clay county histories
Lt. Grace Berg Harkrider
Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC
Grace Berg was the daughter of Reverend Olav Gustav and Lillie Berg. The Bergs were Swedes. Her father was born in the Old Country and her mother in Massachusetts to immigrant parents. Grace was born in Nebraska before her father got his call in Moorhead’s Bethesda Swedish Lutheran Church. This church was the one I recall in my youth being painted white and home to Churches United for the Homeless across the street from the Moorhead Public Library. Some years ago it was replaced with an apartment building, as was the parsonage at 211 6th St S where Grace grew up.
Grace attended Concordia College after graduating from Moorhead High and went on to Minneapolis to study nursing at the Swedish Hospital. It was Grace’s fate to be a young adult in the early 1940s. Much was asked of her generation, and they gave a lot. In 1938, an egomaniacal dictator in Europe thought he could march in and take the smaller countries on his border – Austria, Czechoslovakia, then Poland. But he misjudged his own power, and the world united to defeat him. When America joined World War II, we needed nurses like never before. Grace Berg joined the Army Nurse Corps.
Lt. Grace Berg was a nurse aboard the US Army Hospital Ship Shamrock in the Mediterranean Sea. She cared for wounded soldiers of all countries as they were transported from warzones to the safety of Base Hospitals away from the fighting. Hospital ships were considered neutral and protected from attack by international law as long as they were only used for medical care. To make sure everyone knew it was a hospital ship, the USAHS Shamrock was painted white with green stripes down each side, had large red crosses painted on it, and was brightly lit each night. In the Mediterranean, aboard a defenseless ship designed to be as visible as possible, she bravely bet her life that a regime guilty of countless war crimes would show mercy to her ship of wounded soldiers.
Her enemies knew that the Western Democracies respected human life more than their totalitarian dictatorship did. Everyone aboard Grace’s ship was working to save all lives, not just those from their side. The German airmen who could have targeted the Shamrock knew that many of the ships 468 beds contained wounded German soldiers. For those aboard the ship, compassion, humanity, and doing the right thing protected them like a shield. In Moorhead, the Concordia College newspaper called Grace Berg the “Cobber Angel of Mercy.”
Berg’s ship followed where the fighting was, first tending to those wounded on the battlefields in North Africa, then going along for the invasions of Sicily, Italy, and southern France. By 1945, the army had 24 hospital ships with capacity for 14,600 beds. During the war, Grace fell in love with her ship’s pharmacist, Robert Harkrider. The two married in May of 1945, 11 days after Germany surrendered. They raised four children together and made their home in Atlanta, Georgia.