Elizabeth M. Norman (42 page)

That Wainwright, of all people, would raise a technical point—questioning the scope of Davison’s responsibility and the size and importance of her command—is almost inconceivable. Here was the same man who, as Bataan was falling, told the country, “You may talk all you want of the pioneer women who went across the plains of early America and helped found our great nation.… But never forget the American girls who fought on Bataan and later on Corregidor.”
¹²

Perhaps as a soldier of the old school, a stickler for regulations, Skinny Wainwright did everything by the book, even if that meant denying honor to someone he had publicly praised and admired. It is also possible that his own brutal imprisonment left him bitter, and when he weighed his trials against those of the women, he concluded that their service and sacrifice were of a lesser order. Who can say? The effect of his paragraph, however, was devastating. The Awards and Decorations Board, in the person of a major general named H. R. Bull, concluded that

The position [of] Chief Nurse of a field command is not considered a position of great responsibility in the Distinguished Service Medal sense. The position normally is lacking in duty requiring the exercise of independent initiative and responsibility. The Legion of Merit, therefore, is considered the appropriate medal.
¹³

Then, responding to an appeal made to the Secretary of War, Bull added the final slur.

Although the circumstances of Major Davison’s services for which the Distinguished Service Medal recommendation is made are most exceptional and no doubt call for independent decisions and actions not normally required of a person in her assignment, it still does not appear that this case comes within the basic policy governing the award of the Distinguished
Service Medal.… In determining the degree of responsibility in this case it is apparent that a large share must have been carried by doctors and commanders … 
¹⁴

Sexism or intraservice enmity? Were military men, for example, incapable of thinking of military women in the same light as themselves? Were they so fixed in 1940s gender roles that they could not acknowledge what others seemed to see? Perhaps. It is also possible that the members of the army decorations board had never seen heavy combat, and like many an “armchair commando” were convinced that the boys in the field were telling war stories, exaggerating things. Finally the case might have turned on simple malice: a large number of army generals and field-grade officers in Washington did not like Douglas MacArthur, and they might have been using Davison to take another slap at him.

Whatever the case, Laura Cobb, the other chief nurse in the Philippines, received the same treatment from her service, the navy.

C
OBB TOO WANTED
to stay in uniform but, like Davison, had been enervated by war. During a stint at the naval hospital on Treasure Island, near San Francisco, her first postwar assignment, Cobb realized she no longer had the stamina for the work; even simple administrative chores exhausted her.

She had lost more than thirty-five pounds at Los Banos and still suffered the lingering effects of severe beriberi. She pushed herself at first; she was only fifty, after all, a lieutenant commander and well positioned for a distinguished career, but she was just too weak and too tired to carry forward. On June 1, 1947, after twenty-six years of service to her country, Laura Cobb packed her things and put in her papers.

She settled in Los Angeles at first, and from time to time would have dinner with Red Harrington Nelson, who often stopped by on her way to San Diego to visit her mother. Then in 1964, after the sudden death of a sister, Cobb moved back to her hometown, Wichita, Kansas, where she lived quietly for many years, pursuing her books and hobbies. When she finally became enfeebled, she turned over her legal and financial affairs to one of her nieces and was admitted to a nursing home. In 1982, at the age of eighty-six, Laura Mae Cobb died quietly in bed.

Like Davison, Cobb had colleagues who greatly admired her, and in 1946 one of them, former Fleet Surgeon Captain K. E. Lowman, began
a campaign to win the chief navy nurse the recognition he believed she deserved.

Lowman tried to persuade his superiors to award Cobb a Legion of Merit for “her brilliant leadership and steadfast devotion to duty.”
¹⁵
His request was quickly denied and, again, like Davison, Cobb was given a lesser medal, the Bronze Star.

Then Dr. Dana Nance, the civilian medical director at Los Banos Prison Camp, wrote to the navy high command, recommending a special-unit commendation for Cobb and the ten other navy nurses at Los Banos.

“They gave unstintingly of their time and professional skill beyond the call of duty for the alleviation of the suffering of the fellow civilian internees in Japanese internment camps,” he said.
¹⁶
But this appeal failed as well, and, like the women themselves, the case simply faded away.

A
S FOR ALL
the others, the seventy-five women who had survived the shooting, the bombardments, the prison camps, the famine and disease, they were left in a kind of limbo.

The postwar planners who were busy at work in the summer of 1945 apparently overlooked the nurses. As the nation prepared to welcome home millions of men and women in uniform, no one really stopped to consider in any systematic way the special circumstances of the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor and Santo Tomas. No one, in short, seemed to know how to deal with them.

Physicians and psychologists working with former prisoners of war focused exclusively on the health of men, not women. The boys, they said, needed “lots of tender loving care.”
¹⁷
The girls, meanwhile, were never mentioned.

Their wartime illnesses—tuberculosis, fungus infections, intestinal disorders, severe dental problems, just to name a few—often became chronic and, in many cases, disabling.

