Elizabeth M. Norman (8 page)

Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of reinforcement is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them. It is imperative that our troops hold until these reinforcements arrive.

No further retreat is possible. We have more troops in
Bataan than the Japanese have thrown against us; our supplies are ample; a determined defense will defeat the enemy’s attack.

It is a question now of courage and of determination. Men who run will merely be destroyed but men who fight will save themselves and their country.

I call upon every soldier in Bataan to fight in his assigned position, resisting every attack. This is the only road to salvation. If we will fight we will win; if we retreat we will be destroyed.

MacArthur
¹²

So they waited for relief because their commander told them relief would come, and they believed him, or wanted to believe him, hope being what it is, the only antidote to desperation. Some historians think that MacArthur meant what he said. They point to a January 3 message from Washington in which General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, told MacArthur

Our definitely allocated air reinforcements together with British should give us an early superiority in the Southwest Pacific. Our strength … should exert a decisive effect on Japanese shipping and force a withdrawal northward.… Every day of time you gain is vital to the concentration of the overwhelming power necessary for our purpose.… The current conferences in Washington … are extremely encouraging in respect to accelerating speed of ultimate success.
¹³

In other words, help seemed on the way, but other historians say MacArthur knew that Washington had at its disposal only limited resources; he also knew well the extent to which the Japanese had crippled the Pacific fleet. Two days after MacArthur promised his troops that help was on the way, two days after they began lining up on the beach scanning the horizon for the relief convoys their commander had promised were coming, he sent the following radiogram to the War Department:

The food situation here is becoming serious. For some time I have been on half rations and the result will soon become evident in the exhausted condition of the men.… I asked for blockade running ships. No reply has been received.… The strategic
problem involving an advance from the south will not relieve the food situation here in time.… No attempt yet seems to have been made along this line. This seems incredible to me.… I cannot over emphasize the psychological reaction that will take place here unless something tangible is done in this direction.… I repeat that if something is not done to meet the general situation which is developing the disastrous results will be monumental.
¹⁴

The nurses at Hospital #1 began to look out at Manila Bay for relief ships stuffed with food and medicine. They told one another the supplies would arrive soon, and soon after that the war would be over.

Dr. James Duckworth, their commanding officer, seemed to sense the fatuousness in MacArthur’s memoranda. He continued with his plan to move Hospital #1 inland, out of the range of the Japanese big guns. At night now the nurses could see the flashes of gunfire in the distance and hear the rumble of tanks.

An officer sent to scout a new location for the hospital reported back with two possible sites, and Duckworth picked kilometer post 155, a cool, green mountainous area where military engineers were carving out a camp. Here was running water and three large wooden buildings that could be converted into staff quarters, wards and operating rooms. The location reminded a number of staff of the cool, green summer capital of the Philippines, Baguio, so people took to calling the new Hospital #1 “Little Baguio.” On the roofs of the buildings they painted large red crosses on white backgrounds. Some of the huts nearby were turned into supply sheds, laboratories and a pharmacy. Down the road were an engineers’ headquarters, a quartermasters’ food storage unit, an ordnance supply depot, a motor pool and an antiaircraft battery. It took the staff at Limay two days and nights to pack their equipment and gear. Surgeons put protective plaster casts around the broken bones of the traction patients, nurses boxed up medicines, bandages and instruments and the patients were readied for transport in buses that had been converted into large ambulances.

About 9:00
A.M
. on January 25, Cassie and the others boarded trucks for Little Baguio. On their way out of camp they passed sixty-four white crosses in the hospital cemetery. During its twenty-nine days at Limay, the staff at Hospital #1 had treated twelve hundred casualties. Not long after everyone had cleared the camp, Japanese pilots came in low with incendiary bombs and burned the hospital to the ground.

Chapter 4

The Sick, the Wounded,
the Work of War

B
EFORE THE BUCKETS
of bloody limbs and the white crosses on the jungle floor, the women of the Army Nurse Corps did not really think themselves part of the profession of arms. Yes, they were in the army—they wore their country’s uniform and the insignia of military rank—but they were healers, not soldiers. They had no interest in siegecraft and strategy. Theirs was a culture of care, not nodding plumes and bugles and battle cries. The army was an arena for men, and women were on the periphery of that domain, that place of male passage.

Then the shooting started, and they found themselves confronting as much danger and deprivation as any dogface in the field. The men who worked with them—doctors, medics, orderlies and attendants—were no longer “colleagues” and “staff,” they were comrades in arms now, and “the girls,” as so many referred to them, were no longer anomalies in the ranks, they were a military unit in the middle of a battle.

They were women at war.

F
ROM THE FIRST
day of the war the allies did much of their medical planning on the fly, improvising as exigencies arose. Hospital #1 had been part of War Plan Orange 3, but the idea for a second hospital on Bataan seems to have evolved not long after the fighting started, and during Christmas week, nineteen army nurses from Sternberg set out by boat across Manila Bay to Bataan and a point inland on the peninsula, kilometer 162.5, to establish General Hospital #2.

The moment they arrived on the shores of the peninsula, they found
trouble. Their ship, the ferry
Mc E. Hyde
, negotiated the bay safely, but not long after it tied up at a wharf off the East Road, enemy planes appeared overhead. The nurses scrambled for cover, some to foxholes, some behind bushes, some just flattened themselves in the dirt. When they finally looked up, the
Mc E. Hyde
was sinking, and with it many of the hospital supplies and basic equipment the women had carried with them.

