Elizabeth M. Norman (39 page)

S
OMETIME AFTER NOON
on Saturday, February 24, 1945, the C-54’s carrying the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor were beginning their initial approach to Hamilton Field. For the women on board it had been a long journey—thirty-seven hours’ flying time across some 7,500 miles of Pacific Ocean. On the final thirteen-hour leg from Hawaii, most had slept, but now, sensing the end of their travels, they began to stir. “As one plane neared the California coast, the excitement mounted,” wrote a pool reporter on the flight.

One blond girl burst into the cabin from the pilot’s compartment and cried: “I see California!”

Almost all the nurses spontaneously began singing: California here I come …

When the plane’s wheels touched the runway, a great simultaneous sigh went through the place and the nurses said:

“Home. We’re really home.”

And one of them added, “I never expected to see it again.”
¹

Their uniforms were too large and they were tired and nervous (“every girl wore a tremulous, red-lipped smile” was how the Associated Press described their demeanor
²
) but they were glad to be home—oh, how they were glad to be home! And as they emerged into the bright California sun, a band played Sousa marches, and the crowd of 1,500 that had gathered to watch them started to applaud and cheer.

In this group awaiting the nurses were Generals, Colonels, high-ranking civilians, including Mayor Lapham of San Francisco. Not one dry eye could be seen. Tears were streaming down cheeks of even the toughest old Army men.
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Army public relations officers and their factotums tried to hustle the arrivees into position to begin the welcoming ceremony, but as soon as the women looked at the crowd, a gathering that included many of their
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers and close friends, they broke ranks and rushed forward, a stampede of sentiment, grabbing hold of their kin and swinging them round and round in a whorl of kisses and embraces and utter delight.

The keynote speech was delivered by Brigadier General Raymond W. Bliss, assistant surgeon general of the army.

“Your self-sacrifice has demonstrated that the high standards of the nursing profession are something real, and the Army Nurse Corps glories in the picture you present to our fellow Americans,” the general said. “Your courage is an inspiration to the women of our country and in history you will take your place with the pioneer women who have helped establish the ideals on which we live.… You have fought the good fight. We are grateful to the Almighty for your safe return and we stand humble in your presence.”
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In later years, when the army no longer needed them and refused to decorate their leaders or even recognize them as a group, many of these modern-day pioneers would remember the general’s words with a certain contempt and bitterness. But now, on a bright California day, they were just happy to be home, and they made ready to proceed immediately to Letterman General Army Hospital at the Presidio where they were to spend several days in further medical exams and debriefings.

A long convoy was drawn up at the ramps and after excited reunions … [the nurses] climbed into army trucks to be taken to Letterman …

“We’re really back in the army now, girls,” one of them said as they boarded their convoy.
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Like Alices in Wonderland they gaped at the passing scene: the green hills along San Francisco Bay, the new automobiles on the road, the thriving city—their prison-camp daydreams played out under a brilliant blue sky.

At Letterman they were assigned to Ward A-2, by army standards luxurious accommodations, with flower-filled vases and radios and boxes of candy and Kleenex next to each bed. Beauticians came in to give them cuts and perms, then quartermasters and tailors arrived with three hundred uniforms and pairs of shoes flown in especially for the women.

For the first two days they rested and visited with family and friends, underwent physicals and more tests, had dinner with big shots, like the actor Joe E. Brown, who had lost a son in the Pacific theater. Then on the third day, the army held an official ceremony on the hospital grounds.

The dais was filled with army brass, a priest and a rabbi. The podium
was set on a patio with the hospital as a backdrop, and sitting at the windows in their maroon bathrobes, looking down from the upper floors, were hundreds of wounded soldiers. The two nurses who had won the Purple Heart came up to the podium to officially receive their medals,
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then each of the women was handed a white envelope with her name and serial number typed neatly on the front. Inside was the following letter:

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
TO MEMBERS OF THE ARMY NURSE CORPS BEING REPATRIATED
FROM THE PHILIPPINES ON 23 FEBRUARY 1945:

It gives me special pleasure to welcome you back to your native shores, and to express, on behalf of the people of the United States, the joy we feel at your deliverance from the hands of the enemy. It is a source of profound satisfaction that our efforts to accomplish your return have been successful.

You have served valiantly in foreign lands and have suffered greatly. As your Commander in Chief, I take pride in your past accomplishments and express the thanks of a grateful Nation for your services in combat and your steadfastness while a prisoner of war.

May God grant each of you happiness and an early return to health.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
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They were celebrities now, and the press recorded their every word, dogged their every step.

When Doris Kehoe, Brunetta Kuehlthau and Helen Hennessey set out for a day of shopping and sight-seeing, Jane Eshleman Conat of the
California Call Bulletin
grabbed a photographer and went along.

With girlish giggles and unabashed enthusiasm, three of the returned Army nurses today made their first off-post reconnaissance tour—to San Francisco’s downtown shopping district
.

Lieutenant Helen Hennessey, 31 years old, pert blonde who has been away from her Leavenworth Kan. home four years, gasped as she made a frontal attack on a cosmetic counter
.

