70 years later, Snohomish County woman killed in WWII is remembered

EVERETT — Margaret Billings was the only one.

At Everett’s Lowell Park, her name stands out on a granite war memorial. It is the only woman’s name on the monument, which honors nine U.S. military members from the Lowell community killed in service to their country.

A member of the Army Nurse Corps, 2nd Lt. Margaret May Billings was the only woman from Snohomish County killed on duty in World War II.

Rhododendrons are in bloom at the foot of the memorial, erected in 1992 by the Lowell Civic Association. On a peaceful spring day, it’s hard to imagine the hellish scene aboard the USS Comfort the night of April 28, 1945 — 70 years ago Tuesday.

The Battle of Okinawa was raging when a Japanese kamikaze plane smashed into the hospital ship’s starboard side, even though lights were shining on the Comfort’s big red crosses.

Earlier that day, the Comfort had left Okinawa with a load of wounded Americans. The ship was bound for a hospital on Guam when the suicide pilot’s plane, carrying a bomb, tore into three of its operating rooms. At least 28 people died in attack, including Billings and five other nurses. Forty-eight were wounded in the attack on the Comfort, a Navy ship with Army medical personnel.

Everett Daily Herald readers learned on May 5, 1945, that the 35-year-old nurse had been killed. “Insofar as records here reveal, Lt. Billings was Snohomish County’s first woman casualty of the war,” the article said.

A 1928 graduate of Everett High School, she was a Lowell native, the daughter of Lees and Luella Billings. She was trained at Providence Hospital’s School of Nursing. Before joining the Army Nurse Corps, she had worked at Firland Sanatorium in Seattle and for the Veterans Administration.

Beth Buckley, a relative of Billings who also grew up in Lowell, has a remembrance more personal than the war memorial or the nurse’s grave marker at Everett’s Evergreen Cemetery.

“I have the flag that was over her casket,” said Buckley, 66, who now lives in Snohomish. “I grew up with our grandpa hanging it out on our front porch in Lowell every holiday.”

Buckley, also a nurse, said Margaret Billings “was my grandfather’s cousin.” Herb Buckley, her grandfather, was a Lowell Paper Mill worker.

At the Snohomish Senior Center, where Beth Buckley serves on the board of directors, she unfurled the huge 48-star flag Thursday, and recalled how she came to have the heirloom.

The Army nurse’s mother — Buckley’s “Aunt Lu” — gave the flag to Buckley’s grandfather. “He gave it to my dad, and my dad gave it to me,” Buckley said. She said Margaret Billings grew up in a house still standing at Second Avenue and Ravenna Street in Lowell.

Billings was younger than Buckley’s grandfather, but older than her father Mert Buckley.

“I knew her sister Eloise quite well growing up,” Buckley said. Billings’ sister — her married name was Eloise Mackenstadt — lived in Bremerton when the nurse was killed.

Another Washington nurse, Florence Grewer of Longview, also died in the Comfort attack. In an article in 2004, The Daily News of Longview featured Grewer’s story.

Daily News writer Brenda Blevins McCorkle interviewed Pete Leonardich, of Salinas, California. Leonardich, who died in 2007, was on duty when the USS Comfort was hit, an Army medic in charge of the ship’s medical supplies. He said in 2004 that the vessel had just picked up a load of wounded Marines. “The water was calm, then we got a buzz job. … He (the kamikaze) hit the red cross, where nine operating tables were at. It left one big hole.”

Leonardich recalled that he and a friend sometimes went to watch surgeries — but not that night. “It wasn’t our time,” he said in 2004.

On Friday, his widow Agnes Leonardich said by phone from California that her late husband had shared his story in “Too Close for Comfort,” a book about the hospital ship by Dale P. Harper. “Pete met the author a couple of times,” she said. Agnes Leonardich also said her husband is pictured with other U.S. servicemen in a photo of the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

After the kamikaze attack, the damaged Comfort made it to Guam under escort. It was repaired and returned to service before the end of the war, and decommissioned by the Navy in 1946. Today, the Navy has the USNS Comfort, a seagoing treatment facility launched in 1976.

Harper’s book and many other sources suggest that the Comfort, which should have been protected as a mercy ship, was attacked in retaliation for the April 1, 1945, sinking of the Awa Maru, a Japanese ocean liner.

The Awa Maru was being used as a Japanese passenger ship and relief vessel. It, too, was to have been allowed safe passage. More than 2,000 people died in the sinking by the USS Queenfish submarine. There are many theories about what else the Awa Maru might have been carrying — gold, gems, war materiel, even fossils of Peking Man, the specimens found in China in the 1920s that disappeared in the 1940s.

Hundreds of people survived the USS Comfort attack. With each passing year, fewer World War II veterans are left to tell what they lived through.

Buckley lost another relative in the war. Robert H. Buckley, her father’s cousin, served in Europe and is also listed on the Lowell memorial. “He is buried in Holland,” she said.

She cherishes the flag that honored her family’s war heroine.

“Everyone was very proud of her,” she said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.