Elizabeth M. Norman (27 page)

J
ULY 2 ARRIVED
sunny and hot. A light breeze blew dust from the athletic fields toward Main Building. By late afternoon the air had grown still and the intense tropical heat had turned the campus into an oven. On most days like this, most of the internees would have retreated to the shade or their shanties. But the Japanese had told the Executive Committee to prepare for a new group of Americans, a very special group, and on this particular summer afternoon, a large crowd of internees, numbering in the hundreds, had gathered to wait near the main gate and on the concrete apron in front of Main Building.

Just before four o’clock, three flatbed trucks turned down Espana Boulevard, then passed between the iron front gates and past the guards in their nipa huts. As the trucks made their way slowly up the esplanade to the plaza, dozens of people along the way pointed to the vehicles and began to count the occupants. Aboard the trucks were sixty-nine women, among them the fifty-four army nurses from Bataan and Corregidor—thin, tired and anxious about their fate.

The nurses managed to smile a bit and wave to the crowd now surrounding them, now yelling and waving, pushing fruit in their faces, mangoes and papayas and bananas, and with each offering, each gift, came a question, a plea, really, for news, any word at all of the men on the Death March, the men captured on Corregidor, husbands and fathers and brothers from whom, of whom, there had been no word, no sign, no nothing.

“No talking!” yelled a stone-faced sentry as he shut the iron gates.
⁵

The trucks veered around the crowds, coming to a stop on the concrete apron in front of the Main Building.

Cassie, Eleanor Garen and the others slowly climbed down to the ground. Inside Main Building another crowd of men and women, desperate for news of their loved ones in uniform, had lined the hallway and stairs and as the nurses passed by, anxious voices yelled out the names of soldiers or units or battlefields.

The guards yelled for silence.

The women were whisked down the hall and into a small room where guards registered them and searched their belongings. They were hot and tired and thirsty and the process of the guards pawing through their possessions and grilling them seemed agonizingly slow. As the afternoon wore on, a number of women asked to use a lavatory, and the guards gave them permission, one at a time, to leave the room.

Outside in the corridor the internees, eager to get a look at the new arrivals, had formed a gauntlet, and as each nurse emerged from the room and made her way down the hall to the lavatory, hushed colloquies took place. The internees wanted information about the troops; the nurses, meanwhile, were anxious for news of the war.

In quick murmurs and asides, the crowd in the hallway gave the women great news … Allied victories at Midway and in the Coral Sea and Jimmy Doolittle’s daring daylight bombing of Tokyo. The tide was beginning to turn, they whispered, and these tidings, the first for the nurses in months, made the Battling Belles weep.

As the afternoon passed, camp cooks sent in a lunch of noodle and
vegetable stew and hot chocolate and pineapple. The women suffering from malaria and dengue fever were especially dry and thirsty and feasted on the fresh fruit, so sweet, so cool and full of juice.

Meanwhile the guards continued to pull apart the women’s bags and bundles. A soldier rummaging through Peggy Greenwalt’s gear came upon a large brightly colored piece of silk and, curious, he pulled it from her bag. Greenwalt tried to fight off her panic, for in his hand the guard was holding an American battle flag, the unit colors of the Twelfth Regimental Quartermaster Corps. The day Corregidor fell, the leader of the quartermasters, Colonel Frank Kriwanck, gave his flag to Greenwalt and made her promise to smuggle it home for him. Now Greenwalt and the others stood frozen with fear. Would the flag anger their captors and bring brutal reprisals? The guard held the pennant up, as if to study it. Clearly he was perplexed, especially by the insignia, a bald eagle with arrows in its claws, set on a field of red and gold. Then, Greenwalt got a bolt from the blue. She rushed forward, took the flag from the guard’s hands, draped it over her shoulders as if it were a shawl and, with a bit of posturing and a little strut in her step, acted as if she were showing the guards the latest in women’s fashion. The impromptu performance amused her captors, and, as it turned out, preserved a battle flag so dear to so many men.
⁶

