WASHINGTON, May 12--Col. Florence A. Blanchfield, who as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps directed 60,000 Army nurses in World War II, died today in Walter Reade Hospital. She was 87 years old and made her home with a sister, Mrs. Ruth Ordnoff in Arlington, Va. Tribute to Heroism Florence Blanchfield was the first woman to receive a commission in the Regular Army. In making the presentation of her commission in a ceremony in 1947, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to the heroism of the Army nurses. The War Department credited Colonel Blanchfield, who at the time had spent 30 years in the Army Nurse Corps, with being "largely instrumental in securing full military rank for nurses." She marshaled her arguments for "full" rather than "relative" rank at hearings before a succession of Congressional committees. Full rank was won on a temporary basis in July, 1944, and was made permanent by the Army and Navy Nurse Corps Law of April 16, 1947. Behind all the arguments was a matter of down-to-earth pay--or, in today's terms, should women earn less than men for the same work? In March, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Mrs. Julia O. Flikke, Miss Blanchfield's predecessor as superintendent, as a colonel and Miss Blanchfield as a lieutenant colonel. The Controller General then ruled that there could not legally be a woman colonel in the Army. He issued Colonel Flikke the pay of a major and Lieutenant Colonel Blanchfield the pay of a captain. It took a new law to permit the rate of pay to catch up with the rank. Took Secretarial Course Florence A. Blanchfield was born on April 1, 1884, at Shepherdstown, W. Va. She attended the public schools of Walnut Springs, Va., and was graduated from the Granda Institute of Granda, Va. She took a secretarial course at the Martin Business College of Pittsburgh and other courses at the University of California and Columbia University. Her attention then turned to nursing, and she studied at Pittsburgh's South Side Training School for Nurses, from which she was graduated in 1906. She took a postgraduate course in surgical techniques and operating room supervision at Dr. Howard Kelly's Sanitarium and at Johns Hopkins Hospital and worked in three Pennsylvania hospitals. A year of work in the Canal Zone followed, with general and anesthetic duties, and she became industrial nurse at the United States Steel Company's plant at Bessemer, Pa. In 1916 she went to the Suburban General Hospital in Bellevue, Pa. and then, in 1917, took a military leave. She entered the Army Nurse Corps on Aug. 20, 1917. Miss Blanchfield, who never married, concerned herself with the privilege of Army nurses to take a husband. In June, 1944, with the war still on, she reported that over a four-month period an average of 14 nurses each day became wives. At the time the Nurse Corps numbered about 40,000. It was another six months, in January, 1945, that the Navy Nurses Corps permitted nurses in service to marry without resigning. The Navy at the time still barred married nurses. The reason for the reluctant acceptance of the married nurse was the hard fact that nurses who wanted to be married were resigning in large numbers, and the only way to keep them, it seemed, was to permit them to be married. Miss Blanchfield, in service in many countries, China, the Phillipines and Europe in addition to a number of Army installations in the United States, paid tribute to the nurses' aides, and added: "We have no fears of there being a surplus of nurses after World War II as after World War I."