Elizabeth M. Norman (18 page)

The Japanese knew little about this underground fortress and headquarters. A main corridor 750 feet long, 25 feet wide, and 15 feet high served as the spine for the laterals. Through this corridor ran a railway line to ferry supplies. Adjacent laterals were used to store food, medicine and ordnance and served as barracks, administrative offices and a hospital.

After the first Japanese bombing on December 29, 1941, most of the seven thousand troops stationed on Corregidor moved into or near the sprawling underground complex.

Army nurses set up the hospital, which soon consisted of a central corridor a hundred yards long and open on one end to the outside, and eight smaller laterals, or wards, that branched off the long corridor and were connected honeycomb fashion by other passages.

The hospital had all the familiar trappings of an infirmary—white enamel bedside tables, iron beds, flush-type latrines, showers, spigots, filing cabinets and refrigerators. In addition to recovery and convalescent wards, the hospital laterals held operating rooms, a dental clinic, laboratories, kitchen and dining areas, a dispensary and sleeping quarters for the nurses.

As in all the laterals throughout the complex, red lights hung from the arched ceilings and flashed warnings of impending attacks, but Malinta Tunnel was so well built, the hospital staff could continue to work during raids, interrupted only by the muffled thuds of bombs and shells landing above.

The Japanese had been bombing the island repeatedly since their December invasion, but, the extensive surface damage notwithstanding, the bombardment had not really hurt the garrison. Now, with Bataan under enemy control, the Japanese moved their big guns south to the peninsula and ordered extra flights of bombers. At times they pounded the Rock so hard it seemed as if they were trying to pulverize it into dust.

Using observation balloons, reconnaissance aircraft and 116 big guns on Bataan, as well as at the Cavite naval base outside Manila, the enemy lobbed so many tons of explosives across the water that some of the nurses who had been in the hospital laterals since the beginning of the war thought that the seventy feet of rock over their heads might collapse on top of them.

In Malinta Tunnel hospital Maude Davison and her deputy, Josie Nesbit, now commanded eighty-five army nurses, twenty-six Filipino nurses, one navy nurse and dozens of civilian women living and working among them. As the bombardment intensified so did the casualties
among the beach and artillery crews. Soon single beds became bunk beds, soon bunk beds were welded into triple-deckers.

To the nurses who had been bombed in the open-air hospitals on Bataan, Malinta Tunnel seemed impregnable. For the first time in three months they had a ceiling over their heads, a decent meal every day, no snakes, ants or iguanas in their beds. Their only complaint was a sense of disorientation, for in the tunnel it was impossible to tell night from day. As often as they could the women and their friends gathered outside at the entrance to the main corridor to smoke in the open air, listen to the radio and stare at the stars in the night sky. Sometimes in the crowd of men and women outside the entrance a voice would break into song—“The Yellow Rose of Texas” or “Home on the Range”—and soon a single voice would grow into a sing-along.
¹

In early April, when news spread that a large group of young American women had arrived on the Rock, the hospital complex began to draw a steady stream of visitors.

Maude Davison, a by-the-book officer, reacted in typical fashion: she issued a series of orders designed to enforce strict military protocol. The green coveralls her women wore on Bataan were put away, and the army hired Chinese tailors to sew khaki skirts and military-style blouses. Hairdos once again reflected “off-the-collar” regulations. Some of the women, particularly the younger ones, no doubt bridled under such nickel-and-dime nonsense, but they kept silent. Many in fact found a kind of reassurance and comfort in the old disciplines.

M
AUDE
C
AMPBELL
D
AVISON
, the chief of all army nurses in the Philippines, was fifty-seven years old when the war started, but with the beginning of a dowager hump in her back, she looked older. To regard her, to view her from a distance, was to look upon the image of maternity, compassion, safekeeping and care. She was a small-framed woman who wore her white hair tied back in a bun like a grandmother. The younger nurses even nicknamed her “Ma,” but Maude Davison never offered her charges maternal comfort.

