Elizabeth M. Norman (13 page)

[March 8]
Rain drenched the beds and all our things under the trees this afternoon. Now it is sticky.… Cases of malaria increase day by day.… Several new rumors: One that a convoy has arrived; the second, that our fleet is waging a fight with the Japs somewhere between Guam and the Philippines.… Our quinine is running low. Wonder how much longer we’ll be able to carry on.

[March 11]
The song “The Old Gray Mare” keeps buzzing through my head. We had horse meat for supper.

[March 12]
The food is becoming worse. Caraboa stew.… Last night a group of us got together and had coffee and toast.

[March 14]
Malaria continues to claim the nurse corps.… We carry kerosene lamps painted blue through the wards at night.

[March 15]
Found worms in my oatmeal this morning. I shouldn’t have objected because they had been sterilized in the cooking and I was getting fresh meat with my breakfast.… I’m still losing weight and so are most of us.… I only have two pieces of underwear left.… Drugs are rapidly being used up. No new supplies have arrived. We need quinine terribly.
²⁹

Chapter 6

“There Must Be
No Thought of Surrender”

E
ven in peacetime when its ranks are filled with self-selecting volunteers, the military still serves as a kind of mirror of American society. Here in uniform are all kinds—the emotive pessimist (someone like Ruth Straub wearing her heart on her sleeve), the stoic (a Maude Davison, as unemotional as her male counterparts, focused only on the job at hand), the sentimentalist (Dorothea Mae Daley, swept up as much in the melodrama of war as its actuality), and the clear-eyed realist, impatient with daydreams and self-delusions, a woman like Eleanor Garen.

Single-minded and smart, Garen was an avid reader who understood the basics of politics, interservice rivalries and the hard choices that resulted from fighting in a two-front war. For months before Pearl Harbor Garen had been studying articles on foreign policy and the tenuous American position in the Far East. She knew that her country had been grossly unprepared for war and now would never be able to mount a rescue.

After the fall of Manila, Garen was assigned to the tunnel hospital on Corregidor where, almost every day, she and her fellow nurses received reports about the plight of their sisters on Bataan. When Maude Davison asked the women on Corregidor to help at the overburdened field hospitals across the bay, Garen immediately volunteered.

She landed on Bataan the first week in February, and when she saw the thousands of sick and wounded patients out in the open at Hospital #2, she knew she was right—the end was inevitable.

She kept her opinions to herself, of course—she was no Cassandra—pasted a smile on her face and set to work. But in a letter home that first
week in February, it was easy to read between the lines and discover her true mind, easy, in fact, to feel her worry.

Feb. 7, 1942

Dear Lauretta and Bill [her sister and brother-in-law]:

Write Mother and tell her I am fine. In fact I am in the best of health with all this fresh air, sunshine and plain wholesome diet. Although we can’t go swimming yet we have a marvelous creek in which to bathe. However I do sleep under a mosquito net but as yet I haven’t found a mosquito.… Please check with Mother about my car, whether the sale of it will pay off all my insurances, annuity and the Metropolitan Life. Have made my allotment out to you so if more money is needed for the insurance use it, otherwise bank it for me to have when I come back. Unless Mother needs it.… For goodness sake don’t feel sorry for me or worry. I’ll do OK by the Garens … if needs be.

Love to all
Eleanor
¹

A plain woman, roughly five feet seven inches with a round face and big blue eyes, Eleanor Garen was born March 7, 1909, in Elkhart, Indiana. She had three brothers, Dana, Reese and Paul, and one sister, Lauretta.

Eleanor was the brightest and most adventurous of the Garens. She learned to read early and became such a bookworm she would fill up her own library card, then take out books on her brothers’ accounts. She loved to read history and was so good at Latin that her classmates pushed her forward to recite the day’s declensions and conjugations while they sat secretly trying to catch up.

Outside of school she was a tomboy who liked to play baseball and fish for trout and bass on Lake Wawasee. Her brothers were her pals, and the four of them were usually in trouble. Once they tried to dig a swimming pool in the backyard. When that failed they took it into their heads to become parachutists and were perched in the family cherry tree with umbrellas, ready to leap into the void, when their father rushed out to stop them.

John Garen worked for the railroad and Lulu Garen ran a restaurant and boardinghouse. Sometimes Eleanor would help her mother and soon became friendly with the waitresses and chambermaids. These women,
mostly working class, talked often and freely of their lives—lives dominated by hard work, too many children and drunken husbands with heavy hands. Their utter dependency and their red welts and bruises left young Eleanor determined to lead an autonomous life. She wanted to be a nurse, self-possessed and, above all, self-reliant.

After she graduated from Chicago’s Wesley Hospital School of Nursing in 1931, she enrolled part-time as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago while she worked as a nurse in the university clinics. At first she saved her money to buy a car, but all that reading across all those years had given her an incurable case of wanderlust, and she set out for Europe to attend the International Council for Nurses convention in London. When she got home, she bought her car, but the payments, along with other bills, left her in debt. So in January 1941, hoping for a higher salary and another ticket overseas, she joined the Army Nurse Corps.

Her first post was Fort Benning, Georgia, where she worked in a surgical ward and tried to pay off some of her obligations.

July 29, 1941

Dear Mother,

Well, here it is the first of the month again and as usual I am broke and need help. Don’t you get tired of me bothering you?… Perhaps it may be the last time if this situation goes on into war.… Never again will I buy a car on time.… I believe I have learned my lesson and never again … will I incurr [
sic
] any more debts.

