Elizabeth M. Norman (46 page)

Her favorite spot in the stone farmhouse is near a doorway between the kitchen, with its large fireplace, and the living room. Here she has placed a large wooden rocker and in front of it a coffee table. She reads her newspaper there and sometimes in the afternoon jots notes to her many correspondents:

Dear Beth [1/21/97]

Hope you’re getting over the holidays and are back to the normal grind.…

Well, I’ve reached the big 80! this month. Had no idea I’d ever reach this age! And in reasonable good health and spirits.

Ed is doing O.K. However, any exertion while out of doors in this cold and wind becomes very distressing to him. He sends his very best wishes for the New Year. As do I.

Be good to yourself.

Love,
Cassie
²⁶

Afterword

O
F THE NINETY-NINE
army and navy nurses who went to war on December 8, 1941, some sixteen were still alive in 1998. Among the living and the dead, I know Cassie best, or as well as any student of history can know her subject. Perhaps it is more accurate to say I felt most comfortable with Cassie, woman with woman, and in that concert have come to care for her.

A bit of this comes from our proximity; I live in New Jersey less than a two hours’ ride from Cassie’s home in eastern Pennsylvania, so across eight years of researching and writing the Angels’ history, I’ve seen her often, more often than the other twenty women I was able to encounter and interview. Also, in oblique ways she reminds me of my mother, Dorothy Riley Dempsey.

Though my mother and Cassie have never met, Dorothy often asks after my friend. They are of the same era, and during the war Dorothy enlisted in the women’s division of the United States Coast Guard, the SPARS. Her wartime service was more of an escapade than anything else—she trained in Palm Beach and served in Boston as part of a special unit of musicians and singers entertaining the troops—but she is fiercely proud of her days in the SPARS. To borrow a line from Stephen Crane, she mingled in one of the great affairs of the earth and she never forgot it.

She never forgot the Angels either. She was still in the SPARS when they came home in 1945, wartime celebrities and the idols of almost every woman in uniform. My mother was in awe of their fame and celebrated the triumph of their utterly stunning survival. Almost from the
day I began my research, she insisted I tell her everything I uncovered, every detail of the women’s lives. A few years ago when my mother became part of a national effort to memorialize the contributions of American women in uniform
¹
and made the rounds speaking to local civic groups, she would call me first, hoping for the latest detail or anecdote. “Anything new on the nurses?” she would say.

I made a point of telling each of the Angels about my mother and how my sisters and I grew up with their war. Somewhere in our crowded house in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, there was always a picture of Dorothy in uniform, and sometimes, for a Halloween party or perhaps a play, she would let one of her five daughters slip into it. I remember I was impressed by the weight, the heavy blue wool; I also recall feeling that I had put on a piece of time. Perhaps in some dim, inchoate way, my long search for the nurses of Bataan and Corregidor, my interest in the role women have played in the profession of arms, began the day I first wore my mother’s history.

T
HE HANDFUL OF
Angels who survive are old and ailing, and it is unlikely they will all gather again as they did for many years at various conventions, symposiums and reunions. The largest of these took place in 1983, when the Veterans Administration honored them as a group and thirty-one of the women attended. They gathered again in 1992 when a business group brought some of the survivors of Santo Tomas to Washington, D.C., to honor American military women who had been prisoners of war, and I was invited to observe the occasion.

Thirteen of the Angels made their way to the capital that cold and wet March weekend. They arrived in sackcloth. “Charlie” Dworsky Henderson, who had helped plan the fete and had so much looked forward to the company of her old comrades, died less than a month before, and her passing served only to underscore the sobering reality of loss that regularly leaves its mark on this group.

Many of those who could not make the trip sent messages.

To the POW nurses of the Philippine[s]—As time goes by I appreciate you all more and more. May we meet in eternity. God bless you.

Mary Jo Oberst
Owensboro, Kentucky

Just tell the group I love each one. I’m living in the Lutheran Home, have a nice apartment.… This past June I was 81, have three lovely daughters that are married. Count my blessing every day as I feel there is an angel on my shoulder.

