Pure Grit, page 6
NURSES AT BOTH HOSPITALS STARTED TO SEE symptoms of protein deficiency in soldiers’ wasting muscles and protruding bones. Only enough food remained for each soldier to eat a few mouthfuls. Then the food was gone. With no fresh water available on the front lines, thirsty soldiers drank whatever water they could find, then showed up at the hospital sick from bacteria and dehydrated from dysentery.
The wounded appeared barefoot, their uniforms in rags. Wide-eyed with dread, they told of the enemy charging them shouting, “Banzai! Banzai!”—Japanese for “Long live the Emperor.” Soldiers staggered into the hospital, laid down their rifles, and begged for food.
The last line of Filipino-American defense fragmented on April 8, three miles north of Hospital No. 2. The Japanese coiled for a final strike. The emaciated, outnumbered Filipino-American force would be pushovers. The Japanese knew it. The War Department in Washington, D.C., knew it. General MacArthur knew it. Still, he radioed from his headquarters in Australia, “There must be no thought of surrender.”
Army Nurse Anna Williams (no relation to Denny Williams) climbed the hill behind Hospital No. 2. “I wanted to see what was happening, because the guns were closer and closer, and the smoke was thick,” she said. “I’ll never forget the dejection and the sadness and the awful look on the men as they came along the road, retreating, covered in bandages and blood and dirt.”
“Quit worrying!” Josie Nesbit told herself. “Just accept what comes.”
CHAPTER 8
RETREAT TO THE ROCK
An American patient gets open-incision treatment. After running out of antitoxin for gas gangrene, doctors improvised. Allowing sunlight and oxygen to penetrate the wound destroyed the anaerobic bacteria consuming the flesh.
APRIL 8, 1942
Bataan Peninsula
The day came straight from hell—hot, never-ending, drenched with the smell of blood, and accompanied by erratic drumbeats of artillery fire and a discordant orchestra of rifle shots, groans, and cries of agony. When night fell at Hospital No. 2, Denny Williams had been on her feet in surgery for forty-eight hours with little to eat. She heard a medical officer swear. “Hell, it’ll have to be a surrender, or the worst massacre in history. . . . We haven’t anything left to fight with except coconuts and bamboo sticks.”
Colonel James O. Gillespie summoned Josie Nesbit and told her that General Wainwright had ordered the nurses to evacuate to Corregidor. “Tell your American nurses to get down here to my office by twenty hundred hours,” he said, “and only bring whatever they can carry in their hands.”
“What about my Filipino nurses?” Josie asked.
“Only the American nurses.”
Josie could not help remembering the reports of Chinese women raped and killed when the Imperial Army conquered the city of Nanking, and she worried about the Filipinas who called her Mama Josie.
Filipina nurse Gregoria Espinosa worked with the American nurses and became friends with Frankie Lewey.
“If my Filipino nurses don’t go,” she said, “I’m. Not. Going.”
Josie waited long minutes while Colonel Gillespie called Wainwright’s headquarters. “All right,” the Colonel finally told her. “All the nurses will go.”
Several minutes later, Ethel Thor and Denny Williams were among the nurses assisting doctors in the operating “room” when Josie walked in. “Take off your gloves and gowns,” she told them. “You’re leaving.” Ethel didn’t move.
“Now!” Josie said.
Hundreds of wounded men lay waiting for surgery. Ethel believed she had been put on earth for one reason: to serve others in need. Abandoning patients to the enemy devastated her. Most of the women were appalled at the order to leave, and refused to go. Josie made it clear they had no choice.
Many stayed with their patients until the last minute before going to pack. In her anguish over leaving, one nurse forgot the bracelet that served as her engagement ring. Another abandoned her underwear on a clothesline. One nurse threw wet laundry into a pillowcase to go, while another came along with curlers in her hair. A nurse left behind her beloved Bible and her copy of Emerson’s poetry. Others left letters, photographs, and souvenirs of happier times in Manila.
Denny’s husband, Bill Williams, had just been admitted to Hospital No. 2 that morning. She ran down the path to the officers’ ward, where he lay sick with malaria.
