In December 1941, nearly 100 American women were already at work in the Philippines when the Japanese bombers arrived.
They were nurses. Army and Navy both. Some had been posted there for months. A few had arrived just weeks before Pearl Harbor.
Within hours of the December 8th attacks on the islands, they were triaging wounds by flashlight.
There was no orderly evacuation. There was no rescue plan that included them.
As Japanese forces advanced across Luzon, the nurses moved with the retreating army into the Bataan Peninsula. They set up open-air wards in the jungle, under the trees, because the buildings were already full. Malaria hit the patients. Then it hit the staff. They treated dysentery, shrapnel wounds, burns, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from working a 12-hour shift on half rations and then doing it again.
Bataan fell in April 1942.
The nurses who remained were pulled back to the island fortress of Corregidor, where they worked inside the Malinta Tunnel, a long concrete corridor blasted through the volcanic rock. The tunnel shook with every shell that hit the island above. Patients lay on cots a few feet apart. The nurses moved between them in the dark, between bombardments, doing what they could.
Corregidor fell on May 6, 1942.
At that point, most military personnel became prisoners of war. The nurses were no exception. They were interned at Santo Tomas, a civilian internment camp in Manila that had been a university. Hundreds of civilians were already there. The conditions were crowded and, over time, they became desperate.
Food was the slow emergency. Early in the internment there was enough, barely. By 1944 the rations had been reduced to a level that was clinically insufficient. Prisoners were losing weight that they could not afford to lose. The nurses, trained to read bodies, watched it happen in the people around them and felt it happening to themselves.
They still ran the camp hospital.
They still treated the sick, organized the ward rotations, kept the records. They did this for nearly three years, through the stages of deprivation that the camps passed through as the war ground on.
A group of nurses was also held at Los Banos, another camp south of Manila, where conditions grew even harsher in the final months of the occupation.
Liberation came in early 1945, as American forces returned to the Philippines. The rescue of the Los Banos internees in February 1945 involved an airborne assault and a coordinated amphibious crossing that freed more than 2,000 prisoners, including some of the nurses, in a matter of hours.
The Santo Tomas camp was reached by American armor in early February 1945 as well. The nurses who walked out had endured captivity for roughly three years.
When they returned to the United States, they were thin, quiet, and largely unrecognized.
The story that the public knew about the Philippines was the Bataan Death March, which had claimed the lives of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers after the peninsula fell. That story was real and it was enormous. But the nurses had their own story running alongside it, and it did not get the same telling.
They had not broken under the pressure of combat conditions. They had not abandoned their patients when the situation became hopeless. They had worked, with shrinking supplies, in a tunnel under an island being bombed into rubble, and then they had spent three years in captivity and still come home.
Nearly all of them survived.
The Army eventually gave them formal POW status and the recognition that came with it, but it took time and it took effort from the women themselves.
Historians and writers have returned to their story in the decades since, and each telling tends to surface it briefly before it sinks again into the general haze of wartime detail.
© Daughters of Time
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