Elizabeth M. Norman (38 page)

“When we got to the beach, the Japanese started to fire,” said Nash. “Stray bullets were going in every direction. I covered the baby with a great big hat and I lay down on the sand over her. Later I ran across the beach with her and got into another amtrac.”
⁴³

Four hours later the entire party had crossed the bay to safety, and 2,136 internees and eleven navy nurses were in Mamatid, eating real food and thanking their liberators for their lives.

T
HE TWIN-ENGINE
C
-47’S
carrying the army nurses of Santo Tomas out of Manila circled over the city before it headed south to Leyte. Edith Shacklette, looking out a window at the battle-damaged city, spotted the sixty-acre campus where she and the others had spent three years as captives.

“Freedom is ours,” she wrote in her notebook.
⁴⁴

Sitting there, reflecting for a moment, the women said they felt lucky, and with good cause. Not one of them had been killed in battle. What was more, no one had starved to death, this in a prison camp where the death rate at the end was seven times that of civilian life. Finally, more than half their comrades in the Army Medical Department, some 750 physicians and enlisted men who had served with them on Bataan and Corregidor—these men were dead.
⁴⁵

As their plane island-hopped south the women tried not to think about their losses and were careful not to celebrate their luck, at least not out loud. At one airfield a crewman sprayed the cabin with DDT; he was sorry, he said, but the nurses might be carrying contagious bacteria. As the white mist filled the cabin someone joked she could hear the bedbugs dropping on the deck. At another stop they had doughnuts—“Manna from Heaven,” said Anna Williams—and coffee.
⁴⁶
At a third they sipped their first cold Coca-Colas in three years.

All along the way everyone seemed so friendly. Many of the nurses had not yet shaken off the dark psychology of survival and the lachrymose mood of the camp, and the bonhomie at first bewildered them.

“It’s astounding how everyone laughs all the time and is so good humored and carefree,” Shack wrote.
⁴⁷

In every port and at every airfield they saw long lines of ships and planes and huge stacks of supplies and equipment, and they were astounded. Much of the technology was new to the women, Rip Van Winkles in khaki who sat gawking at what the missing years had wrought. The massive stores of material also made them remember the long spring of 1942, staring out at Manila Bay for the relief convoy that never came.

When they finally arrived at the 126th Army General Hospital on Leyte, many of the seventy-one women were still seriously ill and needed
immediate treatment and rest. Maude Davison was in the worst shape; sixty years old, she was reeling from her intestinal obstruction and the aftereffects of starvation. Louise Anschicks and Myra Burris were recovering from prison camp surgeries. Frances Nash limped badly from beriberi and probably had an infected lower leg. Sally Blaine had malarial fever, chills and dehydration. Seven other women were so ill they were immediately admitted to a medical ward.

As for the rest, they were overwhelmed by the moment, by “real beds” with genuine inner-spring mattresses and clean, white sheets and steak dinners with all the trimmings, including peas, pineapple and tomato juice. (Afterward some of the women, laughing, said they hadn’t eaten meat in so long their jaws ached from all the chewing.) In a letter home, Shack wrote, “All this and heaven too.… I can’t write more—so tired—so happy.”
⁴⁸

So the group rested at the hospital for a week, catching up on the present and trying to recover from the past. They wanted to look like women again, like the women they used to be, attractive and well turned out. The staff nurses at the 126th, eager to be of service to their professional kin, stopped by with a lode of cosmetics.

“I feel like an old Model T taken in and rejuvenated—have heavy colored finger and toe nail polish, new lipstick to match and lovely cream,” Shack wrote.
⁴⁹

Phyllis Arnold, Rita Palmer and Cassie borrowed bathing suits and headed for the beach, but when they got there and disrobed, “we began to realize how horrible we looked,” Palmer said.
⁵⁰

The army issued them new uniforms, white seersucker for the summer and dark wool for the winter.

“We had never worn a uniform like this before nor had even seen one,” said one of the women. “We strutted and primped, bemoaning our loss of weight.… We hadn’t realized that there was still a very strong spark of female vanity in us [after] all those years of wearing the same shirts and skirts … during our internment.”
⁵¹

Doctors put the group through lab tests and physicals, making careful notes on their condition and the consequences of three years’ captivity. The physician examining Eleanor Garen found that her hemoglobin, red blood cells and white blood cells were normal. Her chest X ray was clear and there were no ova or parasites in her system. Her pulse and blood pressure were good and she had twenty-twenty vision in both eyes. But she had an enlarged liver, a tender abdomen, bouts of dysentery,
some bad teeth and was underweight by more than ten pounds. “Progress good,” the doctor wrote on her chart. “Feels well except tired.”
⁵²

And then the press arrived. Dozens of newspaper reporters and photographers, magazine writers and newsreel cameramen descended on the 126th and tried to turn a tale of duty, loyalty, professionalism and endurance into a heroic myth.

“One of the greatest ordeals American women ever have undergone,” declared the
San Francisco News.
⁵³
Lee G. Miller, a correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, wrote from Leyte, “The cumulative effect of a dozen interviews was a realization that the American female can be just a touch more than wonderful.… Why, they looked fresher and more like girls back home than the WACS and Red Cross workers around here.… The Japs weren’t putting out much of anything, aside from rice and an evil smelling sort of fish, although to give the devil his due they didn’t molest the nurses.”
⁵⁴

After a few days of this hyperbole or, in some cases, hysteria, the army finally had the good sense to move forty-nine of the women, those most ambulatory, to the 1st Convalescent Hospital, a secluded facility set up on one of Leyte’s beaches. There, grateful to be out of the public eye, Shack and the others settled down to rest:

To-nite we are in a tropical paradise!… It’s the tropics movie land asks for. The loveliest beach stretching for miles. About 50 yards in front of our
tents are breakers that would surpass Waikii [
si
c] … a harbor stretching for miles full of ships.… In the midst of pineapple palm groves, a clean
cot, a full stomach, and that luscious sound that only waves washing
against the sand can make—and that we never expected to hear again!
⁵⁵

So they sunbathed and swam in the surf. For the first time since 1941 they ate cookies and ice cream. At night in a private showing, they watched Fred Astaire take Ginger Rogers in his arms and dance across the screen.