Ethel Thor Nelson
Tacoma, Washington
²

The centerpiece of the weekend was a gala banquet held Friday night at the officers club at Bolling Air Force Base. Several hundred people attended—military officers, government officials, business and civic leaders, men who had fought on Bataan and Corregidor, a contingent of reporters, and, according to many in the room, the largest number of women generals and women admirals ever gathered under one roof.

The room was ablaze in red, white and blue—bunting, flowers, garlands and confetti. Even the cheesecake had small American flags stuck on top. A military band dressed in World War II-era uniforms filled the hall with the sentimental melodies of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller.

The Angels, of course, stole the show, or to put it more precisely, they were regarded with such veneration that they sat there quietly, like human shrines. People approached them slowly, almost devoutly, to ask for autographs and pictures. Sometimes someone would start to reach out to touch one of them, then think better of such sacrilege and quickly pull back.

Madeline Ullom, unabashed as ever, helped restore some balance and perspective to the evening; her frock was a black evening dress, her footwear white tennis shoes.

Chaplain Eileen O’Hickey delivered the invocation, referring to the Angels as “daughters of courage.” For the keynote address the organizing committee drafted a Vietnam-era navy pilot, Giles Norrington, who had been shot down and imprisoned by the enemy for five years.

The women we honor tonight … were thrust by circumstance into a situation not of their own choosing.… No three words ring with such somber resonance as these three: prisoner of war, P.O. W.—dear God, how miserable the existence.… I am honored to have served in circumstances similar to yours … dear sisters.… You are, after all, vital proof of Susan B. Anthony’s birthday observation: “Failure is impossible.”
³

Then everyone stood and filled the hall with song. They sang loudly and with a fervor I had never before heard: “God … bless … America …”
And as I watched Cassie and Red and some of the others, I wondered whether, in that moment, they were back in Santo Tomas, standing in front of Main Building in an ebullient crowd, singing their song of deliverance.

At dinner I sat next to Helen Gardner Rozmus, who now lives in Florida. Swept up in the affair and eager to interview as many of the women as I could, I only picked at my filet mignon. Helen, like the others, cleaned her plate. “What?” she said, looking at my leavings. “Aren’t you hungry?”

The next day two chartered buses carried the women, their military escorts and the rest of the party on a tour of the capital’s landmarks. It was cold, gray and wet that Thursday, and as we pulled up to our first stop, Helen looked out the window and shivered. “I don’t feel like getting off the bus, but I don’t want people to think that I’m decrepit, so I’m going,” she said.

Dorothy Scholl Armold had suffered a stroke and needed help navigating in her walker. She was having trouble speaking as well, but I noticed that whenever she caught anyone looking at her, she would show her pluck by flashing them a smile and wink in reply.

A couple of the women seemed easily disoriented and the others were careful to look out for them. “Where do I go next?” Ruby Bradley asked a couple of times. Sally Blaine Millett said, “So what if she’s confused. She’s with us.”

They may have been wizened, gray and hobbled, but they were still the “girls.”

“Com’on, girls, let’s go!”

“Look at that, girls!”

“Hey, girls, do you remember …?”

Jeanne Kennedy Schmidt looked around the bus, taking in all the faces, then turned to me and, with a kind of quiet pleasure, said, “I know these women like the back of my hand.”

Hattie Brantley, for years the group’s official spokeswoman, was, as usual, complaining about the press. “Why can’t they get it right,” she kept saying to her comrades. And, as if to underscore her point, one of the women was trying to give one of the reporters a lesson in Philippine geography. “No, no, no,” she was saying. “It’s Limay,
L-i-m-a-y
, not Lammie.”

When the bus stopped and the women alighted at the various sites, they often stood arm in arm or shoulder to shoulder. And if someone became bewildered and wandered off, someone else would go after her.
“Come on with me,” she would say. “We were wondering what happened to you.”

The last stop on their tour was the nurses’ section of Arlington National Cemetery, a gently sloping graveyard of small gray markers. Above the graves on a hill was a statue of a woman in a cape and cap, the “Spirit of Nursing” monument. In this section were buried nurses who had served in every fight since the Spanish-American War.