Have been swimming in the officers swimming pool. It is swell. In fact I have been so busy doing things I haven’t had time to think. This one Major that I met is lots of fun and for the last 2 weeks he had been taking me to dinner every night.… Last week we drove 90 miles just to go swimming in a natural spring and to have dinner in another place.

You must think that I am doing a lot of running around but then the truth is that I never know but what some day there will be orders for me and I will have to sweat it out at some hot army post in South America. Or there is the Philippines also and I would not be surprised to find myself there some day in the future. I don’t mean to alarm you but … you read the paper more than I do … so you know the situation.

I will write to you when I [am transferred] to [Camp Livingston, Louisiana]. Don’t worry, for it is too late now unless you want to go insane. We are in for some trouble with Japan.

Your daughter
Eleanor

A short time later she got the news that one of her colleagues at the hospital had been injured in a riding accident and that Eleanor was to take her assignment—in Manila.

On October 4, 1941, Garen boarded the U.S.S.
Holbrooke
in San Francisco to set sail for Manila Bay.

Dear Mother,

Well today is the day of sailing. We are leaving at noon.… I will write you my next letter from Hawaii. There are to be two ships going to the Philippines with over 20 nurses and many troop[s]. Give my love to all.

The voyage was filled with rumors of war, but most of her shipmates soon discounted such talk. Japan would never challenge American might, they said. The United States had won the Great War and overcome the Great Depression. Certainly they could face down a small island nation with its ancient codes and backward ways. For her part, Eleanor was preoccupied by the adventure ahead, the excitement of a new and exotic place.

Oct. 25, 1941

Dear Mother,

Well the ships made it into the Manila Bay and we docked about 7
P.M
. on Thursday. The weather is warm and the … streets dirty. Cabs cost only 5 cents and 10 cents for a ride. Clothes are about the same price.

Love
Eleanor
²

Then came war and in early February 1942 Eleanor Garen found herself in the middle of a sprawling jungle hospital.

She worked nights, in charge of Ward 14—some three hundred patients with tropical diseases.

During the lull she passed her off-duty hours sitting on a wooden box with her back against a tree at the crossroads between the nurses’ latrine and the creek where they bathed.

She was popular with her colleagues, a cheerful woman who wore her brown pigtails tied with red ribbons, so happy-go-lucky, they said. She watered the flowers that grew outside the nurses quarters, or liked to stand around the stove in the shed drinking coffee and chatting with her bunkmates.

What she knew of politics and foreign policy she kept to herself, choosing to mask her concern with cheerfulness, her intelligence with small talk. Years later she told an interviewer that more than anything else, she wanted to be part of the group, and in the way women sometimes have with one another, she played the part of the cooperative optimist and kept her doubts and growing melancholy to herself.

T
HE
J
APANESE WERE
well aware of the shortages in the allied ranks and the deteriorating condition of the American and Filipino army. Japanese intelligence officers knew that MacArthur’s troops could barely hold their positions at the lower end of the peninsula. Captured GI’s revealed that they were down to one solid meal a day, and Japanese patrols spotted American soldiers foraging for caraboa, bananas, rice—anything to eat.
³

Meanwhile General Homma’s army grew stronger and stronger. Fresh troops from Shanghai, new squadrons of planes and artillery pieces from Japan had reached the Japanese 14th Army that spring. And now they were ready to renew their attack. A quartermaster officer on Corregidor, sensing the peril, warily looked across the two-mile channel at Bataan and wrote in his diary, “It looks like something may happen over there. It’s been too damn quiet to be comfortable.”
⁴

By March malaria was epidemic. (On March 9 alone, 290 malaria patients were admitted to one of the field hospitals.) Stocks of quinine were low, and with the food ration reduced to less than one thousand calories a day, malarial patients had tremendous difficulty fighting the disease. Hundreds of men with dysentery and nutritional edemas showed up every day for treatment. The staff began to notice that the
soldiers’ muscle tissue was shrinking and atrophying, a sign of severe protein loss.

The desperate battle in the Philippines captured the country’s attention. After Pearl Harbor, America needed a victory, or at least evidence that the country could mount a decent defense. And that fight was being waged on Bataan.

Life
and
Newsweek
magazines carried headlines declaring,
STILL HOLDING
and
BATTERED BATAAN
. The editors of the
Saturday Review
published a ringing tribute to the beleaguered force.

Bataan! The world is but an island
.
This the brave knew …
They fought and fell, not for our promises
,
Not for victory, but for the day
That would give the future, and kill the enemy.
⁵

MacArthur turned out his own brand of propaganda, trying to convince his troops all was not lost:

10 March 1942

 … All elements of the Philippine Department, operating under conditions that imposed the utmost hardship upon officers and men, under continuous aerial bombardment, performed prodigies far beyond reasonable expectations, in the execution of its mission … making possible the magnificent resistance of the I and II Philippine Corps on the battle positions.

By Command of General MacArthur
⁶

Nevertheless a kind of fatalism crept into the ranks. Even Josie Nesbit, who fussed and brooded about every nurse and every patient in the seventeen wards under her charge, remembered a moment in March when she accepted the inevitable. Quit worrying! she told herself. Just accept what comes.
⁷

In the late evening of March 11, a day after his communiqué exhorting his troops to keep up the fight, General MacArthur, along with his wife, Jean, their son, Arthur, and the boy’s Cantonese amah boarded patrol torpedo boat 41 at Corregidor’s north dock and, along with other key members of MacArthur’s staff, began their escape to Australia.