Elizabeth M. Norman (12 page)

The lull also gave all the nurses time to unwind. After three months of unremitting work; three months of gunshot and shrapnel wounds, malaria, dysentery, jungle fever, gangrene, concussions, infections, chronic illness and death; three months, in short, of living with the awful inventory of battle, the nurses needed a rest. And the men fighting in the field, eager for a woman’s company, eager to be near an emblem of home, if only for a few moments, were only too happy to oblige them.

“There were a lot of spur-of-the-moment parties,” Cassie said. “People would say, ‘Come on up to such-and-such a location; we’re gonna have a party.’ At this one party I met a group of navy men who told me they were going to try to get to Australia by commandeering a PT [patrol-torpedo] boat. They even offered me a seat. Of course it meant going AWOL [absent without leave] and I wasn’t ready to do that. I never found out what happened to those guys.”
²⁰

A few days later an engineering officer asked Cassie if she wanted to take part in an unusual outing. “He was on a burial detail and he asked me to go with him to a couple of towns to pick up some of the bodies. We went through one little barrio that was really deserted and we decided to investigate. In one hut we found an old piano, an upright, and I sat down to play. But the keys wouldn’t move so the engineer opened the
lid. And you know what? Someone before evacuating had hidden their best dishes in there!”
²¹

All the nurses had a standing invitation to dinner aboard the U.S.S.
Canopus
, the ship the navy had camouflaged to look derelict. The ruse had fooled Japanese pilots, and belowdecks the men secretly turned out weapons. Down there out of sight they were also hoarding a store of treasures taken from the Cavite naval base during the first week of the war. Their mess tables were covered with white linen, silver cutlery and navy china, and their galley was stocked with canned meats and vegetables. Hungry nurses eagerly accepted the captain’s invitation to dine at his officers table, and the women marveled at the place settings and the sumptuous, by Bataan’s standards, bill of fare. They also never forgot their dessert.

“When the Chaplain said good night,” Juanita Redmond wrote, “he handed each of us a lollypop [
sic
]; we could hardly believe our eyes. The very word ‘candy’ belonged to a dead language.”
²²

A motor transport battalion at Mariveles also invited the women to dinner. The men had bartered with the locals for meat, milk and coffee, then set up outdoor tables with tin plates and handprinted menus bearing the message
WELCOME TO THE VICTORY HOTEL
. After dinner, the nurses sat back and enjoyed an old-fashioned musical revue staged by Filipino singers and performers.

Birthdays were always a great excuse for a party, and when Cassie turned twenty-five in late January, she dug out a bottle of Johnny Walker Red she had been hoarding, unscrewed the cap and threw herself and her friends at Hospital #1 in Little Baguio a celebration.

Sometimes in the evening the male doctors and medics at the hospitals would tack old army blankets over a bamboo floor, crank up a vintage phonograph and create an ad hoc dance hall. A few of the nurses still had a dress or two in their wardrobe, and they would put on makeup, from what was left, slip on a pair of mended socks and, in the arms of a doctor, glide over the tightly stretched blankets, pretending all the while that they were back in Manila dancing under the peacetime stars.

One morning during the lull, a group of nurses and doctors from Hospital #1 packed up some caraboa sandwiches and lime juice, piled into a couple of trucks and headed for Manila Bay where they parked on a bluff, changed clothes in the underbrush and walked down a footpath to a pretty little cove with a white sand beach. From their vantage point they could see Japanese planes bombing Corregidor across the bay, but
the war did not spoil their mood. They swam in the blue water and lazed on the beach. (One woman had fashioned a makeshift bathing suit out of a white-and-red flannel bedspread, and as she emerged from the water she quickly discovered, to the delight of her male companions, that when flannel gets wet it is practically transparent.) One of the doctors offered to teach the nurses to swim, but a few of the women thought that his lessons “looked more like Swedish massage” than swimming instruction.
²³
But no one put up a fuss. With war all around, there was a sense of carpe diem in the air, a feeling that everyone should make every moment count.

And so during those quiet days no one was surprised when three couples announced they wanted to get married. It did not matter that the military expelled women who wed—there was nowhere for them to go and no way for them to get there—and it did not matter that the brides sometimes stood before the chaplain in combat boots instead of wedding slippers. Marriage represented a beginning in a place where most people were thinking only of the end.

Nurse Rita Palmer of Hampton, New Hampshire, married navy Lieutenant Edwin Nelson of Huntington, West Virginia (her wedding band was a jade ring the groom had bought in Hong Kong for his mother); dental nurse Earleen Allen of Chicago, Illinois, married dentist Garnet Francis; and on February 19, 1942, ward nurse Dorothea Mae Daley married an artillery officer, Emanuel “Boots” Engel, Jr., of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Daley and Engel had long been lovers. They became engaged in the fall of 1941, then when war broke out, events separated them. In early January, Captain Engel, who was assigned to a beach defense unit at Mariveles, got word that his fiancée was in Hospital #1, roughly twenty miles away, and he quickly hitchhiked north to find her. When Daley set eyes on her man, she nearly swooned.

We were both in khaki, tired and discouraged, feeling like trapped animals, yet when his arms were around me I felt as if the reality of war was merely a nightmare.… When he did find me in the midst of that living hell it gave me the conviction that always he would find me
.

Boots hitched a ride to see me as often as possible, and during January and part of February we were as happy as an engaged couple can be who are fighting a losing war. Perhaps we appreciated those moments more because they were so rare and unexpected.…

Boots had decided we would be married while we were still together on Bataan. We are both Catholics, and we consulted with several chaplains as to how a ceremony could be performed on a jungle battlefield. Father
William Thomas Cummings, who had been director of a boys’ school in civilian life, agreed to perform the ceremony. He said that in the presence of death he would give us the spiritual blessing that he knew we wanted
.