The Executive Committee had made room for the nurses in Main Building, but typically the Japanese had plans of their own. As soon as the registration was finished, guards hustled the women back into the trucks and drove them across the campus and through a side exit to a building directly across the street from the main compound—the convent of Santa Catalina. Here, the women were told, they would live under lock and key until further notice. The enemy intended to isolate them from the other internees, even the nuns in the convent. They would be allowed outside for exercise two hours a day, would get their meals delivered from the camp kitchen and would have absolutely no contact with anyone, save their guards. In effect the Japanese were holding the group incommunicado.

Across the street in the main camp, news spread quickly of this special confinement. Although the Japanese often acted capriciously, making decisions one day and, for no apparent reason, reversing themselves the next, no one in camp could quite figure out why they wanted to wall off the nurses. Some said the enemy was wary of the women because they were military, but others pointed to the presence of the navy nurses, and they’d been in camp since March.

“The [real] story was they wanted us to forget the atrocities and the horrible treatment [of the male prisoners],” said Hattie Brantley. And, of course, not “to talk to the civilians about it.”
⁷

Whatever the case, the women were weary and racked with fever, and they slumped down onto their narrow cots of woven palm fibers on the second floor of the convent and tried to sleep. An offshore breeze made its way inland, and through the open windows came the scent of hibiscus from the garden below.

Their first week in camp the women worked on healing themselves. A score were suffering from malaria, dysentery, arthritis, hepatitis, stomach cramps, leg ulcers and dengue fever. A physician from the main camp hospital, accompanied by Laura Cobb, visited the convent often that week. For the most part the women slept, rising only for meals or mandatory roll calls. After seven days of treatment and convalescence, most began to mend and move about.

Although they had been a military unit—the Army Nurse Corps in the Philippines—they had rarely spent so much time together. Working different shifts at different hospitals and clinics, they had been closer to their patients and the doctors than to one another. Even on Bataan and later in Malinta Tunnel, they’d had little chance to bond or coalesce. In effect the nurses were a corps in name only. Now, without the distraction of their work and the divided loyalties the practice of medicine imposes, the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor were suddenly women unto themselves, a band of sisters, as it were, whose mission was simply to survive.

So they fell back on what they knew, the customs and routines of women. They organized their two rooms on the second floor of the convent into an army barracks—palm cots placed just so, personal items stowed neatly away, everything uniform and in its place. The strong ones scoured the floors of their quarters, got down on their hands and knees with hard brushes and harsh soap. Those still ailing sewed and washed and did the ironing. A couple of women got yarn from the main camp and wove socks and underpants for those who needed them.

They shared books—Archibald Cronin’s
The Keys of the Kingdom
, Henry Bellamann’s
King’s Row
and John Buchan’s
The Man Who Was Greenmantle
—played card games too, bridge mostly, and talked. They talked with one another like they had never talked before, and as the days passed, they began to know one another too. Old friendships were renewed and new ones inaugurated. In the evening they often sat together at their second-story windows and watched the sun set, the great golden disc slipping from a flame-white sky into the Oriental night.

After dark they held sing-alongs and talent shows. Blanche Kimball from Topeka, Kansas, had a flair for telling fortunes with playing cards and soon had her friends engrossed in reading the future. Everyone, it seemed, wanted Blanche to turn over the eight of hearts, the card that signaled what many missed and most longed for—a love affair.

In late July a woman named Ida Hube, an old friend of Josie Nesbit and Maude Davison, came into the women’s lives. Hube, a German-born citizen of Switzerland, had joined the American military as a nurse, serving in the corps in the Philippines until 1910, when she married a wealthy German importer and moved to Europe. She returned to the Philippines in 1939 after her husband died, took up residence in the posh Manila Hotel and lavishly entertained her former army friends, Davison and Nesbit among them. When the Japanese occupied Manila and began classifying citizens of foreign birth, Hube was identified as a German national and since the Japanese considered the Germans their allies, she was free to move about Manila as she pleased. And what pleased her at the moment was helping her old friends.