“Miss Davison,” as she insisted on being called, was a strict disciplinarian who demanded that her nurses follow army regulations, and her rules, to the letter.

A naturalized American citizen, she was born March 27, 1885, in Cannington, Ontario Province, Canada. She began her career as a dietitian working at Baptist College in Manitoba, then she emigrated to
the United States and took a job at Epworth Hospital in South Bend, Indiana.
²

Wanting more, she went west to California and entered Pasadena Hospital Training School for Nurses. Less than a year later, on June 3, 1918, at the age of thirty-three, she joined the Army Nurse Corps.

Her double expertise, nursing and dietetics, made her a valuable officer at a time when the army was assigned the difficult jobs of coordinating casualties of the Great War and helping with refugees abroad and a flu epidemic at home. In the early 1920s she spent thirteen months with the occupation forces in Coblenz, Germany, working with the victims of the famine then sweeping across Russia and Eastern Europe. Back home she returned to school, Columbia University this time, and earned a degree in home economics. At the time less than 10 percent of the women in the United States held college credentials.

Her nurses on Bataan and Corregidor knew none of this. Davison kept her own counsel and usually her own company. The physicians she assisted always admired her; she was “capable,” they said—a high compliment in medical circles—a clinician who could adapt to crises and changing circumstances.

She had no family—rather, the army was her family, her life, and she listed its headquarters, Washington, D.C., as her hometown.

The older nurses who knew her said she liked to collect humorous anecdotes but rarely shared these with her women. She also liked her liquor, particularly in the evening after work, often to excess.

The women who crossed her felt the sharp sting of her rebuke. She was blunt and unsparing in her criticism, “mean,” said some women, and they intensely disliked her for it.

In some ways she was typical of her generation of leaders—distant and formal, always professional, always demanding complete obedience.

A
LTHOUGH SHE DID
not show it, Davison must have been impressed with her nurses, particularly the ones who had served on Bataan, for it was clear that three months under fire had honed their skills as no other training could. They were able to dress wounds quickly and efficiently, and they had administered so many anesthetics and painkillers, they now seemed to know the right dosage by heart, by instinct. In a look they could see signs of dehydration and disease. In a voice they could detect the symptoms of distress.

Malinta Tunnel, however, presented them with a new set of disorders.
The stale, stagnant air in those damp and close quarters left people with serious respiratory diseases as well as fungus infections and skin boils, nicknamed “Guam blisters.”
³
The nurses too developed these blisters, and when they tried to lift patients or climb onto their own bunks, they winced or recoiled in pain. Doctors developed a technique of lancing the welts and painting them with Mercurochrome and salicylic acid.

Twenty-two civilian women also shared the nurses sleeping quarters and mess. The wives of high-level politicians or lucky evacuees most willingly pitched in, carrying food to bed patients, taking temperatures and rolling bandages. A Polish woman with a talent for cooking on the griddle volunteered to make pancakes. Ann Mealor, chief nurse on Corregidor before the war, set down three rules for the interlopers: they were to keep their beds made, their floors tidy and their mouths shut after 9:00
P.M
. A few women, society matrons mostly, refused to go along and were shunned. “I could say more [about their] upbringing, selfishness and personal hygiene, but I think that would be unprofessional of me,” said Hortense McKay, a senior army nurse.
⁴

After two weeks underground the Bataan nurses no longer thought of Malinta Tunnel as a haven, just a different kind of hell.

The incessant bombing was concussive and some of the women developed severe earaches and headaches. Walls and ceilings trembled and shook, medicine bottles toppled out of cabinets, bunk beds bounced across the floor. The concussions increased the air pressure in the narrow laterals and caused the nurses’ skirts to wrap tightly around their legs. Each blast shook loose small flakes of concrete and great volumes of dust, and soon there was so much debris passing through the ventilation system, the moist air began to feel viscous and left the patients and staff coughing.