It was drizzling; the trees were still bare and the grass had brown spots and ruts. The women placed a wreath of red, white and blue carnations at the base of the monument, an army bugler played “Taps,” then, without a word, the thirteen women put their hands to their foreheads and offered their dead comrades a last salute.

They turned and started back down the hill to inspect the graves. “It’s so final,” one of them whispered as she surveyed the long rows of light gray stones.

Cassie set out by herself to search for the grave of Rosemary Hogan. The two had worked in tandem at Hospital #1 on Bataan, and at Santo Tomas they were bunkmates. Rosemary died in 1966 before the two got a chance to see each other again. Now on a level patch of ground, Cassie found her, stone 21 422.

She stood there for a moment, staring at the small marker, her hand trembling a bit as she put a finger to her lips. She reached down and placed a bouquet of flowers on the wet grass, then stood erect again and fished for a tissue to wipe her cheek.

Epilogue

W
E ARE NOT
likely to see another group of women like Lassie, Josie, Sallie and the others, not in the American military. Neither the modern army nor the modern navy has an all-female nursing unit. What is more, we cannot apply the lessons of the past to the current debate about the place of women in the military. The question is not whether women can do the job, but whether they should want to. On this I offer no opinion other than to say I have lived with the consequences of war and combat for the twenty-six years I have been married. The man who shares my bed is marked by the memory of his year on the battlefield, and not a day goes by without its dark shadow crossing his face.

Although I have used the epithets of “hero” and “angel” throughout, I have tried not to aggrandize my subjects—they were, from first to last, nurses. To call a woman a nurse, however, is to give her more than a moniker. In an ironic way, the ethos of a nurse is like that of a soldier. Research has shown that soldiers fight not for their country or for a cause, but out of love for their comrades. They care deeply about the men in the mud beside them, and they are willing to risk all and endure anything to prove it.

This same ethic—call it an ethic for the other person—is instilled in every nurse. From their student days forward, nurses are told that they have an almost sacred obligation to those in their charge—“The patient always comes first”—and, thus, caring for the sick and injured becomes a kind of prepossessing sentiment, like comradeship. Even now, decades later, the Angels feel it. During my interviews, it was not their own fears or suffering that most haunted them, it was the memory of a certain
evening on Bataan in April 1942 when they received word that the peninsula was about to fall to the enemy and they were ordered to leave their patients, just leave them there on bamboo beds in the middle of the jungle in the path of the advancing enemy, thousands of wounded and bleeding and feverish men, unarmed and utterly helpless. Some of the nurses thought of refusing that order. They wanted to stay because that is what a comrade does, that is what a nurse does. But they were soldiers too, and soldiers obey orders. So they left—and for the rest of their lives they have regretted it. Fifty years later, I watched them weep incon-solably in the telling. That kind of loyalty and sense of sacrifice and duty stands out in sharp relief in our era.

Nursing is also an intimate profession, much more so than the profession of medicine. Surgeons and physicians perform their tasks then depart. It is the nurse who remains at the bedside, changing the bloody dressing, washing the injured body, listening carefully to every beat of the heart. It is one thing, of course, to do all this in the safety of a Stateside hospital; it is quite another to do it in the middle of a jungle, starving and afraid and wracked with malarial tremors.

So we will not call them heroes or angels, but what they were, what they are—women, made remarkable by history and ennobled by suffering and love.

We can learn many lessons from such women. First, that loyalty, sacrifice, obedience and discipline are genderless. Honor may have begun as a male code but the sense of selflessness it requires is much more characteristic of women. The abiding camaraderie that sustained the nurses under fire and in prison should have surprised no one. Maude Davison and Josie Nesbit had an easy time holding their small band together because that is what the women wanted. They prized their affiliation, their sorority, their womanhood because, as women, they were more naturally comrades than men. I do not mean to suggest that women cannot act independently or that among us there are no individualists. History has long since put that canard to rest. Instead, I think that men feel compelled to prove themselves in isolation, while women feel compelled to prove themselves in accord. The voice of a woman is the voice of connection,
¹
and this inclination to keep close, to define oneself through affinity, kept the women going.