Their only “work” was to sit for interviews with attorneys from the adjutant general’s office, which was collecting statements and testimony for war crimes trials. The women were eager to cooperate, and they spent hours providing thousands of details for the court.

“They just about know every eye tooth I have left,” Shack wrote.
⁵⁶

Later there were beer parties and jeep rides and dinners with generals on tables covered with white linen and silver.

Toward the end of the week, they donned their new Class A olive-green
uniforms—flown in from Australia especially for them—and stood smartly in formation in two ranks under the palms as Brigadier General Guy Denit, chief surgeon in the Southwest Pacific, announced that the women were being promoted one grade in rank. Then as each stepped forward he handed them battle ribbons won by those who served in the Pacific theater—and the Bronze Star for valor.
⁵⁷

Then on February 19, fifty-four of the women, and a few members of the press, boarded two C-54 aircraft and took off for the first leg of their long flight home. The others would soon follow on a hospital plane and link up with their comrades in Hawaii.

Their “homecoming flight,” as the military labeled it, touched down initially in Siapan, where the women had their first hamburgers, then they flew to tiny Kwajalein Island, where they were met by an old colleague, Juanita Redmond, who was assigned to escort the group home. Redmond had been evacuated from Corregidor on a PBY seaplane in 1942 and now here she was, standing on the runway, waiting to greet the women she had left behind. Some of the older nurses told “Red” they were happy to see her. “You look wonderful,” they said. Some of the others, however, perhaps too tired, too bitter for such gallantry, greeted her with silence or a sideways glance.
⁵⁸

After refueling at Johnson Island, the C-54’s continued to Hickam Field, Hawaii, where a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and where some of the nurses, overwhelmed by the feeling of the motherland beneath their feet, knelt down on the tarmac and kissed the ground.

During a layover in Hawaii, the women were given permanents, facials and manicures.

“We had tub baths,” said Bertha Dworsky. “And somebody found silk stockings for us.”
⁵⁹

The army issued each woman $150 advance pay, of the thousands owed them, then drove the newly minted first lieutenants to the post exchange where they bought pens, wristwatches, cigarette lighters, jewelry, perfume, purses and shoes.

Finally, forty-eight hours later, they took off for Hamilton Field, San Francisco. At last they were really headed Stateside, Mainland U.S.A., home.

[F
EBRUARY 16, 1945
, W
ASHINGTON
D.C., 12:07
P.M
.]

AM PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT OFFICIAL REPORT JUST RECEIVED STATES YOUR DAUGHTER SECOND LIEUTENANT ELEANOR M GAREN LAST REPORTED TO HAVE BEEN RESCUED BY OUR FORCES NOW ENJOYING A
BRIEF REST AND WILL BE RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES BY FIRST AVAILABLE AIR TRANSPORTATION FURTHER DETAILS WILL BE FORWARDED PROMPTLY WHEN RECEIVE
.

THE ADJUTANT GENERAL
.
⁶⁰

The South Bend
Tribune
had called her with the news several days before and now a reporter had arrived at 3001 Roger Street to listen to Lulu Garen talk about her daughter’s homecoming.

“How long do you think it will take her to fly from Manila to San Francisco?” she asked her interviewer. “I think I’ll plan to leave for the coast as soon as I know she is on her way. She can rest there with relatives and we’ll come home together when she is strong enough to make the trip.

“Do you think I could get a train reservation?” she went on. “I know things are pretty crowded now but maybe they’d let a mother travel to meet her daughter after all these long years of hoping.”
⁶¹

Chapter 16

“Home. We’re Really Home.”

T
HE WORLD WAS
still at war in February 1945, as four propeller-driven Skymasters carrying the nurses of Bataan and Corregidor made their way east across the Pacific to San Francisco and home. The war was going well, America and its allies were winning, but a lot of fighting and loss lay ahead. Before the final victory, thousands more soldiers, sailors and marines would be added to the rolls of the dead and the lists of the wounded.

Without public support, the government could not have asked for such sacrifice, and it kept its public relations machine, its propaganda effort, rolling right along with the convoys of men and materiel. The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor, with their unusual and dramatic story, were a public relations coup, and the government went to great lengths to exploit their homecoming.

Certainly most of the military planners who helped to stage the elaborate ceremony marking the women’s return were sincere in their desire to honor the nurses’ sacrifice, but it is equally clear that the government was keen to turn these “heroines” into recruiting icons, well-coiffed, smartly uniformed symbols of American womanhood serving their country and supporting the war.

For almost two weeks that winter, a committee of high-ranking planners from two army commands sat in daily conference, generating dozens of letters and directives and circulars on every detail of the reception. The four C-54’s carrying the nurses from Hawaii to Hamilton Field would taxi to a prearranged spot on the runway apron and form a kind of half square, in effect the backdrop and wings of a stage. Two officers would
board each plane and escort the nurses down the stairway to the tarmac and into a neat formation. Then there would follow addresses by the assistant surgeon general of the United States, the mayor of San Francisco and a representative of the city’s chamber of commerce. A band would play and flags would fly and a mob of reporters and photographers and newsreel cameramen would record the event for the world to see.