“Flower mist,” she sighed as she fondled the labels she has dreamed about in the dank, sweating jungles of the tropics
.

A supply of bath powder and toilet water came across the counter.…

Nurse Helen’s unbelieving eyes found their range of a hat counter in a Grant Avenue shop
.

“Oh,” she squealed, “those hats.”

They looked fondly and sadly, for the hats that warm women’s hearts and their husband’s sarcasm are not for the girls in uniform. They just aren’t GI
.

They noticed that “almost everyone wears earrings now …”

So the tour progressed—past flower stands, where Helen wanted to buy violets but didn’t because they weren’t “regulation.”
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The press, and to some extent the government as well, seemed bent on feminizing the nurses. Like the Japanese, wartime America, 1940s America, had trouble thinking of the women as anything but “women”—somewhat vain, sometimes frivolous, always vulnerable. If they said anything to challenge this stereotype, anything insightful, shrewd or sagacious, it simply went unreported.

“If we didn’t tell the papers what they wanted to hear, they didn’t listen,” said Phyllis Arnold. On Bataan, for example, the nurses had cared for enemy wounded and had learned a valuable lesson of war: suffering knows no uniform. “As soon as we tried to point out anything where, because of war, it could happen to both sides, we were considered poor copy,” Arnold said. “I’ve been reading over reports of things I was supposed to have said and it’s not true.”
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Even the normally sober
New York Times
got swept up in the moment. In an editorial celebrating the nurses’ return, the paper called them “one of the beautiful legends of the Pacific War.”

Still, the
Times
seemed much closer to the mark than most when it also said:

No one has suggested that the sixty-eight … were unique among members of the Army Nurse Corps. It was the tragic experience, bringing out high qualities of heroism and unselfishness, that was exceptional. The recognition they have received is more than a recognition of them as individuals. It is a tribute to the spirit of their Corps, to feminine tenderness joined with skill and courage.
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That winter, the government gave the press another big story from the war in the Philippines. Censors released captured pictures taken by Japanese photographers during the Bataan Death March. The details of
that lethal sixty-five-mile trek had been known for some time, but not widely publicized. America, after all, had been defeated in the Philippines in 1942, and at the time the government was worried about morale and the national mood. Now, however, three years later and with the war going well, the grim photographs were released to the press, and America awoke to front pages filled with images that were both gruesome and shocking—American captives with spectral eyes, American corpses laid out like cordwood. The stark black-and-white photos seemed to make the country, tired from four years of fighting, angry all over again.

Either by coincidence or design, some of the survivors of the Death March were shipped to Letterman General Hospital a week or so after the nurses arrived there. Several, in fact, had been patients in the jungle hospitals of Bataan.

“Smitty!” cried nurse Frankie Lewey when she saw one of her former patients. “Let me look at you! Fine angel I was leaving you there on Bataan in a body cast!”
¹¹

Swish Zwicker took a picture of the reunion and sent a copy to young Terry Myers in Manila.

“Look at these men,” she wrote. “They made their own peg legs. This is what we left behind us. So you wonder why we were so bitter and disgusted with … Santo Tomas.”
¹²

Slowly as the days passed the women began to reorient themselves, but they had been out of circulation, out of the culture, for so long, they could not shake their sense of dislocation. “This all seemed like the movies,” Madeline Ullom said. “People moving about dressed in pretty clothes. They weren’t acting. They were living.”
¹³

There was a lot to learn: how to eat with a knife and fork again, how to negotiate a busy street, how to buy things that were rationed. By early March they were ready and the military began to clear them for travel home. Their orders called for a sixty-day leave, then a stretch of several weeks additional rest and recuperation at one of the army’s “redistribution stations,” convalescent facilities located in resort areas such as Asheville, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; and Santa Barbara, California. After that, they were told, they had their choice of duty; they could work wherever they wanted.

So home they went, home to Georgia, New Mexico, Illinois, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Tennessee. When they landed, little girls came rushing up to them with bouquets of flowers and the local police gave them motorcycle escorts. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and old
men in American Legion campaign caps stood in the town square and waited to greet them. Bands played, and politicians made speeches and showered them with tributes and gifts: keys to the city, railroad passes, sets of silverware and tea wear, new watches, new nursing pins, free meals wherever they went.

At 1:28
A.M
. yesterday [Frances Nash and Mildred Dalton] came back [to Washington, Georgia], far more than three years older, wiser in ways unfamiliar to many, and veterans of both mistreatment and kindness
.

Lt. Nash, tall and spare, ran down the portable steps of the big airliner at Chandler Field to the arms of her mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. James Nash, who live on a small northeast Georgia farm.…

Mr. Nash murmured, “Fran, it’s been a long time.”

[Several days later at home] she wore a soft red flannel robe and she lounged lazily in an easy chair, idly smoking and talking in a quiet husky voice. Her eyes were red and her face showed the effect of beriberi.…

She was home at last, within the safe walls of her father’s pretty, green-roofed bungalow … surrounded by adoring members of her family.…

It was no wonder she rubbed her eyes every now and then in a dazed way, and admitted: “I’m numb, really, just numb. I guess it will take a little time to sink in.”… Said her father, “This is the greatest day of our lives.”
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