Elizabeth M. Norman (5 page)

H
EADQUARTERS
P
HILIPPINE
D
EPARTMENT
IN THE
F
IELD

February 6, 1942

SUBJECT: Commendation

TO:
Second Lieutenant Helen M. Cassaino [
sic
], ANC

The commanding General has directed me to commend you and to express to you sincere thanks for your courageous conduct and unfailing attention to duty at Fort Stotsenburg [
sic
], P.I., on December 24, 1941, during a Japanese air attack. By your conduct and fearless example you calmed a number of litter patients … on a hospital car … when the air alarm was sounded and a number of enemy planes passed overhead. The litter patients had become panic stricken and tried to leave the car causing great confusion which might have resulted in serious injury to a number of patients … but you remained at your post.…

Allan C. McBride
Brigadier General, G.S.C.,
Chief of Staff
⁵

Manila could not hold. The enemy controlled the sky and sea, and the allies had neither the men nor the materiel to defend the city. By the end of December MacArthur knew he would have to retreat south in advance of the enemy attack.

In Washington, Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall met with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and President Roosevelt to analyze the situation in the Philippines. America was fighting a two-front war, and the two theaters of battle, Europe and the Pacific, were
vying for the scant resources Washington could provide. Making matters worse, the Pacific fleet was in ruins and incapable of running the Japanese blockade in the Philippines. Stimson insisted that America’s top priority should be to keep open the North Atlantic sea lanes, and Roosevelt agreed. So on December 23, at a conference with top American and British leaders, the president announced that the primary theater of war for the United States would be Europe.
⁶
MacArthur was told that he would have to use the forces at hand to stop the Japanese offensive.

American commanders in the Philippines decided to implement a decades-old strategy called War Plan Orange 3: to avoid massive civilian casualties and the destruction of property, Manila would be declared an open, neutral city; all military personnel, with their equipment, would retreat to the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor Island, a fortress known as “the Rock,” and from these two positions the Americans and their Filipino allies would try to defend Manila Bay until Washington could send help.

It was a doomed plan and everyone knew it. MacArthur and his generals were, literally, bottling up their army, tens of thousands of troops, on a small peninsula, fighting a holding action without air cover or any assurance of resupply. All the Japanese had to do was to press their attack until the Americans and their Filipino allies lost the capacity, or will, to fight.

On December 22, 1941, forty-three thousand well-trained, well-equipped enemy soldiers, many of whom had already seen action in other campaigns, came ashore through the turbulent waters of the Lingayen Gulf, a bay in northern Luzon Province that lay at the mouth of a wide valley between two ranges of mountains, a natural corridor from the sea south to the city of Manila.

The next day General MacArthur, his family and his staff left Manila to join top Filipino and American politicians in the underground fortress of Malinta Tunnel on the island of Corregidor. From this command center across the bay from the capital, they would direct the retreat of their forces and the defense of the Bataan peninsula. On December 24, the Japanese landed another seven thousand infantrymen, this time at Lamon Bay, to the southeast, at Manila’s back door, closing the trap.

M
ANILA HAD LONG
since lost its shimmer. It was hit first on December 10, two days after the bombings at Baguio. Seventy-seven warplanes
attacked Manila’s port area, sinking ships and setting the docks afire. More raids quickly followed. When gasoline stocks were hit, the city ran short of fuel, and people took to riding bicycles and hauling things in horse-drawn carts. Blackouts were the rule at night and many of the clubs shut down. Antiaircraft crews took over the once beautiful parks and patches of greensward, trampling the flowers and tearing up the grass with their tents and trenches.

[Straub Diary, December 13]
Ordered to go out as acting chief nurse to set up 590 bed hospital in the Holy Ghost school across from Malacanan [
sic
] palace. It has become an emergency hospital as Sternberg is overflowing. (We are burying the dead in sheets.) The Catholic nuns are grand and have helped us put up beds in empty classrooms. Work, work, work. I keep going back to Sternberg to find out about Glen.

Every day the bombs fell, destroying churches in the old, walled city, warehouses at the waterfront, office buildings in the business district, the homes of the rich, the shanties of the poor.

At Sternberg Hospital, the jewel of the army’s medical facilities, military and civilian casualties were stretched out on floors, waiting for treatment. The workload began to wear on the staff. For them each bombing raid meant another rush of casualties, another chorus of suffering. When the bombs fell the heavy crystal chandeliers in the dining room began to sway; windows shattered and sprayed glass on the ward; patients cried out in terror. “The feeling,” said Madeline Ullom of O’Neill, Nebraska, “pierced our hearts.”
⁷

[Straub Diary, December 14]
Worked all
A.M
. but couldn’t keep my mind on my work. Finally I got Lieutenant Brown to take me to Sternberg. Perhaps someone would know about Glen. Searched all over the hospital. So many of our friends who lived at Clark Field are in it now, but no one can tell me a thing. Had dinner at Sternberg and then drove back to Holy Ghost. I found myself alone in the receiving office, so I made an official call to the hospital at Fort Stotsenberg. Captain Kege answered. He hesitated a long time and finally said: “I am sorry to be the one to tell you. Glen was admitted on the tenth and died shortly thereafter.” The world tumbled around my ears.

Meanwhile, the bombing went on and on. An ominous mood came over the capital and a deep cynicism and dark humor crept into daily conversation. “If you see [only] one plane flying in formation,” the nurses joked, “you know it is ours.”
⁸
Someone hung a sign in the hospital hallway that read
DON
’
T BE A DEFEATIST
. But the declaration did little to improve morale.
⁹

The nurses at Sternberg and the other army hospitals tried to focus on their work. Were there enough bandages? Which patients would be transferred where? Would there be time to eat a meal before the next rush of broken bones and mangled limbs? What had happened to their friends elsewhere, the women they had worked with, the men they had loved?

