Elizabeth M. Norman (20 page)

A
T
7:30
A.M
. on May 2 the Japanese began an artillery and air attack that lasted twelve hours. Two officers on Wainwright’s staff counted the explosions and estimated that every minute of that period at least twelve five-hundred-pound shells fell on Corregidor. After five hours and some 3,600 rounds, or 1.8 million pounds of explosives, they stopped counting.

On May 3, four days after the PBY aircraft had taken the twenty army nurses and others off the Rock, a submarine, the U.S.S.
Spearfish
, approached the island. The
Spearfish
had been on her fourth war patrol near Luzon when her commander, Lieutenant James Dempsey, received a dispatch from Australia instructing him to proceed to Corregidor to pick up passengers. Although there were four enemy destroyers and one minelayer patrolling near the island, the submarine managed to slip in undetected and surface just outside an allied minefield.
²⁵

Wainwright picked another group of old or ailing colonels to evacuate, the U.S. Navy sent out six of its officers, a dependent, and Ann Bernatitus, the lone navy nurse to serve with the army nurses on Bataan; then, once more, Colonel Wibb Cooper met with Maude Davison to come up with some names, eleven this time, among them an older nurse, a grief-stricken younger woman unable to work and a nurse whose weight had dropped to seventy pounds.

When Ruby Motley, an army dietitian, heard about the submarine,
she went directly to Cooper and boldly asked to be put on the evacuation list. “I knew him quite well,” she later recalled. “I said, ‘I sure would like to go out on that sub!’ I didn’t want to go on those PBY planes; they didn’t have much of a chance of making it. A sub, I thought, would. He looked at me and said, ‘Ruby, you are the only dietitian we have and we can’t do without you.’ Well … I felt like two cents! I never said another word.”
²⁶

As before, Wainwright relied on Cooper and Davison to tell him which women to send to safety, but now he wanted to make one of the choices himself, Gladys “Ann” Mealor.

Mealor had been the chief nurse on Corregidor in the early stages of the war and the general had gotten to know her well. She had worked hard, he felt, and deserved to go home, but Ann Mealor, in her mid-thirties and at the time as sick and weary as any of the women, simply refused.

“I couldn’t see how anybody could walk off and leave all those wounded people,” she said. “I had enough faith in that old tunnel that I could make it if the japs [
sic
] came in. [After that] I didn’t plan on what would happen.”
²⁷

Wainwright later called her decision “one of the most courageous acts of the entire campaign: … I consider—and still consider—this a truly great act of heroism. She knew as well as I that she was signing her captivity warrant.”
²⁸

One of the last on the list was Ruth Straub.

[Straub Diary, May 4]
Last night 13 of us—a navy wife, a navy nurse, and 10 other army nurses besides myself—were called to the surgeon’s office and ordered to be ready to leave Corregidor by 7:30
P.M
. Wondered how many of the girls were leaving. Wondered if there would be time for General Wainwright to get all the nurses out of the tunnel. Wondered how we would leave.

Again among the women left behind there was anger and ambivalence, though clearly less than before. As their colleagues got ready to leave, some of the women, realizing that this was their last chance to send word home, pressed letters into the hands of those leaving.

[Straub Diary, May 4, cont’d]
The girls were grand in their wishes for us as we left, although there were tears in the eyes of some,
and many wore a look of hopelessness. I was thrilled, but I felt like a heel. What of all those left behind? Would they get away? So many doubts, so many worries …
²⁹

Eleanor Garen gave one of the women a note to her sister.

Dear Lauretta,

Tonight there is a way [to evacuate] some [nurses] so I will send this to you. It is hard to know what to say and how to say it but my mood is not so good. If Jeanne [her best friend Jeanne Kennedy] were going I would feel better but the way things go it makes me bitter. Gastinger is going!

We are living on a bulls-eye and every day is the same. As yet I have no regret over coming here.… It is so hot. I know what living on a deserted island is like now. Even though it is crowded and small here I still am lonely. Give my love to the rest of the family.
³⁰

Wainwright gave his favorite Smith & Wesson revolver to a departing friend with instructions to pass it on to his son. He also sent a complete list of the Americans still alive on Corregidor and a list of recent military promotions.

[Straub Diary, May 4]
General Wainwright stood at the entrance to the tunnel, shook hands with all of us and gave us his best wishes. Many of the men stood about waving good-by and shouting “Good luck to you!”
³¹

At roughly 7:45
P.M
. the evacuees, under bombardment, climbed onto a converted yacht for the short ride to the rendezvous point, four miles out to sea southwest of Corregidor. At 9:30
P.M
. a large, black shape rose out of the water. From the conning tower a blinking light signaled the yacht’s passengers aboard. The evacuees slipped quickly through the hatch belowdecks, the crew loaded baggage and mail, and in less than an hour the U.S.S.
Spearfish
had descended to a depth of two hundred feet and was on its way south to safety.

During the next twenty-four hours Japanese shore batteries fired more than sixteen thousand shells at Corregidor, most at the beach defenses
manned by the marines. Sometime before midnight on May 5 under a full moon, lookouts spotted fifteen Japanese landing barges, part of the first wave. Wainwright radioed General Marshall in Washington, telling him a landing was imminent. Then he ordered his men to burn all secret code books and strategic papers.

In their lateral the women waited. Maude Davison and Josie Nesbit huddled together, trying to figure out how they might safeguard their staff. Minutes later an officer approached the lateral and informed the women that the Japanese had landed at Monkey Point, a spot down the beach just northeast of the tunnel. The fighting was fierce, he said. Meanwhile the lookouts had spotted a second wave of enemy barges, this time loaded with artillery pieces and tanks.