When the generators failed, as they often did, the hospital turned dark, and corpsmen were called upon to hold flashlights for the surgical teams. “If you ever wanted to feel what the darkness of the Egyptian pyramids must have been like,” said Hattie Brantley, “you should have been in Malinta Tunnel when the lights went out.”
⁵

Off duty in their lateral, the nurses read and chatted and wrote in their journals.

[Straub Diary, April 18]
All quiet today. No shelling. No bombing. Why?

[April 19]
Enemy shelling was heavy for five hours. The atmosphere of the tunnel becomes more depressing as each day passes. Food is fairly good; in fact excellent in comparison to that of Bataan.

[April 21]
Four and a half months since I’ve seen a streetcar, taxi, caleso—that’s a Filipino horse-drawn cab—store, movie. We have found the real meaning of being isolated.

[April 25]
General Wainwright came through the ward this evening to give Lieutenant Augur, a patient (he was in the coast artillery I think), the Distinguished Service Award.
⁶

As time passed and the bombing and artillery attacks increased, the tunnel began to feel like an anthill, a suffocating and oppressive labyrinth of dark, malodorous and crowded passageways. The stale muggy air, the close quarters and the stench of disinfectants, anesthetics and suppurating flesh prompted larger and larger numbers of people to seek a few minutes of fresh air and join the large nightly gathering at the tunnel’s main entrance.

On the night of April 26, some two weeks after the surrender of Bataan, a large group of “tunnel rats,” as some began to call themselves, stood outside the entrance to the main corridor for their nightly airing. Just as the group settled into conversation and song, the Japanese fired two huge 240mm shells at Corregidor.

One was a dud, the other landed at the tunnel’s entrance.

The concussion was so colossal it slammed shut the tunnel’s slatted iron entrance gate, and the laterals echoed with screams from the outside. Corpsmen and nurses in nearby laterals sprinted toward the entrance to aid their comrades. When they arrived they had to pry open the iron gate, a grizzly task, for jutting between the slats were body parts and pieces of torn and mangled flesh.

Outside, fourteen men lay dead, seventy wounded.

Cassie stood there open-mouthed at the slaughter. When a severed head rolled around her feet, she started to retch and looked away lest she lose her self-control.

That night nurses and doctors worked nonstop. Even for the Battling Belles of Bataan it was hideous work—tearing away clothing soaked
with a bolus of blood and flesh, applying tourniquets to stop the river of red running on the lateral floor, snipping off mangled fingers and toes, watching them drop into a bucket fast filling with amputated flesh.

[Straub Diary, April 26]
Last evening … many injured, some killed. A most depressing sight. Today people were jittery and not at all anxious to get outside.… Awfully hungry tonight. In fact, most of the time. Wonder what butter tastes like.… Still on duty in the orthopedic ward. Hospital is filled to capacity. We’re using triple-decker beds now.
⁷

The daily bombardment was withering. The face of Corregidor, once almost gardenlike, a kind of military resort with flowers and lawns and clubs and pools, an island swept by breezes from the sea—this once lush and pastoral place was now a wasteland, denuded of its natural beauty, reduced to gray rubble and piles of dust, a hot, hardscrabble dot of rock in the crosshairs of a hundred thundering cannons.

Living among the tunnel rats was Leon Ma Guerrero, one of the Philippines’ brightest and most talented intellectuals. Guerrero, who worked at the tunnel radio station, kept a diary and made fastidious mental notes about life under siege, and later in a Philippine literary journal, he wrote an essay, “Last Days of Corregidor,” that, though embroidered and overdone, seemed to capture both the perverse defiance and dark mood of the tunnel rats.

Reality was a brief cigarette in the dark, a frenzied kiss and embrace beyond the bend of the road, a plateful of beans and a slice of canned pineapple, a throw of the dice, a turn of the card
.

Above all reality was a bloody carcass carried on a swaying khaki stretcher along the cavernous gloom of Malinta Tunnel, past the staring crowds suddenly grown hushed … into the hospital lateral … finally to be laid on the white surgical tables, to squirm and groan and scream and mutter half-remembered prayers and half-forgotten names amid the tinkle of instruments and the rush of water.…