Christmas 1943, a Lancashire base camp, the first wartime Christmas the bulk of the US European deployment would spend in uniform — and a unit roster typed up at the 304th Station Hospital as a holiday gesture. A Fold3 printout (printed February 1, 2015) of the 304th Station Hospital Officers and Nurses Roster as of Christmas 1943, with Captain Constantine L. Jeannopoulos highlighted among the officers. Handwritten annotations at the top of the printout read “Christmas 1943” and “1943 Hospital UK WWII” — placing the document at the 304th Station Hospital’s UK base camp during its first holiday season overseas.
What the roster captures
The 304th Station Hospital was Constantine’s deployed unit from his September 5, 1943 ETO arrival through to the end of his European service in January 1946. The Christmas 1943 roster captures the complete officers + nurses + enlisted-medical-staff complement at the time of the unit’s first overseas Christmas — a routine administrative document that survived because someone in the unit had it typed up as a holiday gesture.
Constantine appears among the Medical Corps officers, ranked Captain at that point (his Captain commission was effective December 1, 1943 — just three weeks before the roster date — see his Presidential commission certificate). The roster is the only family-archive document that names the specific colleagues Constantine served alongside during the early European-theater phase of his deployment.
About the 304th Station Hospital
US Army Station Hospitals were the fixed medical installations of the wartime medical service — distinct from the mobile field hospitals that accompanied combat troops. A Station Hospital had a fixed bed complement (typically 500-1500 beds) and served a defined geographic area, treating casualties evacuated rearward from front-line units, sick soldiers from training units, and the routine medical needs of the troop-concentration zones it covered.
The 304th Station Hospital was based in the United Kingdom from 1943 through the Normandy invasion and the subsequent advance across Northwest Europe. After D-Day (June 6, 1944), the unit followed the advance — eventually reaching Germany. By the final phase of the war Constantine was “orthopedic ward officer at a station hospital in the E.T.O.” and, for the last four months of the European Theater, “in charge of two medical dispensaries headquarters third army” — i.e., attached to Patton’s Third Army HQ medical-dispensary network (per his WWII separation qualification record).
The Christmas 1943 context
The Christmas of 1943 was the first wartime Christmas for the bulk of the US European deployment. The 304th Station Hospital had been in the UK roughly three months when the roster was prepared. The unit was operating from a fixed base — likely one of the Lancashire / Cheshire hospital cantonments — receiving patients from the buildup of Operation Bolero (the US troop concentration in Britain for the eventual invasion of France). Constantine, as a Captain in the Medical Corps, was part of the orthopedic-surgery roster handling musculoskeletal cases from training accidents, transport mishaps, and the early stream of returning aircrew casualties.
The roster’s preservation in family hands — eventually retrieved off Fold3 by Peter Jeannopoulos in 2015 — represents the continuity of military-unit documentation that the wartime medical service maintained as a routine matter. The fact that Peter searched specifically for this roster on Fold3 reflects his ongoing research into Constantine’s deployment story, decades after his father’s 1980 death.
Companion WWII documents
| Date | Document |
|---|---|
| 1943-04-12 to 05-20 | Carlisle Barracks Medical Field Service School |
| 1943-07-12 | Change of address — 304th Station Hospital, APO 4716 (archive item 0007) |
| 1943-09-02 | Army Medical Corps acceptance card |
| 1943-09-04 | Signal Corps ID — 1st Lt MC |
| 1943-09-05 | ETO deployment |
| 1943-12-01 | Captain MC promotion effective |
| 1943-12-25 | 304th Station Hospital roster — THIS DOCUMENT |
| 1946-01-05 | Returned to US |
| 1946-03-20 | Fort Dix discharge |
Provenance
Constantine’s archive includes this 2015 printout of the original wartime roster as accessed on Fold3 (the Ancestry-affiliated military-records service). The original wartime document — typed at the 304th Station Hospital’s UK base in December 1943 — survives in US military archives via the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. The Fold3 reproduction Peter retrieved is the family-readable copy preserved in the 2010 / 2015 scan batch.