The fifty-four army and twenty-six Filipino nurses, along with an army dietitian, an army physical therapist and twenty-one civilian women, passed the hour with their patients.
³²

Throughout the night, men from other laterals came to the hospital laterals and bid the women good-bye.

Chapter 9

A Handful Go Home

N
O ONE SURVIVES
at war without luck. The evacuees from Corregidor were trying to pull the flower of safety, as Shakespeare called it, from the nettle of despair. A few made it, a few did not.

The two seaplanes that left Corregidor on the night of April 29 rendezvoused at Lake Lanao, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, then hid until sunset, when they tried to take off under the cover of darkness.

A stiff wind had put a heavy chop on the water and the first PBY struggled several times before it became airborne. As it circled in a holding pattern, seaplane number two tried to taxi into position, but the turbulence kept blowing it back to shore, and all at once one of the women aboard heard a crunching sound. A rock beneath the waterline had ripped a hole in number two’s fuselage, and the cabin began to fill with water.
¹

In the darkness and wet the passengers disembarked, while a navy boat crew and salvage expert worked on the damaged ship. The colonel who took command of the evacuees from number two said he did not think the PBY could be repaired; therefore, he wanted the group to hide until MacArthur sent a rescue plane or boat. Everyone agreed with the colonel’s decision, and together they went inland to seek a hiding place. They made their way to an old hotel a safe distance from the Japanese lines.
²

By late afternoon the next day the crew of number two had been able to effect repairs and was ready to try again, but the nurses and colonels were nowhere in sight. And now the Japanese were less than twenty miles from the lake—and closing.

The pilots in number two had no choice—they had to take off or lose their ship to the enemy. They waited as long as they dared, then taxied onto the lake, turned the ship’s nose into the wind, and gave the engine full throttle.
³

(The passengers who had been left behind—ten army nurses, three women dependents, a naval officer and an army colonel—tried for almost two weeks to evade the Japanese, wandering from one house or farm to another until, at last, there was no place left to hide. The group surrendered to a unit of the Japanese army about midday on May 11. The men were shipped to military prisons on Luzon. The women worked in a hospital on Mindanao until the early fall, when they were sent to Manila and imprisoned there in a civilian internment camp.)

P
BY NUMBER ONE
set down on the waters of Port Darwin, Australia, around 8:30
A.M.
, May 1, 1942, an arrival that capped what was then the longest rescue in United States history. To some at Allied headquarters in Australia, the 7,300-mile round-trip flight was nothing short of a miracle.

The ten nurses aboard were bone-weary with fatigue but hardly cowed. Combat emboldens those who survive it, and, according to one officer who claims to have watched the arrival, some of the women still had some fight in them—or at least some leftover anger.

From his quarters near the water, Stuart Shadrick Murray, a naval officer in charge of a submarine division at Port Darwin, watched as PBY number one taxied to the dock.

[The women disembarked] then they locked arms … and started down the main street.… The Australians … got out of their way and would just stand on the sidewalks gawking. The Americans would do the same because these nurses were singing at the top of their voices, and they were pretty loud too, ‘Dig a little deeper in your dugout, Dugout Doug’ [as MacArthur was called by many of those he’d left on Bataan and Corregidor]. And they knew verses I’d never heard of and none of us had. Apparently they had put it together and it was anything but complimentary. I had the doubtful honor of being told to go out … and break it up.… I … tried to talk with them by walking ahead of them. They were walking at a pretty brisk pace because they were accustomed to marching and I tried to walk backwards first, and almost fell down, then I walked with them and talked over my shoulder and finally I talked them into breaking it up. I might add it
took two or three blocks of walking before I got them to break it up.… They were hardened. There was no question about it.
⁴

Hardened? Perhaps Commander Shadrick let his view of women, and of himself, color his memory.

For their part, the evacuees remembered feeling stunned at first, and disoriented. The heavy thuds of bombs were still fresh in their ears, and they stood on the pier, suspended in the moment, trying to situate themselves in a new time and place.

As they began to get their bearings, a few knelt and put their lips to the Australian soil, while others, tears coursing down their cheeks, flung themselves into one another’s arms.

Later, during physicals at a local hospital, they stood in front of full-length mirrors, and what they saw shocked them—faces gray and drawn, eyes limpid and hollow, bodies left androgynously flat by months of hard labor and want. (About this time the women learned that PBY number two had arrived empty and that their comrades had been left behind. “We told each other they’d be all right,” wrote Juanita Redmond. “You can’t [keep] that lot down.”
⁵
)

On May 5 the army flew the nurses to headquarters in Melbourne. It was winter in Australia and the women, still in their air corps coveralls, shivered in the cold.

At Port Melbourne Hospital they were issued regulation uniforms, real clothes for the first time in months. “You look almost human again,” Eunice Hatchitt told one of her companions.
⁶
And the army, apparently noticing the same thing, decided it was time to trot them out for the press.

They were good copy, these women who had nursed under the guns in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor. Their example might inspire other women to take up nursing and military commission. And their story—a tale of courage and escape—might boost the morale of a nation reeling from a series of costly shambles and bitter defeats.

So they took their places at a press conference, sat there politely and respectfully in a room crowded with reporters, answering questions about what they had missed the most—“enormous hamburgers smothered in onions”
⁷
—and about life under fire.