the four women to be buried at the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. The three other women honoured with burials there, are Mary H. Bankston, Mary Jewel Barlow and Dolores Mercedes Browne, African American women who had served in the Army's unique 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and been killed in a Jeep accident.
After Elizabeth’s death, her family and friends decided to create the Elizabeth Richardson Prize for art students. Milwaukee-Downer College also decided to pay tribute to their former student and published in 1950 the poems and stories written by Elizabeth in First Round, an internal college newsletter.
Elizabeth Richardson is buried in Plot A, Row 21, Grave 5.