Elizabeth M. Norman (37 page)

Santo Tomas had become a kind of staging area and artillery position and central dispensary rolled into one. The army sent in more doctors, medics and nurses. Word arrived that many of the other prison camps had also been freed, and some of the military POW’s began to show up at Santo Tomas with information about the husbands and boyfriends of many of the women in camp.

At midmorning on Wednesday, February 7, General Douglas MacArthur came through the front gates. Military police ushered the supreme commander and his retinue through the crowd and up a staircase in Main Building to the rooms on the second floor where the army nurses, the women he had abandoned on Corregidor, were waiting to greet him. No doubt some were bitter—thousands of veterans of MacArthur’s command had suffered horribly at the hands of their captors and many held the general responsible for their travail—but in that first blush of freedom, old antipathies faded. “Dugout Doug,” as many had called him, had kept his promise; he had returned, and now Edith Shacklette, standing there in her bathrobe, “nude as a Jay-bird otherwise,” on an impulse “up and kissed” the general on the cheek.
³⁰

T
HE BATTLE FOR
the city was now being waged with bloody results. The Japanese were entrenched south of the Pasig River, and the fortified campus of Santo Tomas became a natural target for their big guns. Just after MacArthur departed, the enemy started to lob shells into the crowded compound. Some of the incoming rounds exploded in the Dominicans’
garden and among the remaining shanties. Later Main Building, crowded at the time with internees, took a direct hit.

“We had a lot of casualties,” said Anna Williams.
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Ten internees, including two teenagers, were killed and a score of others injured. The new round of bloodletting and death muted the euphoria of the moment.

“Having so many casualties come in during the liberation,” said Jeanne Kennedy, “well, that put us back down for a little while.”
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Among the dead was Dr. Walter Foley, a minister who often helped out at the hospital. His wife, Mary Foley, another favorite of the nurses, was badly mauled by shrapnel. When this news reached the nurses, Sally Blaine rushed to Mrs. Foley’s side.

“I went up to her room, went up to speak with her,” Blaine said. “I was going to ask her if I could do anything for her. I looked at her and saw she lost her arm [severed by a shell fragment at the right shoulder]. I really lost my composure there and I couldn’t speak. She said, ‘Sally, you know me? I’m Mrs. Foley’—I always called her ‘Mrs. Foley.’ I said, ‘Of course, I know you.’ And she said, ‘Where’s Frances Helen [her teenage daughter]?’ I said, ‘She’s over here.’ So Frances Helen went up to her mother and [Mrs. Foley] said, ‘How is Daddy?’ I knew Mr. Foley had died [but, obviously, his wife did not]. This little girl, who weighed about 90 pounds, said, ‘Mother, Daddy is all right. Don’t you worry about Daddy one minute. He’s all right now.’ Then the girl turned around and came back to me. I said, ‘Frances Helen, do you really know about your father?’ She said, ‘Yes, I know—I know he’s dead, but I didn’t want Mother to know it yet.’ She was fourteen, fifteen, at the most. Oh God!”
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All night the artillery boomed, and the nurses sat on their win-dowsills in Main Building and watched Manila burn. Many thought back to Bataan, of course, the sound of the big guns, the fires in the night. In the days that followed they worked six-hour shifts, surgeries, mostly, some three hundred of them. Off duty they tried to sleep and eat—oh, how they ate!

“To-nite! Colonel Hall brought the operating room force 4 big cherry pies,” Edith Shacklette wrote in her diary. “We ate it with cream on top. Then I had my big slug of bourbon. If my stomach stands this I guess I’m o.k.”
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On February 9 more help arrived—one hundred army nurses from the States. The women of Santo Tomas, gaunt and haggard, stood wide-eyed and open-mouthed as their colleagues, flush with good health, climbed down from open trucks. Standing next to the Angels, the replacements
seemed so wholesome, so sturdy, so full of life. Their skin was pink, not the pasty gray of prison camp, and their hair was soft and rich with color and curls. The Battling Belles told one another they looked like grandmothers, women weathered by the exigencies of time and unhappy circumstance.