“We’re leaving,” she whispered. “It’s supposed to be a secret from the patients. Bill, I don’t want to go.”
“Of course you’re going,” he whispered.
“No. Do I have to go?”
“Yes, you have to go.” Neither of them could voice all the things they wanted to say. Denny kissed him and ran back through the darkness, arriving just in time to answer Josie’s roll call.
Frankie Lewey didn’t say good-bye to anyone. She hung her head, hiding tears as she carried her bag along the edge of the hospital, where the wounded lay among the trees. She kept her back to the patients she called her “boys.” That way, she told herself, “they won’t see me go.”
“Nurse . . .?” one called out.
Frankie paused.
“Nurse?”
She couldn’t ignore the soldier. She’d do what she could for him in these last moments. He wanted to talk. Told her his name, his hometown.
“Please take this,” he said, holding out a ring that had been his mother’s. He didn’t want the Japanese to get it.
“Take it,” he said. “Remember me.”
The ring felt heavy in Frankie’s hand. A weight she would carry forever.
AT HOSPITAL NO. 1 FRANCES NASH, HATTIE Brantley, and the other dozen nurses boarded a bus and trundled along the crowded coast road. American troops headed in the opposite direction, toward the enemy. Thousands of them trudged along in weary columns. Starving soldiers begged for food as the bus inched along. The sight was excruciating for the nurses, as they had nothing to give them and knew that the men would be Japanese prisoners the next day. Finally, the bus reached the Mariveles Harbor docks. The nurses squeezed into a launch and sailed for Corregidor.
THE EIGHTY-EIGHT NURSES FROM HOSPITAL No. 2 had more trouble reaching the docks, where they were scheduled to catch a boat at 2:00 A.M. The Army motor pool scrounged ambulances, staff cars, a bus, and trucks for the evacuation, but in the confusion some nurses were left to find their own transportation. Several ended up riding in a garbage truck and getting stuck in bomb craters along the way. Passing soldiers pushed them out. Filipino villagers, carrying their earthly goods and running from the Japanese, clogged the roads. Some pounded on the nurses’ bus, begging for a ride.
Two nurses had to hitch a ride when the car they were in broke down. Other nurses had to wait when their vehicles ran out of gas. One car stopped to let American troops march by. Midnight passed. Nurses heard soldiers calling out to one another in the night and small-arms fire in the jungle. The Japanese advanced close by, and nurses could hear them hollering “Banzai!” as shells arched overhead. Dynamite explosions filled the sky with thunder and flashes of fire, as U.S. troops demolished weapons, vehicles, and ammunition dumps to keep them from enemy hands.
BOOM!
The largest blast yet shook the earth. Nurses covered their aching ears. It seemed the whole world was going up in flames. One of the largest stocks of ammunition had blown just as a truck carrying a group of nurses approached.
Everything on wheels ground to a stop. Army Nurse Minnie Breese was sick with malaria and dysentery. Shaking with chills and fever, she climbed from the truck bed and lay next to the road without the strength to care whether she lived or died. It was at least an hour before the fire burned low and traffic moved again. Minnie’s friends helped her back into the truck.
On the morning of April 9, American officers pass through enemy lines along Bataan’s East Road. Their job is to locate a Japanese officer and deliver a message: The Americans wanted to surrender.
By now the convoy of nurses from Hospital No. 2 had fragmented into individual vehicles struggling to get to Mariveles. As a result, nurses arrived by different routes and at different times, and found their own transport across the water to Corregidor. A group including Ethel Thor arrived at about 5:30 that morning. The evacuation boat had left while it was still dark, to protect the nurses already on board from air attack. With dawn now breaking over the wharf, Japanese planes indeed began to bomb the area, making it more difficult for boats to dock, load, or depart. Ethel’s group sought cover in a Navy tunnel, where they found canned peaches, tomato juice, and corned beef left behind by U.S. forces.
When Sally Blaine’s group arrived, they saw no other nurses, but spotted a U.S. officer on the dock.
