Elizabeth M. Norman (10 page)

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are gray
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
So don’t take
,
My sunshine away.”
¹⁶

And sometimes they would wade over to a tree that had a massive root growing from the bank into the stream, a natural water slide that set them laughing and giggling, even as the sounds of gunfire echoed down the road.

Quickly the women learned the ways of the jungle. In their al fresco quarters they put tins of water under each leg of their beds to keep the ants from migrating up and under their sheets. They grew accustomed to falling asleep with monkeys chattering in the stumps overhead. Tree branches served as their valets, jungle vines as clothes hangers.

Everyone hated the rats. War seemed to make them especially avaricious. At night the rats would come out in force, crawling over the recumbent bodies asleep under the trees. One night Josie Nesbit was awakened by a blood-curdling scream from the nurses quarters. The Japs have finally broken through, she thought. As it turned out, a mammoth rat had worked its way into a nurse’s bed and had nuzzled her.

E
VERY VENUE IN
the large hospital had its own routine.

In the operating room two nurse-anesthetists poured a potent barbiturate, pentobarbital sodium, onto pieces of cotton, then held the cloth
over a patient’s nose to sedate him. Other women assisted at surgery, managing the instruments, irrigating the wounds, sopping up the blood. In the moments between patients, they would roll bandages or patch surgical gloves and resterilize them. As they worked they listened to the sounds of war—the bombs falling, the artillery and antiaircraft guns firing, the moans and cries of the wounded. Ethel Thor, a redhead from Tacoma, Washington, was assigned to circulate among the operating tables to make sure the pace of the surgery kept up with the flow of patients. Sometimes, however, the surgery became frenzied and Ethel would intervene to stop a doctor from cutting. In their eagerness, it seemed, some physicians had a habit of trying to debride—or slice away—dead tissue from burns and shrapnel wounds before the Novocain had taken hold. Even for Thor, an experienced nurse, the screaming was too much to bear.

At the eye, ear, nose and throat clinic, nurses worked with doctors to repair broken eyeglasses so the troops could see to shoot. At the dental clinic they helped reconstruct mouths torn and shattered by bullets and shrapnel or, when the fighting was hand to hand, as it often was, by rifle butts or bayonets.

Everyone—doctors, nurses, orderlies and attendants—often worked all day and all night.

“I heard not a single complaint about long hours and I cannot recall a single instance where there was any personal grievance among the officers, nurses or enlisted men,” wrote Colonel Duckworth. “Many of us felt that the best work of our lives had been done here.”
¹⁷

Chapter 5

Waiting for the Help
That Never Came

T
HE ALLIES FACED
two enemies on Bataan, the Japanese with their bombs, bullets and long bayonets, and a second adversary, more powerful and unforgiving than any army that has ever taken the field, Nature.

If Nature had not opposed them, the men and women of the United States Armed Forces Far East might have been able to hold the desolate and forlorn Bataan peninsula much longer than they did, stalemating General Homma’s army and making the Japanese pay a heavy price in blood for their imperial dream of conquest. But Nature, in the form of hunger and disease, helped the enemy, and after that the battle for Bataan became a crying game.

N
ATURE CAME AT
them in the night, an army of female anopheline mosquitoes carrying a host of deadly parasites. When a mosquito punctures the skin of her victim with her teeth, she pumps saliva into the puncture wound, and in that saliva is the parasite called plasmodium, commonly known as malaria. An anopheline may have as many as 5,000 to 100,000 malaria sporozites in her salivary glands. Once in the human bloodstream the parasites invade the red blood cells, reproducing inside the cells again and again until the cell membranes burst, spilling the disease into the bloodstream and sending the victim into paralyzing paroxysms of fever and chills. One species of plasmodium, falciparum malaria, causes blood cells to adhere to one another and clog the capillaries, and it is this clogging that deprives parts of the body of oxygen. If this takes place in the brain, as it often does, the victim falls into a coma, and if the
clogging paralyzes an internal organ like the kidneys or the liver, death often follows.
¹

On Bataan, malaria was epidemic. In a postwar report, Colonel Wibb Cooper, chief medical officer in the Philippines, found that malaria

soon became the primary cause of admission to clearing stations and its incidence rose steadily until by March 1st it reached 500 cases per day. By April 1st the rate was approaching 1,000 cases per day and the shortage of quinine [the only drug then available to treat the disease] was so acute that the issue of the drug was based on an allowance of but eight grams per case [hardly enough to effect a cure].
²

At first, the doctors and nurses on Bataan took preventative doses of quinine, but when supplies began to dwindle, they stopped and soon came down with the disease. The commander of Hospital #2 estimated that half his personnel had malaria. (To Josie Nesbit, everyone looked ill.) A surgeon standing over a patient with a scalpel might suddenly start to shake violently with malarial chills. A nurse dressing a wound might begin to swoon with malarial fever. When Sally Blaine became bedridden with malaria, she set herself on a cot in the middle of her ward and directed the work of her staff from there. Lucy Wilson, an operating room nurse dizzy and weak with the disease, found a way to wedge an arm in a space near her operating table to steady herself during surgery. “It was with great reluctance that the nurses reported off duty ill,” wrote Josie Nesbit. “They knew the need … to care for the hundreds of sick and wounded men.”
³
It wasn’t long, in other words, before the nurses were nursing one another.

Dysentery was also endemic. Flies from the open pit toilets were contaminating the food and water. “We had to eat when the air was thick with flies, usually waving with one hand while eating with the other,” said John R. Bumgarner, a doctor at Hospital #2.
⁴

The effects of malaria, dysentery, dengue fever and half a dozen other conditions were aggravated by the growing problem of malnutrition. The troops were hungry and every day, Colonel Cooper watched them grow weaker and less able to resist the diseases that were consuming them.