Now, of course, with replacements on the job, the Angels were free to think about their future. Sally Blaine, worrying about what might be ahead, wandered off by herself, unable to sort out her emotions. An army major happened to spot her walking alone and, noticing the look of sorrow on her face, he approached and put his arm around her shoulders.

“Aren’t you one of our girls?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to go home?”

It had been so long since she had allowed herself to think of Bible Grove, Missouri, and her mother’s Sunday dinners, the question rattled her prison-camp reserve. And for the first time in years, Sally Blaine broke down and cried.
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The next day word spread that the nurses would be the first group to leave Santo Tomas, and they quickly began to tie up loose ends. Cassie, Rita Palmer and Swish Zwicker sought out Little Cassie and said good-bye. She was seventeen now, self-reliant and strong.

Cassie said, “You take care of yourself, kid.” Then the nurse felt a lump in her throat and tears began to well up in her eyes.
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Others stole off quietly for one last embrace with their lovers, and one woman, Bertha “Charlie” Dworsky, gave in to an impulse and decided to get married. That night at 7:00
P.M.
, with a half hour’s notice to her friends, “Charlie,” as everyone called her, became the wife of internee John Henderson, and every nurse in camp not on duty attended the ceremony in the university museum chapel.
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For many of the women the wedding was the fulfillment of a common dream, the dream of a husband and a home, the desideratum of a “normal” life. But it signaled a kind of loss as well, the disbandment of their unit, the last assembly of the Battling Belles of Bataan. Never again would they take their identity—their strength, spirit and character—from the group. They would never need one another in the same way, never require the kind of trust, loyalty and self-sacrifice that so ennobled them, that made them seem bigger and somehow more significant. They had survived and in surviving they had given the best of themselves.
From now on, only memory, and perhaps a longing for what they had lost, would bring them together.

O
N
F
EBRUARY 12
, classrooms 38, 39, 40 and 41 on the second floor of Main Building were noisy with packing and good-byes. The packing went quickly—a few cotton dresses, some shorts, worn khaki blouses and skirts, a cup, a spoon, a little unfinished needlework, that’s all. Throw it in a bag, take a long last look at the
bejuco
and the bedbugs. Peggy Greenwalt carefully folded the 12th Regimental Quartermaster flag that Colonel Frank Kriwanck had given her the day Corregidor fell. She was going to keep her promise now and carry it home.
³⁸

At 10:20
A.M.
, under a blazing sun and clear sky, the sixty-six army nurses, along with civilian nurse Denny Williams, dietitians Ruby Motley and Vivian Weisblatt, physiotherapist Brunetta Kuehlthau and Red Cross field director Marie Adams climbed into two open trucks at the front of Main Building. Three of the women helped sixty-year-old Maude Davison, now extremely weak from an intestinal obstruction, settle down on the wooden seat next to them.

Hundreds of internees and American troops surrounded the vehicles. They shouted adieu and bon voyage and good cheer. Dressed in fresh khaki blouses, skirts and overseas caps, the women at least looked crisp and clean, military. The drivers started the engines and the crowd parted to make a path. Slowly the vehicles began to roll down the esplanade. Some of the women looked back at Main Building, at its clock and cupola and large white cross, then the trucks picked up speed and before the women could turn forward again, they had passed through the front gates to freedom.

T
HE FIGHTING CONTINUED
across hundreds of miles of battlefield on Luzon, and the enemy gave ground slowly, particularly in the southeast at Los Banos, where some 2,100 internees, eleven navy nurses among them, were still starving at the hands of their captors.

Red Harrington, Laura Cobb and their fellow prisoners at Los Banos were living on five hundred grams of unhusked rice a day, nothing else. When a desperate few tried to sneak out for food, the camp’s executive officer, Lieutenant Sadaki Konishi, issued a warning that such miscreants would be shot, but the hungry sometimes know no fear, or are driven to
discount it. Pat Hill, an employee of Marsman Mining Company, slipped under the wire one night and was returning with some pigs when guards shot him in the back and chest. Later George Louis, a manager with Pan American Airways, was wounded in the shoulder while creeping along the fence line. Some of the internees rushed to his side to help him, but Konishi and the guards pushed them back. For two hours Louis lay bleeding to death, then, perhaps impatient, Konishi handed a guard his pistol and the guard put a bullet in George Louis’s head.

