Elizabeth M. Norman (19 page)

Every day it seemed that the line of stretchers grew longer.… The narrow hospital corridors were crammed with the wounded, the sick and the dying; convalescents were hurried out to make room for fresh casualties as doctors made their rounds with an increasingly artificial joviality
.

Nurses snapped at one another, at the male attendants, at the patients as the intolerable strain continued. An official order commanded all women refugees on the island to lend a hand; and the gossips, the flirts, the Navy wives and the army daughters, except for the old and the invalid, put aside their knitting, their pleasant novels, their compacts, and their cigarette cases to carry soup trays or administer baths and rub-downs with their manicured hands.…

Sometimes a nurse and her boyfriend of the evening would melt into a dance under the disapproving eyes of the garrison adjutant. The eyes of the onlookers would grow soft and thoughtful, while other couples would steal out into the perilous night, to lie on the harsh dry grass that was softened by the dew
.

Out there a man might indeed forget, gulping down sweetened hospital alcohol, listening to the thin and delicate melody of a Filipino kundiman [a traditional love song], or a muffled laugh—surrendering Mind with all its fears and premonitions to the warm embrace of Flesh.
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As the shelling grew more and more ferocious, the psyches of those determined to defend the island grew more and more fragile. A number of soldiers developed “tunnelitis,” an unwillingness to leave the laterals for any reason. Some of the nurses, no doubt convinced their end was near, began to get up well before dawn and wander outside in the early morning quiet to see at least one more sunrise, experience at least a few moments of one more day.

On Tuesday, April 28, General Homma held a victory parade in Manila, a ruse to deceive the allies into thinking that he had delayed at least for a while his plan to attack Corregidor.

[Straub Diary, April 28]
It is surprising that I still have this little would-be diary. Intended to burn it as the Japs were coming into our camp at Bataan, but didn’t have time. However I tried to keep from mentioning anything that would be of military value. All in all, this little book has been a companion in my loneliness and sorrow.… Every patient in the hospital has been given a gas mask.
⁹

The next day at 7:25
A.M
. Homma ordered a massive pounding of the Rock, the heaviest artillery and air bombardment of the campaign.

The walls and ceilings of Malinta Tunnel trembled with the concussions
and the tunnel instantly filled with dust, choking the patients and staff. Outside, the island was on fire. Even the trees seemed to explode, and when two gasoline dumps were hit the blasts sent smoke thousands of feet into the air. Ambulance drivers risked their lives dodging the explosions and trying to navigate the crater-filled roads to reach the exposed artillery units, where casualties were severe.

The next day the bombardment continued. Clearly the Rock was being “softened up” for an invasion. And it was just as clear that the defenders of Corregidor, now on severely limited rations, short on trained infantry and weapons, without heavy armor, most of all without any hope of resupply, could not repel the well-trained, well-supplied troops that would surely come against them, wave after wave of fighting men determined to raise the Rising Sun on Corregidor’s heights and slaughter anyone who got in their way.

In the last week in April, Wainwright was informed that two navy PBY seaplanes were going to attempt to slip through the Japanese blockade, deliver a small load of supplies and take out some passengers—civilian dependents, staff experts and cryptographers requested by MacArthur, and many older officers that Wainwright felt “were in no physical condition to take captivity.”
¹⁰
The general also decided to include in the group twenty of the Rock’s eighty-five army nurses.

No one knows why Wainwright decided to send some of the women out. Was he thinking of them in the same way he thought of his older officers, trying to cull from the group those who for various reasons might not fare well under the Japanese? Or, reflecting the attitudes of his age and perhaps guided by the chivalric code of the warrior, did he mean to get all the women off the Rock—some now, the rest later—lest the flower of American womanhood fall into the hands of the army that had despoiled Nanking?

Early on April 29 Wainwright received word that the planes would arrive that night, and he asked his chief medical officer to give him a list of women to go out. Colonel Cooper met with Maude Davison to decide who would stay and who would be given a chance to escape.
¹¹

Davison would later tell one of the nurses left behind that she picked the names out of a hat, but everyone quickly saw through this fiction, for many of her choices were obvious. Among the first selected were women in their late forties and early fifties who already were wilting under the physical duress of war—Louise Anschicks, Peg O’Neill, Florence MacDonald. Next she selected a few women who were either extremely ill with tropical diseases or who had been seriously wounded during the
bombings at Hospital #1—Sally Blaine, Rita Palmer, Rosemary Hogan. Then came the more difficult choices, women, as Ann Mealor later recalled, who were “inclined to be hysterical or anything like that.”
¹²
Josie Nesbit said that Maude Davison was convinced that only the most emotionally stable and physically fit would be able to withstand what was coming.

At 6:00
P.M
. twenty army nurses got word to report to the dining lateral at sundown. Davison handed each of them orders that stated they were being “relieved from present assignment and duty and will proceed by first available transportation to Melbourne, Australia, reporting upon arrival to the Commander in Chief, Southwest Pacific Area, G.H.Q., for further disposition.”
¹³
She ordered the women not to discuss their departure with anyone else. There would be no farewells, she said, no good-byes. Each could take one bag, as long as it weighed less than ten pounds. The two PBY’s would arrive shortly, and the women should be ready.

The evacuees, of course, ignored the gag order, and the news of their imminent departure soon spread. Few of the women who were to be left behind complained about the evacuation of the old, the sick, the wounded or the emotionally crippled. They “deserved” to go, most said. But also on the evacuation list, they noted, were a half dozen of the most attractive young women in the outfit, and not one of these beauties seemed to fit any of the evacuation criteria. In fact the only thing they had in common were their connections, often romantic, to high-ranking male officers.