“Hey, you!” Sally yelled, running across the sand toward him. “Where’s the boat that the nurses are supposed to go over on?”
“It came and left.”
“What are we going to do?”
“How many are you?” he asked.
“Five.”
“I can take you.” The officer loaded the nurses into a small craft with an outboard motor.
As they sailed, the water appeared silvery gold in the calm of early morning. Sally looked at the sky and the water and thought it might be the last sunrise she’d see.
“We didn’t talk. During all that time we didn’t cry, scream, or carry on. You were quiet. You kept your fears to yourself.”
Seventy thousand American and Philippine men surrender unconditionally to the Japanese Imperial Army. It is the largest U.S. Army surrender in history. Bataan Peninsula, April 9, 1942.
JOSIE NESBIT DID NOT ARRIVE UNTIL AFTER 6:00 A.M., when Filipino-American forces on Bataan surrendered to the Japanese. She discovered Ethel’s group waiting for a boat and went in search of a telephone to call headquarters on Corregidor and request help. Collapsing with exhaustion, a number of the nurses slept. Others waited fitfully. Had they been abandoned?
Several hours passed before a boat came to take them across the bay. Japanese dive bombers attacked, shattering the dock just as the boat pulled away. Ethel and the others crouched low, huddling under canvas.
Except for Anna Williams. As they sped across the water, zigzagging to avoid falling bombs, Anna filed her nails. “There wasn’t anything else to do, and I wasn’t going to sit and moan.”
When they reached Corregidor, several nurses were too weak to get up the hill to the safety of Malinta Tunnel on their own. No worries, though; they leaned on their comrades.
“My God, look at them,” said a soldier.
“The fact we all got there and no nurse was lost is just a miracle,” Hattie Brantley said.
The first nurses to arrive on Corregidor from Bataan had piled two to a bunk, able to give in to their weariness for the first time in over three months.
By the time Millie Dalton made it to Corregidor, there were no beds. “So I lay down on the concrete floor with my helmet for a pillow, and I went to sleep. I was that exhausted.”
CHAPTER 9
HOLING UP ON CORREGIDOR ISLAND
The west entrance to Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor Island, with San Jose Barrio in the foreground. Tramway tracks run from the dock through the tunnel to carry personnel and supplies, c. 1937.
APRIL 1942
Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor Island
The Japanese could bomb day and night, but they could not blast through the three hundred feet of rock and soil above Malinta Tunnel. The eighty-six Army nurses, twenty-six Filipino nurses, and one Navy nurse on Corregidor were safe. And there was food—more and better than the women had eaten in six weeks.
Though the hospital was situated underground, its equipment and staff’s expertise rivaled any in the world. The hospital lay in a tunnel branch the length of a football field. One end opened to the outside, wide enough for two ambulances to drive in, where nurses met them for triage. Stretcher-bearers carried the wounded to the surgical wards located in eight smaller offshoots of the main hospital. Aboveground generators provided electricity, a cold-storage depot preserved food, and a chlorination plant ensured safe drinking water.
The subterranean network of corridors was like a small city, with areas for eating and sleeping, kitchen and laundry, a barber and general store. Off-duty Army officers in shirt-sleeves, Navy officers in shorts, enlisted men in jeans, and convalescents in white pajamas gathered at the canteen to listen to news on the radio, play cards, and exchange rumors.
The women settled in under the blue mercury-vapor lights, but they continued to worry about the men they had left on Bataan. They had no word from them. Neither did the American public, who would not find out what happened to the men who surrendered on Bataan for nearly two years.
The Japanese marched those American and Filipino POWs sixty-five miles north to Camp O’Donnell in the hot sun, with little food or water. No one knows for sure how many men died in the six days that came to be called the Bataan Death March—perhaps as many as twenty thousand. Another roughly forty thousand POWs are believed to have died in the sixty days after the men reached Camp O’Donnell.
