While serving as a member of the Army Nurse Corps in World War II, Ethel Shilmover Grossman was moved and astonished to see the kindness with which American soldiers treated wounded German POWs. Immediately after graduating from the St. Agnes School of Nursing at the University of Maryland in 1942, Grossman lied about her age to join the Army Nurse Corps. She was sent to a military hospital in Fiji, where she rose to the rank of captain. It was there that she met her future husband, supply sergeant Manuel Grossman, who courted her secretly because their relationship violated regulations. In 1945 she did a rotation at a hospital in Augusta, Georgia, where she saw doctors and soldiers treating wounded POWs like any other patients. The experience broke through the anger she had harbored at the enemy because of the lives she had been unable to save throughout the war. After her service was complete, she and Manuel married and settled in Detroit.