Elizabeth M. Norman (41 page)

“We got into Denver overnight and the next morning flew to Washington. I checked into Walter Reed for the night and tried to make some calls to get myself on a civilian flight to Boston. Later I’m walking down the hall from my assigned room and coming towards me is this nurse I had been stationed with at Camp Edwards in the early days. When she realized who I was, she ran up and put her arms around me. ‘Oh, Cassie,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your mother!’

“That’s how I found out my mother was dead.”
²⁷

It seems that Maude Davison had known all along. Cassie’s family had called the chief nurse just after the women landed at Letterman. They told Davison they thought it was best to keep Cassie in the dark until she got home.

“That really set me off,” Cassie said. “How dare they think I could not handle the information! I was very miffed and I let my family know in no uncertain terms.”

In Washington she found a seat on an American Airlines flight for Boston. Waiting at Logan Airport was her family and a dozen reporters. She smiled, of course—by now most of the women had learned how to put on a public face—smiled past all that was on her mind, all that was pulling at her.

“Hey,” she said, looking at the gang of reporters and photographers, “what’s all the excitement about? Are all these people hanging around to see me? … I haven’t done anything special.”
²⁸

A few days later, Bridgewater turned out to honor her. First was a parade down the main street—she sat waving from the backseat of a convertible owned by Leo Nourse, one of the town’s selectman—then at Maan Auditorium, the whole town toasted her. On stage behind her sat Mrs. Sample, her first-grade teacher; Maurice Walsh, her high school civics teacher; Father Grimes, her parish priest; and Margaret Dieter, the
superintendent of her nursing school. Cassie in her new tailored uniform stood on the apron of the stage, smiling and full of gratitude for her neighbors and friends. It was good to be home, she told herself, as she listened to one testimonial after another, good to be with all the people she knew and held close. She thought too of her mother, naturally. Cassie’s imprisonment had been hard on the small, frail woman. Over and over Mrs. Cassiani had told her children that she lived for the day her daughter would be free, the happy day a telegram would arrive telling her that her Helen was on the way home. And she almost made it. Sarah Cassiani’s heart stopped beating just three days before American tanks broke down the gates of Santo Tomas Internment Camp.

A few days after her parade and fete, Cassie had a dream, a recurring fata morgana of homecoming and loss:

It was always exactly the same; the dream would start with me on a ship with many people. I can’t tell you whether these people were fellow prisoners or anything like that, but I’m on a ship coming home from somewhere. [Then] I find myself at the head of my street, High Street, where I was brought up. I’m walking down the sidewalk, midday, and nobody comes out to meet me, all these people I’ve known all my life. I see them looking, pulling the curtains apart, peeping to see who this is coming down the streets. A couple of them were working outdoors; Agnes Frawley was sweeping her front steps; she looked up and saw me coming down the street and she went in the house. My mother was sitting out on the side lawn and my niece and nephew were playing around. When they finally realized somebody was coming down the street, the kids looked up and they immediately ran to my mother’s lap and began clutching her. As I got closer and closer there was not a sign of recognition from the two kids, or my mother. And then the dream stops right there, just a few feet from her. Isn’t that strange?
²⁹

Chapter 17

Aftermath

M
AUDE
D
AVISON WAS
the Angels’ first casualty.

Had her health improved she might have achieved high rank and office in the postwar nurse corps. Under her command, the nurses had held together as a unit, fulfilling their duty to their country and their ancient obligation to the injured and sick. Even in prison during the nurses’ dangerous decline, Davison had insisted on good order and discipline, and in doing so gave her women a way to live, a structure to survive. It was not discipline for discipline’s sake, rather a prescription for endurance and courage. Stick to the job, she had told them, and they might just make it home. She may not have been genial or empathetic, but she was a leader, the captain who had brought her unit through, and that kind of an officer usually won favor with the high command.

But Maude was too sick to assume another post, and on January 31, 1946, some ten months after her liberation, she retired from active military service and gave up the office she had served so faithfully and, by most lights, so well.
¹

With no family to enfold her, she turned to an old friend. As a young dietitian in a Baptist hospital in turn-of-the-century Manitoba, Canada, she had befriended the family of a Baptist minister, the Reverend Charles Jackson. Not long thereafter, the Jacksons emigrated to the United States, and, following their lead, Maude moved south as well. The reverend landed a parish in Pasadena, California, while Davison ended up in the Midwest as a dietitian at Epworth Hospital in South Bend, Indiana. Soon she decided to add a nursing certificate to her portfolio and moved west to Pasadena, where her good friends the Jacksons had settled,
and enrolled in the Pasadena Hospital Training School for Nurses. She rented a room in the Jacksons’ house and once again shared in their comity and good cheer.

Now, many decades later, retired and with no hometown to welcome her or kin to give her a bed, she returned to Pasadena and the family that had once befriended her.

The reverend was alone now. His wife had died more than a year before the war and his two grown sons had lives and families of their own. The retired nurse and the widowed reverend became friends all over again. Soon their friendship evolved into companionship, and in 1947, seventy-five-year-old Charles Jackson and sixty-one-year-old Maude Davison were married.

The wedding was a private affair. Maude did not invite her old comrades, the women she had served with through four difficult years of war. Still, word of the wedding spread, and some of the Angels wondered what kind of a man would marry a woman they remembered as remote, taciturn and unyielding.