The 8,800 patients at Hospitals No. 1 and No. 2 did not march to Camp O’Donnell. Two thousand Filipino patients were released by the Japanese to go home, but many were seriously wounded. Hundreds of their bodies were seen by villagers along the East Road, where they died or were killed. American patients remained in the Bataan hospitals for two months before being trucked to prison camps. Two out of every three American soldiers alive at the time of the Bataan surrender did not live to go home.
When the nurses came to Corregidor, twelve thousand people crowded the small island—seven thousand combat troops, two thousand civilians, and three thousand military administrators and medical personnel. Air raids drove everyone except the fighting men underground. People slept along each side of the tunnel on ammunition cases, cots, or the cement floor, where ambulances passed within inches of their heads. Civilians crowded into the subterranean barracks. Nurses’ quarters were in a tunnel next to the hospital.
A period drawing of Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor Island.
American soldiers being directed by a Japanese soldier. On the march to Camp O’Donnell, the Japanese shot, bayoneted, or beheaded men who fell behind or broke ranks to grab food or slurp water from buffalo wallows. Under surrender terms, the Japanese agreed to treat prisoners humanely, but they underestimated the number of POWs they would need to feed and transport.
While the Japanese bomb Corregidor, unidentified American nurses take a break and play cards in the underground tunnel.
Madeline Ullom began to feel like one of the rats that scurried about in the hot, stuffy tunnels. Burrowed under Corregidor, nurses lost track of day and night.
Red lights flashed, warning of air raids. Bombs fell, shaking the rock walls and ceiling, from the main entrance to the farthest lateral branch. Each blast released particles of concrete and clouds of dust, which the ventilation system, when it was working, only seemed to recycle. The stench of sweat, blood, disinfectants, anesthetics, overused latrines, and wounds with decomposing flesh could gag a person.
“It was like being in a steel bucket with somebody beating on the outside with a hammer,” said Hattie Brantley. When the electricity went out, corpsmen held flashlights for the surgical teams. “The darkness was . . . so thick, you could feel it.”
Walls and ceiling shook, medicine bottles toppled, bunk beds scooted. Most of the nurses remained calm and proficient under Maude Davison’s and Josie Nesbit’s supervision. April marched on in a suffocating haze. Food and medical supplies dwindled.
After they captured Bataan, the Japanese intensified their attack on the American battalions dug in on Corregidor’s beaches. Each raid sent hundreds of wounded to the hospital. Nurses remained professional, even when seeing friends and acquaintances coming in on the stretchers.
In the cramped hospital tunnels of Corregidor, neither the living nor the dying had privacy. The patient load increased; double-stacked beds became triples. Nurses climbed on the foot rails to care for men on the top tier and change the bedding. Then a bomb hit the laundry facility, and there were no more clean sheets. Fifteen hundred patients soon filled tunnels meant for five hundred.
Exhausted nurses battled their own illnesses: dysentery they contracted on Bataan and dengue fever. Sally Blaine suffered continuing bouts of malaria. Perspiration coupled with filth and malnutrition caused the women to break out in large puffy water blisters, which smarted, itched, and could turn into sores and become infected. Nurses who spent hours lifting and reaching likened the pain and misery to a plague.
When they had the chance, nurses slipped outside Malinta’s entrance to snatch a few minutes of fresh air. A quick glance at the sunrise, precious moments under the stars, or the feel of a breeze and sun on one’s cheeks helped them bear up. Frankie Lewey admitted to gazing over the water to the horizon, hoping to see the tall masts of ships arriving to rescue them.
Aerial attacks stopped in the evenings, and the chance of securing a little elbow room and a deep breath was hard to resist. As darkness fell on April 25, dozens of men gathered outside near the tunnel’s west entrance. When a shell hit close by, they ran for the tunnel. But the concussion slammed the iron entrance gate closed and jammed it. As the men pounded on the bars, yelling for help, another shell whistled down, exploding right at the tunnel entrance.
Nurses heard the men’s shrieks and sprinted to help. Through the smoke and dust they glimpsed chunks of flesh and bone scattered in the tunnel. The blast had propelled body parts through the slats of the jammed gate.
Patients recuperate outside Malinta Tunnel’s hospital lateral, Corregidor, 1942.