And on February 19, I, Dorothea Mae Daley, took Emanuel Engel Jr., to be my wedded husband, for better, for worse, in sickness or in health, till death do us part. Everybody in the wedding party, including the bride, was in khaki. I had covered my khaki pants with a khaki skirt which one of the nurses had concocted and which she loaned to me for my wedding night
.

There was no ring, no license, no bouquet, no veil, no Mass. It was Lent, a season during which Catholics are forbidden to wed. The chaplain had no time to get a license to marry in the Philippines. Sounds of bombs were in the distance, and my feet, encased in huge army boots, felt awkward as I stood in an army hospital, the like of which had never been seen before. Two male witnesses heard us exchange vows. But there was a solemnity and a sacredness about the ceremony, performed in the midst of so much tragedy, that made us both feel that ours was no ordinary marriage.
²⁴

B
Y ALL AVAILABLE
accounts the presence of women on the battlefield boosted the morale of the men. And the more the men watched the women suffer war’s deprivations and danger, the more determined they were to carry the fight.

In a memoir composed after the war, surgeon John R. Bumgarner was convinced that

One of the most remarkable things coming out of our experience in Bataan was the presence and performance of the army nurses. In retrospect I believe that they were the greatest morale boost present in that unhappy little area of jungle called Bataan. I was continually amazed that anyone living and working under such primitive conditions could remain as calm, pleasant, efficient and impeccably neat and clean as those remarkable nurses
.

 … Some of the men in the combat area who had a moment of quietness would steal away to the hospital to spend a short while in the company of a woman. Often in the evening hours Jack [his barracks-mate] and I would hear girlish giggles coming across the Real River from the burlap confines [of the nurses quarters] accompanied by male voices speaking in low tones.…

In my mind, however, and in the minds of others, there lurked the fear that we would be unable to protect the nurses should the Japanese combat troops overrun the hospital. We had all heard the stories out of China about the atrocities committed against the female population of Nanking
[the so-called Rape of Nanking]. Even today, in spite of all the efforts to maintain that women properly belong in combat situations, I must admit that the thought of placing women in the front lines in a situation such as existed in Bataan offends me. There is something ingrained and inbred in man, though he may laugh at the idea, which persuades him that he is the protector.
²⁵

Maybe it was the false security of the lull or maybe just the natural tendency of human beings, as well-known sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson might argue, to be born enthusiastic and full of hope—whatever it was, many, many of the men and women fighting on Bataan believed they would be rescued.

Some of the nurses took to greeting one another with a refrain popular among the patients: “Don’t save for tomorrow.… We may be out of here!”
²⁶
The staff started an informal betting pool, with wagers of scotch (to be paid when they were safely repatriated), on the hour and day the relief convoy would arrive. A few people took turns climbing a pine tree in the middle of Little Baguio to scan the horizon for a mast or a hull. At Hospital #2 a few of the nurses hiked up a hill every morning, looking for the same thing.

Of course there were never any sightings because there were never any ships. “It sounds ludicrous,” Cassie wrote, “these rumors, these optimisms, these assurances … but at the time they helped us to live. I cannot, indeed, imagine how long we should have succeeded living without them.”
²⁷
Helen Summers of Queens, New York, wrote a song reflecting the fantasy of hope that sustained them.

A.N.C. [Army Nurse Corps] ON BATAAN
[Sung to the strains of the “Missouri Waltz”]

When we were in Bataan, in the good old ANC
We ate twice a day and drank diluted ginger tea
.
We sweat out the chow line, after a day’s grind
And caraboa stew was our daily menu
.

Sitting on a rock and bathing in a babbling brook
Is not the kind of life by choice we would have took
But for the duration
We’ll pretend it’s a vacation
And see it through.
²⁸

Meanwhile at night in her little book, Ruth Straub carefully recorded the details of the nurses’ difficult days.

[Straub Diary, February 18]
Ash Wednesday [beginning of Lent] Whenever two or more people gather, there is talk of food. Corned beef, rice and tea for breakfast. Salmon or Caraboa (water buffalo), tomatoes, rice and tea for supper.

[February 19]
The men now are picking up cigar et [
sic
] butts and smoking them in little holders made of bamboo twigs or rewrapping the tobacco in newspaper.

[February 25]
We ran into a huge cobra tonight. It was ready to spring when one of the fellows shot at it.… Latest fantastic rumor: we may go to Siberia.… The Japs are dropping propaganda leaflets telling the Filipinos to surrender and making all sorts of promises to them.… Had [mango] beans—sickly looking green pellets—and macaroni and an incredible thing, custard for supper.

[February 26]
A rat got into the bed of Rita Palmer and bit her.… Wrote notes [home]. Wonder if they’ll ever get to the States. We have had no mail since we left Manila.

[February 28]
Rumor of the day: Santa Barbara Cal. has been bombed. Latest story, radiogram we sent to the commanding officer of the Ninth Corps area—“If you hold out 30 days we’ll send reinforcements” … Almost three months now since we heard that same promise.

[March 3]
We should rename our ward “medical dump.” In addition to our surgical cases, 20 new medical cases including tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, and asthenia were dumped on us.… We have to sign in and out and [state our] destination now when leaving the hospital area.

[March 4]
Hotter every day. Rats more numerous. More snakes have been killed in the vicinity. Flies are here in droves.

[March 5]
I guess we are self-imposed prisoners-of-war. All we’re doing is protecting our own lives. Almost three months now and help has not arrived.