This Navy Destroyer's New Battle Flag Pays Tribute to the Service's First Female Nurses

The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee, named for the pioneering Navy nurse and Navy Cross recipient, debuted a new battle flag as it pulled into port in San Diego in early March, according to publicly available imagery published to social media.

The flag consists of a golden number 20 encircled by 20 gold stars on a navy blue background in what appears to be a tribute to the “Sacred Twenty,” the first group of women to officially serve in the U.S. Navy that included Higbee among its ranks.

Navy battle flags have a long tradition of honoring American history and culture. The flags often are self-referential, commemorating an important part of the ship's story, as in the case of the USS Bataan, which flies a flag paying homage to "The Battling Bastards of Bataan," or the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose flag includes a line from the 16th president's Gettysburg Address.

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The Higbee and the history of the Sacred Twenty are deeply entwined. The destroyer was commissioned on May 13, 2023, the 115th birthday of the Navy Nurse Corps (NNC) to which the Sacred Twenty belonged. During the ceremony, Navy officials detailed the close relationship between the medical pioneers and Higbee's individual contributions to the service.

"Whether you are the first group of 20 female nurses in the Navy, a new sailor to the service, or someone just wanting to see what a ship commissioning is, we all have the ability and choice to make a difference," Higbee commanding officer Cmdr. Douglas Brayton said at the time.

Higbee and the Sacred Twenty

While women had served in various unofficial or contracted capacities in the U.S. military for decades before Congress established the NNC in 1908, the new group opened a narrow, official path for white women to serve their country in the Navy. The NNC was modeled on the Army Nurse Corps, which had been formed seven years prior. Twenty women, including Higbee, were initially accepted into the corps.

Higbee already had an established career as a nurse before she joined the NNC. A Canadian immigrant and widow of a U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant, she had completed formal nursing training at the New York Postgraduate Hospital and a postgraduate course at Fordham Hospital, with work in private practice in between, when she signed up for the corps. She was promoted to chief nurse and was stationed at Norfolk Naval Hospital after just six months in the corps; in 1911, she became the second NNC superintendent and held the position for 11 years.

Higbee is credited with growing the corps from a few hundred to thousands of nurses, lobbying for expanded health care for military families and leading the NNC through World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Awarded the Navy Cross for her efforts, Higbee is the only woman to receive the honor while still alive. She retired in 1922, died in 1941 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Higbee is the first woman to have a U.S. warship named after her. The first USS Higbee -- a Gearing-class destroyer nicknamed "The Leaping Lenah" -- was christened in 1944 and served in the Pacific Theater during World War II, as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was part of Gemini capsule retrieval efforts before being decommissioned in the 1970s. In 2023, she became the first woman to have two warships named after her, the newest of which now bears the Sacred Twenty battle flag and the appropriate motto, "Bellatrix Illa" ("She is a warrior.").

The Sacred Twenty forged ahead in the face of institutional discrimination in the Navy and opposing Victorian social mores. Besides achieving various professional and educational requirements -- which necessitated travel in a time when most women were chaperoned by male family members -- applicants also had to be unmarried U.S. citizens between the ages of 22 and 44. The Navy did not provide room or board for women and paid them roughly half of what their male counterparts made. Those in the NNC were not enlisted or commissioned; nurses were not afforded ranks until 1944.

The Sacred Twenty pushed to expand their role within the Navy, fighting to serve patients in places that had previously been closed to women, including in Navy hospitals abroad, all-male wards and ships. Leaders rose from the Sacred Twenty, including Higbee and the other two first superintendents of the NNC, changing the way that Navy hospitals served troops, their families and local residents. Nurses of the Sacred Twenty went on to further military nursing, including publishing important medical works, advocating for better medical training for corpsmen and working to standardize nursing care. (It would take another decade before the first women of color -- nicknamed the Golden 14 -- served in desk jobs and more than 30 years before Phyllis Mae Dailey broke the U.S. Navy nurse color barrier.)

But even as a flag honoring these naval leaders flies from a destroyer named for one of them, the Defense Department appears to have recently deleted content about their history. Multiple DoD pages, press releases and publications about Higbee and the Sacred Twenty are currently inaccessible -- including articles and videos on Arlington National Cemetery's website that shared burial information for the seven members of the group interred there -- likely as part of the Trump administration's broader DEI purge.

Related: The Golden 14: How Black Women Exploited a Loophole to Serve During World War I

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