During World War II, a group of American nurses assigned to the Philippines were imprisoned by the Japanese. Not one of the nurses died of disease or malnutrition during their three-year internment, even as hundreds of other internees perished. “Their ‘extraordinary’ survival proved that women, with their high moral purpose and concern for the other, can endure the worst that civilization can visit on itself,” said Dr. Elizabeth Norman, a registered nurse and NYU professor, who wrote a book about the nurses, who were also called ‘the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor’. She noted this “sense of duty” among the nurses on the frontline against the COVID-19 pandemic. “These nurses knew they had skills [that] were needed by many people, whether it was in wartime or during the pandemic… Their own safety from their captors or from a virus was not as important as nursing those in need.”
While working on her book on military nurses who served in Vietnam, Dr. Elizabeth M. Norman kept coming across references to another group of nurses who had “fought” in another war, more than two decades back.
These were the 77 Army and Navy nurses, whom newspapers referred to as “the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor” during World War II.The nurses were assigned to the Philippines, which was not exactly a hardship military post, at least before December 8, 1941, when the US declared war against Japan, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Norman, a professor at a Professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Development and Education, said to the nurses, the Philippines was a “lush tropical paradise”, the military camps no different from country clubs, with their pristine beaches, sports facilities, palm groves, frangipani and orchids.
All these banished when the US and Filipino forces retreated to Bataan, along with the nurses and medical doctors. When the Allied Forces surrendered Bataan to the Japanese, and the American and Filipino soldiers embarked on the infamous “Death March”, the nurses were sent to Corregidor where they cared for the wounded in an underground hospital. They were taken prisoners by the Japanese and transported to a camp in Manila where they stayed for three years.
The untold story of the first captives of war
The “Angels” were the first unit of American women ever sent into the middle of battle. They were also among the first to be taken captive and imprisoned by the enemy. Norman knew their story would be compelling and chose it as the subject of her next book. After finishing her first book, Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam, Norman tracked down the surviving “Angels”, their relatives and other war veterans.
It took her eight years to complete the research for the book, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese. The book, published in 1999, “presents a war story in which the main characters never kill one of the enemy, or even shoot at him, but are nevertheless heroes,” wrote historian Stephen E. Ambrose. “These American nurses suffered as much, if not more, than the fighting troops in the front line.”
Norman began her research with the phone numbers of two of the “Angels” whom she had called in the spring of 1989. “Their willingness to cooperate came, I’m sure, from our sorority – nurse talking to nurse – but I also got the sense that these women were painfully aware that their ranks were dying, and that if they did not speak out now, if they did not attempt to preserve their dark but wonderful story, it would disappear,” said Norman, who has an undergraduate nursing degree from Rutgers University, and an MA and PhD in nursing from NYU.
The other nurses, she said, were not as open with their experiences and refused to see her. “It was too long ago and too hard to remember,” one nurse told her. Another wrote, “I regret that I am not able to assist you. I do not want to live in the past.”
Norman spoke to 20 of the women, some in their homes or in retirement residences, and talked to scores of their relatives and veterans. She said the difficulties she encountered had to do with the nurses’ age. “They were in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many were ill and many died before I had the chance to speak to them.”
“Those women were generous with their time and memories,” said Norman. “We talked for hours. Their recall was amazing.”
Last woman standing: Lt. Mildred Dalton
One of the nurses who shared her story was Lt. Mildred ‘Milly’ Dalton. Dalton died in 2013, aged 98, the last survivor of the Army and Navy nurses who had been captured by the Japanese in the Philippines.
Thus, in the new edition of Angels, Norman added a chapter. ‘Last Woman Standing’ detailed Dalton’s final years. Norman wrote that years later, Dalton had nightmares filled with the blood and screams of the wounded. She had cut so many clothes off the wounded soldiers that she could still feel the pain in her fingers when she used scissors.
The nurses “challenged convention, ignored stereotypes and in their survival (their death rate in prison camp was zero) proved that women, with their high moral purpose and concern for the other, can endure the worst that civilization can visit on itself,” wrote Norman.
Perhaps the most unusual experiences came when they would cry about some particularly bad memory – such as the time they were separated from the military men and patients, and the Filipino nurses. This was in the summer of 1942 when the Philippines was about to fall to the Japanese forces, and the nurses were asked to leave their patients. Many of the nurses she interviewed wept when they remembered that moment when they were ordered to leave the “thousands of wounded and bleeding and feverish men, unarmed and utterly helpless,” in the jungle as the Japanese soldiers advanced. “They said it was one of the worst [experiences] of the war. They loved their colleagues and did not want to be separated from them.”
When she was researching for the book, Norman noted that the old US War Department only contained “raw actualities of the service and imprisonment” of these nurses. “These war crimes testimonies do not present evidence that the nurses survived prison camp or why and how they survived,” Norman said. “These early testimonies were gathered to present as evidence in the war crimes trial, not as a testimony to their survival.”
