Elizabeth M. Norman (22 page)

The War Department had alerted the press to the ship’s arrival, and when the
West Point
sailed into New York Harbor on July 2, 1942, its docking was broadcast live by radio across the United States.

In Big Sandy, Texas, some of Lucy Wilson’s landsmen heard the broadcast and were so excited they walked a mile outside town to shake hands with her parents and congratulate them on their daughter’s safe return.

T
HE
A
MERICA THE
nurses returned to in the summer of 1942 was a much different country than the America they had left a year or so before. Everywhere, it seemed, there were men in uniform, women too, a shift in gender roles that caught the nurses a bit off guard.

While they had been serving overseas, Congress had authorized the formation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, or WAACS. By the end of the year, the government had won approval for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the navy WAVES, as well as the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve and the Coast Guard SPARS. Women, however, were not being trained for combat; instead they were considered replacements for clerical or behind-the-lines workers, freeing up men to fight.

The government especially needed nurses. In the year leading up to the summer of 1942, the ranks of the Army Nurse Corps nearly doubled, from less than 7,000 active-duty nurses to 12,475. During the same period the Navy Nurse Corps grew from 430 women to more than 1,800. The leaders of both corps were given field-grade rank—an important distinction previously denied them—and all military nurses were treated as officers and allowed to wear the various insignias of their grade, although, typically, they were paid significantly less than men of equivalent rank.

With a two-front war, however, the numbers of the army and navy nurse corps were still too low, so the government established the National Council for War Service, an alliance of professional nursing organizations,
to coordinate recruiting and meet a goal of 2,500 enlistees a month. Fulfilling that quota required a massive national effort. And to the government, the nurses of Bataan and Corregidor were recruiting posters come to life.

The eighteen “heroes in skirts,” fresh from combat and full of stories about life in the field and under fire, were offered as models of sacrifice and devotion to duty, paradigms of American womanhood, at least the kind the War Department wanted. It did not matter that they were still tired and sick. They were needed on the recruiting trail and the war-bond hustings.

On July 1, 1942, in the gardens of the National Red Cross Headquarters in Washington, D.C., the government formerly launched its campaign to recruit more nurses. The army nurses who had escaped on the PBY became the first American women decorated for bravery in World War II. Among those attending the large, formal ceremony were James C. Magee, the surgeon general of the United States; John McCloy, assistant secretary of war; Frances Bolton, a congresswoman from Ohio; and the first lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Mrs. Roosevelt had flown in from her apartment in New York especially for the occasion. In the audience were representatives from five Washington-area hospitals, many military and Red Cross nurses, radio broadcasters, newsreel cameramen and scores of newspaper reporters and photographers. The Army Air Force band played rousing music, and the evacuees in their new blue uniforms and overseas caps stood stiffly at attention.

Looking at old, black-and-white glossies of that day, it is easy to read their faces. Clearly the women were weary—the eyes show that. Equally clear is a certain frailty in their expressions, a look, perhaps, of resignation or forbearance or, in some cases, sorrow.

One speaker after another hailed the women’s courage. The chairman of the Red Cross compared them with the Minutemen of Lexington and the defenders of the Alamo. Mrs. Roosevelt spoke last. She reminded the audience that her four sons were in uniform and hoped there would be enough nurses on duty at hospitals and aid stations to give them the care they might need. Then she looked at the evacuees and said that the president had been thinking of them: “Your heroism has touched him deeply. To you present today he wishes me to say, ‘God bless you for service well done.’ To those left behind and held by the enemy, he says, ‘Have faith, for the day of liberation will come.’ ”
¹⁹

Afterward the nurses were invited to tea with the first lady, and when
she was introduced to them and shook their hands, she called them “Lieutenant” instead of “Miss,” something none of the women ever forgot.
²⁰
She told them how happy she was that they were well, then wished them good luck and Godspeed.

Five days later in a similar but smaller ceremony, the nurses from the
Spearfish
received their medals. The navy honored Ann Bernatitus in its own celebration, giving her a newly created award, the Legion of Merit; she was the only navy nurse in World War II so honored. Her citation in part read:

Constantly in the front lines of defense in the Manila-Bataan Area, and on two separate occasions, forced to evacuate to a new position after Japanese bombs had wrecked the Surgical Unit, Nurse Bernatitus courageously withstood the dangers and rigors of tropical combat rendering efficient and devoted service during the tense days of prolonged siege and evacuation.
²¹

In between the ceremonies and appearances, many of the women found their way home, often to unexpected acclaim. About six thousand people turned out at Lockhart High School Stadium in Texas to greet Eunice Hatchitt; the local congressman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, presented her with the keys to the city. In Exeter, Pennsylvania, hundreds of Ann Bernatitus’s neighbors gave her a testimonial dinner and a wristwatch. The people of Big Sandy, Texas, held a reception for Lucy Wilson, then went out and bought her a new wardrobe, which she badly needed. Lucy was so grateful, she wore everything handed her, including the size-sixteen dresses that hung like tents on her seventy-pound frame.

After their leaves were over, the women returned to the war-bond and recruiting drives. They made speeches, posed for photographs, gave interviews, christened new ships and accepted honoraria. Few of the nurses, if any, relished this attention. In fact, tired as they were and racked with doubt, they wanted anonymity, not celebrity. But no one protested, no one felt she could say no.