[Straub Diary, December 16]
It doesn’t seem to be true. They took me back [to Sternberg] as a patient. Luminal [another name for the sedative phenobarbital] every four hours. Why, why, why … Others have carried on bravely, and I must too. Glen would want it. “Everything is all right,” he said that last time he called. Air raid signals were frightening at first. I hardly think of them now.…

During one bombing raid Maude Davison was knocked to the floor, injuring her lumbar vertebrae, and Josie Nesbit took her place as chief nurse. Nesbit and the other nursing supervisors quickly adapted standard nursing practice to meet the needs of war. They shifted schedules, stretched supplies, looked for new ways to manage their patients’ pain. They also gave up a garment that had long been the symbol of their profession—starched white uniforms.

The long dresses were ludicrously impractical, especially when nurses were bending over bloody stretchers or jumping into open trenches, so army quartermasters issued each woman two pairs of standard olive-drab coveralls. The new gear, as it turned out, came in one size, men’s 44, and the women joked that two of them could easily fit into one.

Some tried to cinch up the slack with safety pins or a few stitches, but they soon drafted some Chinese tailors to cut the coveralls down to size. As it turned out, these green cotton suits became a short footnote in nursing history: the nurses of the Philippines became the first American military women to wear fatigues, as field uniforms were called, on duty. The angels in white had learned to dress for the dirty business of war.

[Straub Diary, December 17]
They brought me Glen’s personal effects today. Now I know he is dead.

Even to this day, some Manilans call December 25, 1941, “Black Christmas.” Enemy aircraft repeatedly bombed the city and suburbs, and patients at all the hospitals ate their Christmas dinners under their beds. The Filipino cooks who ran the American mess halls and galleys had originally planned elaborate meals. One menu, for example, included oyster stew, mixed olives, celery sticks, roast American turkey, mushroom dressing, cranberry sauce, giblet gravy, snowflake potatoes, creamed peas, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, candy, mixed nuts, bread, butter, coffee, cream and sugar and cigarettes.
¹⁰
Instead, the nurses, doctors and patients at Sternberg celebrated the season of peace with cold turkey sandwiches.

[Straub Diary, December 24]
The Japs continue to bomb the port area. Christmas eve. The girls milling around, no music, no lights, no greetings. Sent a note to Miss MacDonald [chief nurse at Stotsenberg]. Asked her to put some flowers on my darling’s grave for Christmas.

With Manila declared an open city, the army nurses were ordered to evacuate the hospitals, and Josie Nesbit set about moving her eighty-seven-member staff from Manila to field hospital sites on Bataan and Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, she slipped her women out two dozen or so at a time.

[Straub Diary, December 25]
Christmas. We hardly realized it. Sent more nurses out today to Bataan and Corregidor. Only 14 left now. Orders say we are all to evacuate by the first.

Most of the women were under the impression they were headed for hospitals—buildings with red-tile roofs and whitewashed walls—so they packed their white shoes, alabaster stockings, makeup, curlers and nursing school pins. But the Angels of Bataan, as they would soon become known around the world, were about to become the first group of American military nurses sent onto the battlefield for duty.
¹¹

Those that left the city by truck were frequently attacked from the air, and the women had to jump for cover often along the way. The roads were clogged with refugees fleeing the fighting, and as they walked past the lumbering convoys, they often smiled at the sight of women in the trucks and held up two fingers in the sign of victory.

The nurses evacuated from Manila by ferry had a panoramic view of the fires engulfing the capital. At night the light from the holocaust was so bright, the women could sit on the deck of the ferry and read their newspapers in the orange glow. When a boat entered a minefield or a squadron of enemy planes was spotted, the women quickly removed their heavy army shoes and combat boots in case they ended up in the water. (One ferry, in fact, the
Mc E. Hyde
, was attacked off the Bataan coast and sank as the nurses watched from the bushes onshore.)

As the New Year approached, Sternberg held only those patients too crippled or mangled to move. Eleven nurses, along with Josie Nesbit, had volunteered to stay behind with the bed-bound to care for them. The army, given the rush and confusion, assumed it would not be able to get the final eleven out of the city in advance of the enemy and issued them identification cards naming them noncombatants, cards the women were to present to the enemy when they surrendered.

“Surrender?” said Madeline Ullom. “The only surrender which entered my mind … was [the name of] a favorite perfume.”
¹²

A few days later, headquarters reversed itself and ordered all army nurses to Bataan. (The last army nurse to leave Manila was Floramund Fellmuth, who had agreed to take charge of the Filipino Red Cross nurses aboard a makeshift hospital ship, the inter-island steamer the
Mactan
. The little ship was the last chance for many of the wounded. Its skipper had agreed to try to reach Australia, and he took on enough supplies for thirty days. Then three hundred wounded were loaded on the
Mactan
’s decks. Heavy rains and rough seas left most of them ill and miserable, a fire in the boiler almost panicked the ship’s company, and the Japanese often seemed close to catching and sinking them, but with incredible luck and some deft seamanship, the
Mactan’
s crew brought their cargo to safety, one of the few surface ships to slip through enemy lines.)

By New Year’s Eve all eighty-seven army nurses had been safely evacuated from the city. But there were still American women in uniform in Manila, nurses of the United States Navy.

No one can say for sure why the navy nurses were left behind. Perhaps in the haste and jumble of the evacuation they were an oversight, simply forgotten. Or maybe some myopic commander failed to calculate
their value in the battle that was to come. Whatever the case, Josie Nesbit knew the navy women were there, and years later, a bit abashed, said that these sisters in arms, her professional kin, had been abandoned, “left,” in her words, “holding the bag.”
¹³