“Why them? Why not me? Why anybody?” asked Madeline Ullom, echoing a common ambivalence. “We were torn. On one hand you are certain absolutely [about] your dedication and devotion to the patients, while on the other you wonder just how long you might withstand the trauma of continuing to live under this now impossible situation of constant heavy bombing and shelling. The trauma had to resolve itself in the stark realization that although you, personally, were not selected for the departure list, at least someone you knew [was]. In any event there was little consolation.”
¹⁴

Other women were simply angry. When Clara Mae Bickford saw her best friend, Eunice Hatchitt, packing a bag and getting ready to go, she rushed up to her. Hatchitt was young, pretty and attached to an officer on MacArthur’s staff.

“Where are you going?” said Bickford, fuming.

Hatchitt just kept packing.

“What are you doing?” Bickford demanded again. “You’re leaving! Aren’t you?” she yelled.
¹⁵

The two women were close; they had been bunkmates on Bataan and inseparable on Corregidor, even taking their nightly constitutional together outside the tunnel.

Hatchitt couldn’t look her friend in the eye. Finally she closed her luggage, reached up and gave her friend a long hug, and quickly departed.

Denny Williams fixed her anger on a pretty woman named Earleen Allen. “Why she was chosen to escape from Corregidor,” Williams wrote, “only God knows.”
¹⁶

Most of the hard feelings fell on Juanita Redmond, who was beautiful enough to be a movie star.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Cassie, “Redmond was on [that list] because of her connections. Politics works no matter where you are and what the circumstances.”
¹⁷

For her part, Redmond “did not know what to think, nor how I felt. I wanted to go, and I didn’t want to go. Probably I would never see the other nurses again, and I wanted to stay with them and face whatever was to come; we had faced so much together, I felt like a deserter.”
¹⁸

Josie Nesbit, forty-seven years old, was on the list to go, but refused to leave her post. “I want to stay,” she told Davison flatly.
¹⁹

Anne Wurts, who had been sick with various ailments for quite some time, was on the list as well, but she too insisted on doing her duty and urged Davison to select someone even sicker to take her place.
²⁰

As a landing site for the PBY’s, Wainwright had chosen a sheltered area in the bay between Corregidor and a tiny island. Minesweepers had cleared the section and placed two lighted buoys in the water. And the Japanese unwittingly cooperated; for some reason they had temporarily lifted their barrage.

The seaplanes set down and taxied to the landing site. Around 11:45
P.M
. the evacuees gathered on a dock to board small boats for the short ride out to the bobbing seaplanes. Just before she boarded the boat, Juanita Redmond turned to General Wainwright.

She put her arms around me and kissed me. “Oh thank you general,” she cried. We stood there and watched the seaplanes roar and take off and prayed they would not be hit.… They sailed right off the water beautifully, pulled out over the side of Cavite beyond the range of the antiaircraft
guns and were enveloped in the night. Then we turned and walked back to our jobs.
²¹

On board the plane the pilots ordered everyone to move forward to lessen the tail drag during takeoff. Huddled together in the cool, fresh air that now filled the front of the cabin, some of the fortunate few took a final look back at their beleaguered island and wept. Others, perhaps lost in the reverie of their good luck or in the sinking emptiness of regret, stared straight ahead with hollow eyes. A few sat back and quickly drifted into sleep.

W
AINWRIGHT WAS DESPERATE
. He might fight off a first wave, even a second, but he knew the enemy would keep landing troops, wave after wave, and once his beach defenses were overrun, once his short-range artillery was silenced, he would be forced back into Malinta Tunnel. All the Japanese would have to do then was put poison gas in the air ducts or pull tanks or flamethrowers up to the entrance and throw fire down the crowded laterals, where thousands of soldiers, many of them wounded, would be trapped.

The day after the PBY’s left, the quartermaster sent the general a list of shortages—no helmets, no towels, no handkerchiefs, no blankets, no raincoats, no tarpaulins. Most important, Corregidor would run out of water and power in thirty days.

Stewed tomatoes and rice appeared regularly on the menu, sometimes augmented with coconut and canned meat presented in a euphemism the cooks called a “casserole.”

Water was rationed as well and the women learned to wash their clothes and take baths in their helmets.

From time to time morale got a boost by seemingly insignificant acts and gestures. The Voice of Freedom radio programs, broadcast three times a day from the tunnel radio station, continually encouraged people to persevere. VOF announcers ended every transmission with the words, “Corregidor still stands!”
²²
One day three men braved the bombardment and repaired the halyard on the flagpole above the tunnel, then raised Old Glory high for everyone to see. General Wainwright tried to spend part of each day with the troops and made daily visits to the hospital laterals, often walking outside the entrance to smoke and chat with the nurses. Sometimes the laterals filled with music; a trio consisting of
a harmonica, guitar and a trombone led jam sessions that attracted large crowds. Often the nurses played the part of Red Cross hostesses, taking a turn around the concrete floors with a queue of grateful dance partners. At the main entrance to the tunnel a young Filipino would play old standards on the guitar, songs such as “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha, from the Bottom of My Heart,” while onlookers, misty-eyed, softly sang along.
²³

Meanwhile the cannonade continued.

[Straub Diary, May 1]
Phew! What bombing! Right at the entrance to the tunnel again. Although we were safe, it felt as though rock would tumble around our ears. Not much change in the general situation.

[May 3]
More intense bombing and shelling.… Shell shock cases being admitted now.…
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