Somewhat stunned and disheveled, they brushed themselves off and found a small water pipe at the side of the road. Here they were, some of them told themselves, headed for a hospital that did not exist and their supplies now lay at the bottom of Manila Bay. Just then a medical officer appeared with trucks to take them inland. They spent the night at a staging area, and the next morning, after linking up with seventeen doctors and thirty medics and orderlies, headed for kilometer 162.5. They arrived at the medical depot there just in time for dinner. The troops at the depot stood by in disbelief as the trucks rolled to a stop and nurses
—nurses?—
climbed down to the ground. “What in the hell are we going to do with
women
here!” one dogface growled.
¹

What, indeed.

Since the Civil War, when a relatively large number of nurses began working in military hospitals, women in uniform or serving as civilian nurses in the ranks have had to endure the disaffection and raw culture of men—men’s behavior, men’s ethos, men’s appetites—and the army, for its part, was aware of the difficulty. In a memo to his command in the spring of 1941, H. C. Michie, an army colonel in charge of a military hospital in Louisiana, noted, “Except in the hospital, hostess house, post office, on the highways, and except by invitation, the presence of women may be embarrassing and may deny officers and enlisted men privileges due them in their areas.” In other words, women in the ranks were denying men the freedom to be men. “Prior to 1920,” the colonel continued, “nurses occupied a difficult and awkward status. They were in the military establishment and had the status of civilians. Growing out of the considerable work and effort, in which the undersigned played a part, nurses were given the relative rank [as opposed to permanent rank and title] of officers in order that their military and social status would be clearly defined. When this status is properly practiced by the nurses, it had materially bettered her [
sic
] position and solved many of her social and military problems.” To put it plainly, when women acted like officers, male officers, and not women, they were safe. “It must be kept in mind that, where there are large groups of men removed from the restraining
influences of home many things are liable to occur that would not occur under the usual and normal conditions.”
²

The army had not prepared its nurses for war—provided no training in the field or in weapons or even in battlefield medicine—and during their first days on Bataan, they seemed out of place.

The evening the women arrived at the site for Hospital #2, a detail of men was assigned to set up cots for them and dig a women’s latrine. As she watched the men swinging their picks and sweating in the heat and dirt, Sally Blaine of Bible Grove, Missouri, thought to herself, We’re so much trouble here … we shouldn’t be here. We’re nothing but a burden. Clara Mae Bickford also remembered the men grumbling and the way the nurses “really took it on the chin.”
³

That night after supper the women found a cool creek in a secluded area and stripped down for a bath. The roiling water restored them, made them feel like “glamour girls.” Too bad their combs and toothbrushes were at the bottom of Manila Bay, they thought. Later, under mango and acacia trees hard by the Real River, they settled on their cots and fell asleep to the shrieks of birds and the soft creak of bamboo.

Many of the women were strangers to one another, but danger has a way of driving people together, and no human enterprise is more dangerous than combat. In combat people need one another, need to know who can think clearly and who can be counted on when things start to go wrong. So like fighting men, the nurses closed ranks, and within a day or two these strangers were calling one another by their nicknames, “Hatch” and “Blackie” and “Bickie” and “Shack.” Soon they were teasing one another too, poking fun at the peculiar way someone held a cigarette or said “y’all.” In the late afternoon they would set their cots together on a level spot next to the creek and talk for hours about their families and their men.

T
HE SITE FOR
Hospital #2 had been selected for its dense jungle canopy, its level ground and the availability of water—the swift, clear Real River. The only “roads” were a carabao trail connecting the site with the rest of the peninsula and a footpath that ran east to west. There were no open fields and no buildings. Just jungle, a canopy of acacia and mahogany and bamboo, draped with thick vines.

Everything had to be brought in or built. Quickly the medical crew found tools and transportation, and engineers cut a one-lane dirt road to carry patients in and out. Two bands of intrepid officers and enlisted men
commandeered some trucks and, before the Japanese occupied the city and established a siege line on Bataan, dashed back to Manila in advance of the invaders to scrounge for surgical supplies, medicine, generators, tools and food. (One surgeon led another group north to Stotsenberg and, with the enemy closing in fast there, he snuck into the base hospital and made off with a critical piece of equipment—an operating-room sterilizer.)
⁴

Of all the early efforts, however, nothing was more important than setting up the kitchens. Napoleon is believed to have said that his army marched on its stomach, and every military commander since has at one time or another echoed that assertion. Nothing, say those who have been to war, not the stifling sun or monsoon rain, not the mud, mosquitoes or maggots, not even the relentless enemy, affects the morale and performance of a fighting force as much as its food.

War is hard labor and no one works well without being fed. Bad food, monotonous food or severely reduced rations only add to the numbing fatigue of combat or the labor of tending the sick, the injured and the dying. Sometimes the only act of ego, save sleep, that the nurses and doctors were allowed was their meal. For them, as for all soldiers, mess call was a ritual, a time when comrades gathered together for a few moments of peace and, by breaking bread shoulder to shoulder, reaffirmed their community, their identity as a group. The mess hall—in their case a jungle clearing—became a kind of sanctuary, a formal break in the hard routine of war, a break too from the continual discomfort, unease and self-denial that began at first light and ended only with sleep.

The nurses helped set up the first kitchen at Hospital #2 and pitched in to serve one of the first meals: tea, biscuits and slumgullion stew, a concoction of meat and whatever other edible ingredients the cooks could find. Helping out on KP (“kitchen police”) put the nurses shoulder to shoulder with ordinary soldiers. None of these men, of course, were accustomed to working alongside women, and a few of the grizzled sergeants were unsettled by the idea of “soldiers in skirts.” One day on KP one of them told Sally Blaine that he “didn’t want any damn woman in my kitchen.”
⁵