Newspapers and magazines feasted on their story.
The New Yorker, Collier’s, The American Magazine
and
Hospitals Magazine
all ran major articles. Ruth Straub’s diary was syndicated in newspapers across the country. Two books that turned on the Bataan experience became bestsellers—W. L. White’s
They Were Expendable
, which chronicled the exploits of four patrol-torpedo boat officers and one army nurse,
²²
and
I Served on Bataan
, Juanita Redmond’s first-person account of her time in the jungle and escape from Corregidor.
²³

In all of this the nurses were characterized as selfless, calm, courageous, and certainly to greater or lesser degrees these salutes applied. To be under fire is, of itself, an act worth honoring. And to stand faithfully by their patients with the enemy advancing was, by any measure, a gesture of fidelity and love. But to the evacuees this praise was a burden because it was delivered in a plethora of prose that in many instances was pure fiction or rank, degrading melodrama.

Even
The New York Times Magazine
got carried away, taking the notion of “heroine” to ludicrous extremes.

A couple of days before Bataan fell a batch of nurses left the comparative safety of the “hospitals” and slogged forward to do what they could in the front lines. They were rounded up finally, dazed and exhausted, by some officers who tucked them in a jeep and sent them to an embarkation point for Corregidor
.

A nurse, knowing that one of the officers would never get to the Rock, swiped some vitamin tablets, which were the equivalent of gold, took a jeep, and drove through no-man’s land to his gun emplacement to give them to him. Others doled out sedatives to men they felt sure would be wounded.…

Once when the Japanese were pouring in on all sides just a few miles away, several of the nurses asked the officers to shoot them before they could be taken prisoner.
²⁴

Such utter nonsense galled the women. Like anyone who has ever suffered the depravity of war, the nurses wanted to bear witness. And to make a comic myth of such experience was to demean their sacrifice and mock their testimony.

The overwrought prose and preposterous characterizations were in many ways a product of the times. As soon as the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, the roles of American women began to change, but common notions about women, the ways the culture cast them, for the most part stayed the same.

Now the “weaker sex” was suddenly being lionized and the result was a confused, if not schizophrenic, portrait of American womanhood: one moment gutsy patriots doing a dirty job, the next vessels of virtue who needed the protection of men—“the nurses asked the officers to shoot them”—women to the very end, as foolish and hysterical as ever.

And nowhere was this confusion, this cultural paradox, more apparent than in Hollywood.

Certainly some of the cinematic excesses committed in the name of nationalism and morale can be accepted, or at least easily understood. The country, after all, was at war, a world war against a fascistic military cabal and a megalomaniac bent on slaughtering anyone in his way.

No medium delivers a message more powerfully than film, and Hollywood was eager to prove its loyalty, utility and service to the cause by producing dramas of women and war that doubled as effective home-front propaganda. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1943
Cry Havoc
, an ensemble movie about army women living in underground barracks on Bataan (there were no subterranean quarters, of course), offers a tough-as-nails portrait of the nurses.
²⁵
In 1944 David O. Selznick produced one of the year’s top-grossing movies,
Since You Went Away
, a film that focuses on the travails of Anne Hilton, a mother who keeps home and family together while her husband fights overseas. In a central scene, Hilton, played by Claudette Colbert, listens carefully as an elderly lady proudly explains that her granddaughter is one of the nurses stranded on Corregidor, a wartime martyr whose sacrifice leads Hilton to reexamine her selfishness.
²⁶
Donna Reed starred in the 1945 film version of the book
They Were Expendable
. Cast as an army nurse on Corregidor in love with the commander of a PT boat, Reed in one scene was absurdly costumed in military overalls and a string of pearls.
²⁷
Finally there was
So Proudly We Hail
, a Paramount Studios release that stands out from all others in the war-heroine genre because its putative aim was to tell the story of the battle for the Philippines through the eyes of the nurses who served there.
²⁸

W
HEN
S
O
P
ROUDLY
W
E
H
AIL
went into preproduction, Paramount executives wanted a simple romance. The director and screenwriter, however, were obliged to seek and accept the advice of the domestic branch of the Bureau of Motion Pictures, a division of the Office of War Information that monitored all films about the war. In this case the government rejected the romance formula and demanded that the filmmakers aim instead for some verisimilitude—a realistic depiction of the war in the Pacific, toned down, to be sure, so as not to frighten or demoralize the public.
²⁹

Throughout the writing and planning of
So Proudly We Hail
, one of the evacuees, Eunice Hatchitt, played a central role. Hatchitt had escaped from Corregidor by PBY. Tall and athletic with a soft Texas accent, she tried to avoid the limelight by staying home, but her convalescence
was interrupted by a call from Florence Blanchfield, assistant superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps.

Blanchfield told Hatchitt that the War Department had given Paramount Studios permission to make a movie about the nurses on Bataan, and Mark Sandrich, a director known for his work on musical comedies, and Allan Scott, the project’s screenwriter, needed a nurse as a technical consultant. Hatchitt, who believed they were making a “documentary,” accepted the assignment.

“I thought it would be the experience of a lifetime, that I could help. I had everything about the Philippines still fresh in my mind,” she said.
³⁰

Why Hatchitt had been culled from the group of evacuees is somewhat of a mystery. She was smart, articulate, attractive and loyal to the nurse corps, a logical candidate for the job, but others, too, likely met Blanchfield’s criteria. Whatever the reason, Hatchitt, eager for a change of scene, said good-bye to her family, took a train west, and checked into the Hermoy Apartment Hotel in Los Angeles.

Her initial task was to work with Sandrich, who was in the process of fashioning dialogue from the diaries of some of the nurses. At first Hatchitt liked what she saw. The fictional characters bore some resemblance to the women she had known. She also liked the verisimilitude of the costumes and sets, taken from photographs of Hospital #1 that had appeared in
Life
magazine, right down to the tin roofs and the nurses’ air corps coveralls.