Robert Jackson, the reverend’s son, said his father was a lonely man. He married Maude because he knew the nurse “would take care of him.”
²

“Davy,” as the Jacksons called her, turned out to be as formal and distant in married life as she had been in uniform. She ran the reverend’s household with a firm hand, deciding who could visit and who was not allowed in the house. In time the reverend’s friends began to drift away, and the couple, for the most part, kept to themselves, reading, listening to the radio or watching their black-and-white TV. In the evening Davy would ignore the reverend’s Baptist proscriptions and pour herself the good, stiff cocktail she so enjoyed.

The reverend’s two sons “felt bad” that their father had lost so many cronies, but they clearly saw how fond he was of his second wife, so they held their tongues and kept up their visits.

“I tried to get close to Davy but she was a stickler army nurse,” said Robert Jackson, who settled nearby with his own family. “There was no friction between us but we were not close.”

Maude was still sick, quite sick, in fact, and Robert urged her repeatedly to register for veteran’s benefits, but she turned these entreaties aside, even when it was obvious she might soon need care in a hospital.

“The army has taken care of me nearly all my life,” Maude snapped, “and they’ll take care of me when I need them.”
³

In the early summer of 1956 Maude suffered a massive cerebrovascular
accident—in common parlance, a leviathan stroke that left her in a deep coma.
⁴
At first the local veterans hospital refused to admit the former prisoner of war, the woman who had stood under the bombs on Bataan, refused because she had not done their paperwork. The Jacksons finally petitioned the regional office of the Veterans Administration and the VA at Long Beach at last gave her a bed.

Every morning Charles Jackson sat beside his comatose wife, holding her hand and giving her the succor he had once thought she would give to him. At first, Maude, unyielding as always, kept breathing. Then, a few days later, the years of starvation and travail finally took her. On June 11, 1956, at the age of seventy-one, Maude Campbell Davison Jackson, Major, U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Retired, became the first of the Battling Belles to fall.

Typically her comrades learned of her death only after she had been interred. Many said they would have welcomed the chance to say goodbye and offer a last gesture of respect to their chief, their dedicated commander.
⁵

Charles Jackson, traveling alone with the remains, returned the body to their native Canada and buried his wife in a coffin draped with a large American flag. To this day no one, neither her stepson, Robert, nor any of her comrades who survive, know where to find her headstone.

M
AJOR
D
AVISON HAD
always impressed her superiors, so much so that right after the war, her physician comrades at arms petitioned the army to award Maude the high honors they believed she deserved.

The case went to the U.S. Army Awards and Decorations Board.
⁶
Initiating the appeal, Colonel Wibb Cooper, the Corregidor surgeon who had commanded the wartime medical units in the Philippines, recommended his one-time chief nurse for a Distinguished Service Medal, the army’s third highest decoration.
⁷
Cooper argued that her extraordinary leadership, from the fall of Manila in December 1941 through the surrender on Corregidor in June 1942 to the nurses’ liberation in February 1945, demonstrated without argument the remarkable effect of Maude’s command.

It is my feeling that no group of American nurses have ever been subjected to a more difficult or hazardous situation than during the Philippine campaign and the influence of Major Davison’s leadership was a large contributing factor toward the outstanding, dignified and courageous
performance of this small group of nurses.… As chief nurse … responsible for all nursing activities … she displayed exceptional leadership and judgment … and by her cheerful and energetic manner of carrying on her duties under the most unusual and trying conditions, she was an inspiration not only to the members of her own corps, but to all others with whom she came in contact.
⁸

Maude had other supporters as well, among them Brigadier General LeGrande A. Diller, an aide-de-camp to MacArthur, who reminded the decorations board that

these nurses had never been under fire before and yet acquitted themselves in the highest traditions of the military service.… With meager equipment, extremely short of help, and under the most trying circumstances, every nurse without exception conducted herself in a manner which solicited the highest praise. To a large degree this sterling conduct which has now become a tradition is attributable to the outstanding characteristics of Major Maude C. Davison. She organized, planned, and controlled the nurses with vision, a keen understanding of the desperate military situation, sincere consideration for the welfare of the nurses under her command, and above all the extreme physical needs of the battle patients. She was always calm in the face of anger, extremely heroic and seemingly tireless. I have heard many of the nurses say that when they felt they could not go on any longer, the sight or the thought of Major Davison gave them the added inspiration to carry on.
⁹

And, as if that and other encomiums were not enough, Douglas MacArthur himself weighed in:

Major Davison, in her capacity as Chief Nurse, Philippine Department, and subsequently Chief Nurse, United States Army in the Philippines, was the leader and symbol of the entire nursing corps which so distinguished itself throughout the Philippines Campaign. Her performance was outstanding and an example to all. The standards set by her and through her corps, established a precedent not only within the gallant forces of Bataan, but for the entire nursing corps in our Army in all theaters.
¹⁰

Her medal seemed assured, but in the growing file about the case was a curious and, as it turned out, injurious paragraph from a most unlikely source.

In my opinion the position of Chief Nurse, although very important, is not one of great responsibility within the meaning of the qualification of the Distinguished Service Medal. I recommend the award of the Legion of Merit to Major Maude C. Davison.
¹¹

The Legion of Merit was a lesser laurel, more of a commendation for a job well done than a medal for valor and sacrifice. In short that paragraph was a slap in the face … and it came from the real hero of Bataan and Corregidor, General Jonathan M. Wainwright, the battle leader who had stood by his troops to the end, and was captured and beaten by his enemy.