March 22, 1920 – November 26, 2020
Dorothy Beavers Pecora graduated from Mount Carmel School of Nursing in 1941 and joined the Army as a Second Lieutenant in 1943. Pecora served in Europe as a surgical and triage nurse in General George Patton’s Third Army. She liberated the Nazi concentration camps at Penig, Germany, and Ebensee, Austria and later became lifelong friends with several camp survivors.
Pecora provided care to wounded soldiers under some of the most challenging and dangerous conditions of the war. She was stationed as the chief nurse to the Second Platoon of the Third Army’s 30th Field Hospital in 1944 when she married Dr. David Pecora, a young surgeon serving as a First Lieutenant (later Captain) in the Third Army. Both Dorothy and her new husband David Pecora treated soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. Her personal courage was not only evident in her proximity to danger, but in her steadfast determination to bring humanity to the front lines of war. She was later awarded a Bronze Star.