Moreover, the focus of the testimonies was on the male prisoners of war, she said. Since then, the Army and a women’s veterans group have realised the need and benefits of salvaging women’s military experiences. The Women in Military Service to America, for instance, began to collect archival material from all women in the service, including the POWs.
The Army Medical Museum in San Antonio, Texas, has also gathered a lot of information from all branches of the service on military women, said Norman. She also contributed to this mission, donating all the interviews, correspondence and photos she collected from the nurses to the MacArthur Memorial Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.
She said the American nurses frequently mentioned the Filipino nurses who worked with them in caring for the soldiers. “Their bravery and duty to the patients mirrored the American nurses,” she said. “I hope someone writes their stories soon too. It would be a shame to lose them.”
Interviewed by email from her home in Montclair, New Jersey, Norman shared her thoughts on the challenges faced by nurses, this time in the frontlines of the war against COVID-19.
“I believe the POW and Filipina nurses who worked in the civilian POW camps or supporting the rebels outside the camps, or those nurses who continued to go into their hospitals during the COVID-19 surge… knew about the dangers and hard work they had to do, [and] did so out of a sense of duty. These nurses knew they had skills [that] were needed by many people, whether it was in wartime or during the pandemic. Both groups had an urge to help people in dire need. Their own safety from their captors or from a virus was not as important as nursing those in need.” While neither group of nurses “had the tools of the era to give patients everything they needed, they improvised.”
War is the ultimate masculine world
A combination of professional and personal interests led Norman to write the book on the “Bataan Angels”. Her mother, Dorothy Riley Dempsey, had served with the SPARS, the women’s branch of the Coast Guard. Her father, John J. Dempsey, was a combat veteran of World War II.
“I was interested in the intersection of women living in the ultimate masculine world – war; and nurses, whose mission is to save lives working in a war zone where killing is the main objective,” said Norman. The book allowed her to study “how women react under the worst of war’s circumstances.”
(Elizabeth Norman is also co-author of another book, together with her husband Michael, on another chapter of the second world war. Their book Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath describes the incidents of the three-month battle for the Bataan Peninsula, then moves on to April 9, 1942, when more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under the American command surrendered to the Japanese in what is now described as the single largest defeat in American military history. The sick and starving Filipino and American soldiers were ordered to walk 66 miles [approximately 106 kilometers] to their prisons. Norman said the book tells the story of the battle and the aftermath, from the American, Filipino, and the Japanese viewpoint, “which had never been done before.”)
In Angels, Norman wrote that in the battlefield, the nurses shed off their white starched uniforms and donned the soldier’s fatigue coveralls. The garments came in one size and were too big for the women. They cinched up the garments with safety pins and stitches. As it turned out, the fatigues became a short footnote to nursing history. The nurses were the first American military women to wear fatigues on duty. “The angels in white,” she wrote, “had learned to dress for the dirty business of war.”
When Manila was declared an open city, the army nurses evacuated the hospitals and were sent to field hospitals in Bataan and in Corregidor. Many of the women thought they were heading for hospitals and brought their standard white uniform, stockings, makeup, curlers and nursing school pins.
Norman wrote of hospitals where patients filled the wards, corridors, lobbies, the verandas, then out into the lawns and nearby tennis courts. “There was so much blood that at one point, the nurses came to look at their labor with dark irony: the bloody dressings, they said, made them think of the bright poinsettias that so typified their paradise.”
The women fried weeds in cold cream that came in the Red Cross Kits, and had fantasies about cooking more festive meals, like “chicken a la king in paddy shells,” or toasted bread baskets. They took comfort in the fact that the worms in their breakfast oatmeal had been sterilized during the cooking.
Norman had expressed her diffidence in using the word “Angels” in the title. The term, she said, is used by men – not women – and “most of us find it denigrating, insulting and just plain silly.”
Men use the term “to remind women to sacrifice, to work long hours for low pay, and not complain. It is meant to idealize women, to push them to be perfect, because that is the kind of woman, the kind of nurse, men want.”
The American nurses in Bataan and Corregidor were not angels, she said. “They were human beings, as brave and as fearful as their male comrades, but after much thought, and a little prompting from my literary friends, I came to see the word ‘angel’ as a metaphor that married the conflicting ideas of bravery and compassion, heroism and care.”
“The nurses were also at war, but carried no guns…They fought fiercely to preserve life as everyone around them was bent on taking it. In that light, ‘Angels’ seems just right.”
The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap
It is estimated that up to 10,000 Filipinos and Americans died from torture, starvation, and disease during the trek, and that more perished during the 41 months in prison. The book also covers the trial and execution of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the Imperial Army, and the impact of the war on the soldiers from all sides after the war.
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