For many months Anna Williams stayed at Letterman General with severe hepatitis. Verna Henson suffered from the same disease and her liver became so swollen that the medical staff treating her worried about a fatal hepatic rupture. Gwen Henshaw began a decade-long struggle with amoebic dysentery; she finally needed a hemorrhoidectomy to ease her symptoms. Sallie Durrett had dysentery too and was convinced it had permanently damaged her intestinal tract. Earlyn “Blackie” Black was
often doubled over with cramps and digestive distress; after ten years of this, a doctor finally realized she’d been carrying a hookworm since prison camp. Sally Blaine’s joints and limbs ached all her life from malaria and dengue fever. Edith Shacklette always wondered whether her hearing loss came from the concussions she suffered under the bombs in Malinta Tunnel. Peg Nash had pulmonary tuberculosis; the condition was so severe navy doctors retired her eight days short of ten years service; eventually she was “cured,” but the disease left her so weak she could never again work in a hospital. Gwen Henshaw’s tuberculosis went undiagnosed for a year—her physicians had dismissed her complaints as “unremarkable”—and by then the disease had spread to both lungs and forced her into bed for eighteen months. Alice “Swish” Zwicker was diagnosed with tuberculosis and doctors had to remove one of her lungs. And almost every one of the seventy-seven Angels had dental and gum problems from three years of prison-camp food, diets dangerously low in calcium and vitamin D. Gwen Henshaw and Millie Manning lost all their teeth, while many of the others suffered from damaged roots, bleeding gums and chronic gingivitis.

The older nurses seemed to have suffered the most. Mina Aasen was fifty-six when she was liberated from STIC. She had been a member of the Army Nurse Corps since July 1918 and, after liberation, planned to work as an administrator at Letterman General Hospital for a few years until she could qualify for her thirty-year pension. A few weeks into the job, Aasen began to sense something seriously wrong with her. She started to forget details and work schedules, and after only four hours of light paperwork, she would become so tired she had to go home and rest. With her memory unreliable and her stamina rapidly fading, her superiors started to wonder whether she could do her job, and they ordered her to appear before the hospital’s Disposition Board for an evaluation. On January 16, 1946, the board reported its findings.

This officer was prisoner of war of the Japanese from 6 May 1942 to 3 Feb. 1945. During this 33 month period she lost 40 pounds in weight.… In November 1944 she developed ankle edema, marked weakness, periods of confusion and disorientation, easy fatigability, loss of memory, irritability, emotional instability, inability to concentrate and exhaustion. Following liberation and treatment with vitamins, she regained weight but memory had not improved.… In November 1945, because a routine stool examination showed endamoeda hystolytion [a parasitic amoeba that causes dysentery and liver abscess], she was hospitalized and treated. However
even under hospital management, the fatigue, exhaustion and memory loss, retardation of mental processes, and forgetfulness had continued. Board … made a diagnosis of neurasthenia [chronic fatigue and lassitude] manifested by marked general retardation in all mental processes, abnormal fatigability, depression of vital forces, loss of appetite, some malnutrition. All secondary to prolonged excessive expenditure of energy to having been a prisoner of war.
¹⁸

Ten months later, after twenty-eight years in uniform, Mina Aasen retired as a captain. When cataracts, arthritis and memory problems began to affect her ability to live alone, she moved from San Francisco to Minot, North Dakota, where she had grown up, and into a retirement home. In April 1974, at the age of eighty-four, Mina Aasen died in her sleep.

She had told her friends that she wanted a military funeral at her gravesite, but April 6 was a bitterly cold and snowy day in Minot, so the services were performed in the sanctuary of Zion Lutheran Church. As she had requested, someone sang the hymn “Beautiful Savior, King of Creation,” then the members of Post 573, Veterans of Foreign Wars, carefully removed the flag from her coffin and folded it into a neat triangle, just as military custom prescribed.
¹⁹

I
N
WAYS THAT
perhaps only old campaigners would understand, the Angels’ debased physiology was less disabling than the deep and unsettling melancholy that soon began to take hold of them.

There was no escaping the faces of the dead—dead comrades, friends, lovers and, especially, the patients, all those men they had left behind. Many of the women felt they should have stayed longer in the jungle and begged to be imprisoned with the sickest of the sick, the worst of the wounded.

Psychiatrists seemed to assume that the nurses’ training and experience had somehow left them immune to the psychological ravages of combat and imprisonment. In a study of women in the military, one researcher postulated that the nurses’ emotional problems would be “less complex in many ways”
²⁰
than those of other veterans. Their self-awareness, their understanding of the human psyche, their involvement with hundreds of patients, along with the protected environment and discipline of a hospital—all gave them the skills and mechanisms they needed to cope with their troubles. In other words, their status as clinicians
and the hard work and long service in the cause of human suffering had left them less vulnerable than the average soldier. Their profession has somehow rendered them insensate.

In fact, the opposite was true: they felt too much.

[Eleanor Garen Notebook, February 23, 1946] Much has happened in the interim. Tonight I am alone. The first time in a long time. It is terrible to be so. Once upon a time I longed to be by myself but the war taught me comradeship—so I am afraid of being alone. To belong to no one gives one a lost feeling. Perhaps the war is not to blame but the advancing years are making their mark upon me. I have come to the conclusion that I am destined to be a barren solitary woman.… I have often wondered why I survived. Surely I am [not] necessary to anyone. There are so many who died that are needed by their family. Tomorrow will be a year since my return to United States. Why? What purpose have I in life. It is as ashes in my mouth, so futile, so useless to myself as well as to other[s]. It is not a question of adjustment, but of me being me.
²¹

Chapter 18

Across the Years

S
O THEY SLIPPED
back into the mainstream. Some married and had children while others sought careers, several in the service. (Ruby Bradley, for example, rose to colonel and, along the way, ended up at war again.) Overall, however, there was no pattern to their lives, no common thread leading to a common judgment, some unequivocal conclusion, the final lesson of women at war.

The most that can be said of the Angels as a group is that, like the rest of postwar America, they chased the American dream, “not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,” but a dream “of values,” of “a richer and fuller life.”
¹

L
IKE MANY OF
her comrades, S
ALLY
B
LAINE
came home to trouble.
²
In August 1945 she learned her mother was dying and rushed back to Bible Grove, Missouri, just in time to say good-bye.