It is likely that the allies had intended to liberate Los Banos along with the other camps—American commanders knew the prisoners were starving—but intelligence agents estimated the Imperial Army had at least six thousand troops in the province, too many to overcome with a full-scale assault. The answer, they concluded, was a raid, a foray into the camp to swoop up the captives and spirit them to safety.

MacArthur turned to Major General Joseph Swing, commander of the 11th Airborne Division, to plan the raid. Swing’s strategy was simple but tricky: an infantry battalion would stage a diversionary assault, a ruse, on a nearby bridgehead while army paratroopers and local guerrillas overwhelmed the camp garrison, then amphibious tractors would move into position to carry the internees away. Los Banos was 42 miles from Manila and twenty miles behind enemy lines, near the shores of Laguna de Bay; the allies had to strike quickly with a small force, grab the internees and get out before the enemy had a chance to close in behind them.
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Success depended on timing, and surprise. Swing guessed that the best time to attack was in the morning, around seven o’clock, when the Japanese were doing their daily exercises.

On the night of February 22, some three weeks after the liberation of Santo Tomas, an American army reconnaissance platoon crossed Laguna de Bay in canoes and rendezvoused with guerrilla units near Los Banos. Along the shore of the bay fifty-four amphibious vehicles maneuvered into position. A reinforced infantry battalion was poised at a spot along Highway 1. And at Nichols Field in Manila, nine C-47 aircraft carrying a company of paratroopers lifted off the runway and headed for Los Banos. Just before seven in the morning the allies made their first move.

Amphibious tractors set up a road block to prevent Japanese reinforcements from reaching the camp, and the infantry battalion staged its diversion.

At the time Red Harrington and two other nurses were finishing up the night shift at the camp hospital. The Japanese guards had just started
their daily calisthenics. The hospital was quiet; Red was preparing dressings, old rags washed out and hung up to dry, when she heard a drone above. She looked skyward and, startled, saw a large white parachute with a dark object attached, drifting down about a hundred yards on the other side of the barbed wire.

Gosh, she thought, they’re dropping supplies and they’re missing us.
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When she looked more closely, the object began to move. Then came the pop of gunfire and the crack of small explosions.

“Oh, God,” said another nurse, “please don’t let our boys get shot!”
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The internees scurried for cover or dropped to their stomachs in the dirt. Quickly the paratroopers overwhelmed a pillbox outside the fence and killed its occupants. Meanwhile on the other side of the camp, Filipino guerrillas and army reconnaissance rangers rushed the front gate with grenades and bazookas, surprising the Japanese troops in the middle of their calisthenics. Some of the enemy broke in the direction of the internees’ barracks, but the raiders took aim and gunned them down. In less than fifteen minutes, the raiding party had killed more than tenscore of the enemy and had put the rest to rout.

There was little time to celebrate; the Japanese were sure to launch a counterattack. So when the amtracs arrived, the soldiers loaded the old, the sick, the women with children and the casualties from the raid—two GI’s dead, three wounded—into the vehicles and away they went. Everyone else was ordered to follow on foot, roughly a mile and a half to the bay. As the column headed for the water, a rear guard put the camp to the torch.

“I looked around and the whole place was on fire,” said Peg Nash. “I didn’t even care. We all felt the same way.”
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The column moved quickly toward the water’s edge. Across the bay was the town of Mamatid, safely in allied hands. All the Americans had to do was reach it.

The nurses rode the amtracs, tending the sick and wounded. Peg Nash and Edwina Todd each cradled a newborn infant in their arms; they had taken the babies from the nursery when the shooting started and now were helping the mothers who were too weak to tend them.