During the Great War there were many persons who found ways to serve in humanitarian and medical capacities in spite of their ineligibility for military duty. The most numerous of these were the members of the British Voluntary Aid Detachments, familiarly known as ‘V.A.D.’s’, which numbered about 80,000 young women. These volunteers became nursing assistants and hospital workers, and Wikipedia lists twenty-three noteworthy V.A.D.’s, some of whom were Vera Brittain, Agatha Christie, E.M. Delafield, Amelia Earhart, Violet Jessop, and Freya Stark.

Violet Jessop V.A.D. (1887 – 1971) survived the sinkings of the RMS Titanic and the HMHS Brittanic

Others, including men, were ambulance drivers, stretcher bearers or hospital orderlies. Many were Americans who served before April 1917 or who were under military age. Wikipedia lists sixty such persons who became well-known, including Stafford Cripps, E.E. Cummings, Walt Disney, John Dos Possos, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Ernest Hemingway, Tony Hulman, Ray Kroc, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham, Maurice Ravel, Robert Service, Gertrude Stein, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alice B. Toklas and William Wellman.

A major source of these medical service volunteers and vehicles was The American Field Service, an organization which still exists and deserves a future entry here.

James (“Jim”) Patton BS BA MPA is a retired state official from Shawnee, Kansas and a frequent contributor to several WW1 e-publications, including "Roads to the Great War," "St. Mihiel Tripwire," "Over the Top" and "Medicine in the First World War." He has spent many hours walking the WW1 battlefields, and is also an authority on British regiments and a collector of their badges. An Army Engineer during the Vietnam War, he does work for the US World War 1 Centennial Commission and is affiliated with the WW1 Historical Association, the Western Front Association, the Salonika Campaign Society and the Gallipoli Association.