[By the end of February 1942, two months after the fall of Manila, the army on Bataan was down] to only about 1,000 calories [per person] per day. The operation of a defense in a mountainous jungle terrain which required
hand carrying of supplies over difficult trails and the preparation of positions required a high energy output per man that can be conservatively estimated at not less than 4,000 calories per day. [The men’s body fat dropped to dangerously low levels and their muscle mass shrank] with attendant weakness, loss of endurance, and nutritional edema [grotesque and painful swelling]. There was a serious shortage of both protein and vitamins.… All livestock on Bataan, including horses and ponies, were slaughtered and issued. Clinical and incipient beriberi was not only universal by April 1st but in combination with malnutrition and nutritional edema was the cause of the hospitalization of thousands of cases. On April 9th … there was in Bataan only enough food to make one issue of a half-ration [a few mouthfuls and all the food was gone].
⁵

Curiously, through all this—the malaria, the amoebic dysentery, the starvation diet, the intense combat—through it all there was only a handful of men who suffered from battle fatigue, “shell shock,” as it was known in World War I, or, as it is called today, post-traumatic stress disorder. Wibb Cooper was convinced these “cases were few in number [six or eight] because … there was no haven for retreat,” no safe place to get away from the fighting “and everyone knew that.”
⁶

I
N LATE JANUARY 1942
, the Japanese launched two new offensives. One, from the South China Sea, was intended to capture the port of Mariveles on the tip of Bataan and cut off supplies from Corregidor. Meanwhile one thousand Japanese infantrymen tried to sneak through a gap in the allied line that stretched across the peninsula. The fighting was fierce, from the bamboo thickets near the coast to the thickly wooded foothills of the interior. For a while American and Filipino troops managed to hold their positions, but casualties on both sides were high.

To the Americans, the captured or dead Japanese soldiers looked robust; the enemy carried individual water filters, medical kits, ample supplies of food. This apparent plenty galled the deprived dogfaces. Frank Hewlett, a United Press reporter covering the Bataan campaign, summed up the mood of the troops in a poem he titled “The Battling Bastards of Bataan”:

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan:
No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam
,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces
,
no rifles, no guns, no artillery pieces
,
And nobody gives a damn.
⁷

The nurses, showing both solidarity and a sense of humor, began to refer to themselves as the “Battling Belles of Bataan.”
⁸

The Japanese offensives left hundreds dead and wounded, and since the battles had taken place in remote areas of jungle and on inaccessible slopes, the allied casualties were slow to reach the jungle hospitals, often lying for days not far from where they fell. By the time they were carried into the receiving wards, their wounds were suppurating with infection, crawling with maggots or, worst of all, bubbling with the scourge of gas gangrene.

Bacillus Welchii
, the bacteria that causes gas gangrene, has ravaged every army. The contagious organism, which thrives in dirt contaminated with the manure of domestic or wild animals, finds its way into open wounds and works its way deep into the muscles where its enzymes devour blood and tissue, giving off a sickeningly sweet odor and leaving tiny gas bubbles in their wake. If these wounds are not drained quickly, the infection spreads, and when that happens, limbs swell to an enormous size and surgeons are forced to amputate the bloated extremities or lose the patient to systemic shock.
⁹

At both field hospitals there were so many cases of gas gangrene the staff set up separate facilities to deal with the infection, and no one was eager to work there.

“The gangrene ward [was] on a low hill away from the hospital sheds,” said Juanita Redmond. “The putrid odor, the ugly exposed wounds, the monstrous limbs where the infection had not yet been cut out, the agonized moans of ‘Take it off, please take it off,’ made it a place to avoid when one could.”
¹⁰

Short on bacillus antitoxin, the only effective cure, the medical staff tried to improvise. Nurses would double their efforts to keep the wounds clean and free from flies. At first they used sulfa powder to control the infection, but that too soon became scant. Then, a surgeon from Hospital #1 pioneered a new treatment: he made deep incisions in the infected muscle, debrided dead tissue, removed pieces of bone and metal fragments, then swabbed the area with hydrogen peroxide; afterward he left the incisions open but covered the wounds with mosquito netting and ordered patients to be set in direct sunlight. He guessed that oxygen in the air would destroy the anaerobic bacteria consuming the patient. And he
was right. Within twenty-four hours nurses were reporting pulse rates and blood pressure readings near normal. This sun cure, wrote correspondent Melville Jacoby in
Time
magazine, “saved a large number of arms and legs.”
¹¹

M
ELVILLE
J
ACOBY AND
his wife, Anna Lee Jacoby, a former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scriptwriter, covered the Bataan campaign for
Time
and
Life
. In some ways their reports were typical of the early news coverage of the war. The country needed heroes and the press needed melodrama, so in World War II, as in all other wars, truth became the first casualty.

One of their accounts from Bataan had all three thousand patients at Hospital #2 living in tents, when in fact the men were out in the open, often on the ground. In another account, Jacoby reported “doctors probe wounds for bullets and shell fragments … and also bet on the type of fragments they will dig out of wounds. Among their finds (all made in the U.S.): parts of Ford automobiles; nuts and bolts. Out of one soldier’s body came a Singer sewing machine screw-driver.”
¹²
There are no records, testimony or firsthand accounts to validate Jacoby’s report, but likely such inventions found their way into print as a message to all those prewar pacifists who had supported the sale of scrap metal to the Japanese.