One July morning Hube’s large black limousine stopped at the convent door and out she stepped, a vision of Victorian elegance—the big hat, the white gloves, the lace parasol.

After some negotiating the Japanese allowed Maude Davison and Josie Nesbit a few moments alone with their friend outside the gate. The three talked quietly, the nurses detailing their months under fire. Ida Hube was alarmed at the condition of the two thin and haggard figures, and as the guards hustled her back into her car, she promised to return. A few days later her limousine reappeared, this time loaded with gifts: sweet cakes, canned milk, Ovaltine, nuts and candy, fresh fruits and vegetables, bread and sugar, sewing kits and clothes. And there was one thing more, a small token to make the nurses feel like women again. Each of the sixty-nine women imprisoned in the convent received a pocketbook. (During the long months of captivity that were to follow, twice a week two Filipinos in Mrs. Hube’s employ would arrive at the package line pushing carts stuffed with bundles for the nurses—bundles of food, sanitary napkins, needles, thread, yarn and money. Atop this bounty, the good woman always placed a bouquet of flowers. Sometimes she would follow her largess in her limousine. The younger nurses loved her panache and delighted in watching her alight from her big black car in her broad-brimmed hat, then pop open her black parasol and with her carefully gloved hands check the contents of the carts to make sure everything was there. In the middle of a war at a prison-camp gate, Ida
Hube seemed a somewhat comic figure, an absurd apparition, but the younger nurses stifled their laughter for she was their deliverer, the woman Josie Nesbit called the Angels’ “Guardian Angel.”
⁸

The convent began to seem smaller, the days longer, the nights without end. The nurses tired of playing cards and reading books and watching the scintillating sunsets.

“I want to get back to work,” Josie Nesbit told one of her colleagues. “I don’t know how you feel, but I’m getting bored with nothing to do all day.”
⁹

Just then, as it turned out, Dr. Thomas Fletcher, the camp medical director, and Earl Carroll, chairman of the Executive Committee, convinced Commandant Tsurumi that the metallurgy building was too small to continue to serve as a hospital and that the best place to put the sick and injured was Santa Catalina convent. They also convinced the Japanese that the new hospital could not be adequately staffed by the navy and civilian nurses alone, so the army nurses were ordered released from their confinement and told they would soon be working in the hospital, with Maude Davison as its superintendent.

Their move into the main prison camp took place on a hot, sunny day the third week in August. (Ida Hube sent along six roasted pigs to celebrate their release from isolation.) After the nurses were settled, Davison and Nesbit made out work schedules, deciding who would work each shift and on each ward.

At first some of the younger nurses balked at their new duties. They wanted no part of caring for civilians or living under civilian rules; they were military officers, they argued, and if they could not work for their own kind, they did not want to serve anyone. The dissidents riled Maude Davison, who called the nurses together and reminded them that they were still officers in the United States Army, that their country was at war and that, like it or not, they would follow their orders. A few days later another group of young nurses, hoping for more freedom and bitter about being under the thumb of a woman they considered an antique and a martinet, directly challenged Davison’s authority. They were civilians now, they argued, and not subject to her control, but the captain was resolute. One way or the other, she told them, she was determined to keep the group intact. And, in the end, her iron will prevailed.

“Because of Miss Davison’s domineering manner and antagonistic attitude whenever approached on the subject, the nurses submitted to her control rather than confront her with requests for shorter hours of duty or changes in assignment,” Josie Nesbit recalled.
¹⁰

Nesbit was equally determined to keep the Angels together. Her worry, however, went beyond the good order and discipline inherent in the chain of command. She wanted to preserve the group’s sense of self—women loyal to women, women committed to women.

Clearly she was thinking of their survival, of the strength that comes from being part of a group and sharing the respect and good reputation the group enjoys. In other words, what really worried Josie Nesbit was men.