Remember Nurses Who Have Served

On this Memorial Day, I began thinking about nurses who have served our country and the sacrifices they’ve made. Nurses have been administering to troops throughout the history of the United States, but the story of the nurses in the Philippines during World War II grabbed my attention.Ninety-nine were stationed on this Pacific outpost, and most became prisoners of war after U.S. and Filipino forces surrendered the islands to the Japanese in 1942.There are many stories about their imprisonment from 1942 to 1945, but two things are for sure: None of the nurses who were caught in the crossfire of the world’s largest conflict ever expected their lives to take such a turn, and they all acted heroically.Most of the nurses who signed on for duty in the Pacific theater were just “in search of a little adventure,” as one journalist put it. They expected to pass their time with the Army and Navy doling out aspirin and caring for the few who contracted tropical diseases. All that changed on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor set in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of these nurses.The invasion of the Philippines began 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor and dozens of nurses were captured and eventually sent to Los Banos POW camp in Manila where they tended to the sick and injured under extremely primitive conditions.One nurse, Ruth Straub, wrote in her journal that the first hospital on Bataan was a "jungle land and everyone lives under trees. Rows of beds snuggled under the trees with narrow winding paths between them and the night sky overhead.”Nurse Elizabeth M. Norman, who eventually became an associate professor in nursing at New York University, was stationed on Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay that was important to the Philippines’ defense. General Douglas MacArthur used Corregidor as Allied headquarters until March 1942. Two months later, U.S. and Filipino forces surrendered to the Japanese."The nurses stood mute and edgy,” Norman said of the surrender scene in her book, "We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan."“Up and down the line walked the Japanese, looking them over. It was difficult, at first, to read the enemy's face, to separate reputation from reality, reality from fear... The sight of women in uniform was so alien to the Japanese that they seemed puzzled, indeed almost confused, by the nurses' presence."The nurses spent nearly three years in the POW camps and conditions deteriorated over time, especially during their last year of captivity."Some people started eating weeds, flowers and roots,” Norman wrote. “A few of the nurses grew a little talinum (a succulent) and okra, then fried their meager harvest in cold cream that came in Red Cross kits."According to another nurse’s account, the POWs were "reduced to eating anything they could find -- dogs, frogs, even rats."Many of the nurses fell ill themselves, but they continued to work, caring for the soldiers and hundreds of others who also were held prisoner."When your world is crumbling around you,” Norman wrote, “you need this kind of structure.”Another nurse who told her story was Rita Palmer of the Boston area, who died in 2002. According to her obituary, she was “among the few World War II female veterans to receive the Purple Heart.”Palmer joined the U.S. Army Nurses Corps in 1941 and served in a field hospital in Bataan and Corregidor until the surrender, in which she was wounded and taken prisoner. After the war, she told her story to the local newspaper.The first two years “went fairly pleasant,” she related, but things changed in 1944. The nurses had only rice to eat and that was rationed. Some contracted beriberi (a nervous system disease caused by lack of thiamine). They turned to eating cats, and a flock of pigeons that had nested in the eaves “gradually disappeared.”Palmer was “in the hospital with dysentery when the Americans arrived in tanks. She went to the window to watch American soldiers pour into the camp. One gave her the first chocolate bar she had eaten in two years.”Amazingly, all the nurses who were imprisoned in Manila lived to be liberated by American forces in early February 1945. They were decorated for bravery at the White House that summer.

Remember Nurses Who Have Served

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