Elizabeth M. Norman (7 page)

And now, with the Japanese invasion force moving fast, as it had since December 22, when it landed, MacArthur’s infantry, cavalry, artillery and tank units were forced into fighting a retreat, leaving behind them on Luzon the stores their commander had so unwisely repositioned. To make matters worse, thousands of refugees, many more than military planners had anticipated, were streaming onto the Bataan peninsula along with the retreating troops, putting an even greater demand on the depleted stores.

Senior military staff estimated that on January 7, 1942, when the allied retreat was completed, Bataan held 102,000 people—14,000 American troops, 72,000 Filipino troops, and 16,000 refugees from Manila and northern Luzon—three times as many people as envisioned in War Plan Orange 3.
³

With so much untamed land, Bataan had only three roads. East Road and West Road ran north to south along the coasts; about halfway down the peninsula, connecting the two, was a cobblestone crossroad that cut the peninsula in half. In late December these roads, and the routes out of Manila leading to them, were jammed night and day by columns of soldiers, some of them barefoot recruits carrying ancient bolt-action rifles, and by long queues of cannons, tanks, trucks, scout cars, two-wheeled carts drawn by horses frothing at the bit, carabao laden with chicken coops and torn mattresses, and processions of weary, frightened women, children and men.

Soaked in sweat and covered with yellow dust, the columns of combatants
and refugees extended for miles, and the grinding and clanking of the massive equipment created a kind of mechanical thunder that rumbled from dawn to dawn without stopping.

Meanwhile, dug in at the neck of the peninsula and ready to make their stand were American and Filipino soldiers. It was a brave defense. The American air force had only a handful of planes, perhaps twenty at any one time, including training aircraft. The American navy’s Philippine “fleet” consisted of only three gunboats, three minesweepers, four tugboats, two converted yachts and six torpedo boats. (The crew from the U.S.S.
Canopus
, a submarine tender tied up at Mariveles on the southern tip of Bataan, had rigged their ship to look as if she were abandoned; they deliberately tilted her, placed her cargo boom askew, and started smudge fires on deck. The ruse worked, and Japanese pilots left the
Canopus
alone while belowdecks her crew forged weapons so the infantry could continue the fight.)

o
N
D
ECEMBER 24, 1941
, twenty-five army nurses, one navy nurse (Ann Bernatitus) and twenty-five Filipino nurses boarded trucks on a convoy bound for Bataan.

As part of War Plan Orange 3 the army had stockpiled enough equipment at Camp Limay on the peninsula’s East Road to set up a one-thousand-bed hospital, including a fifty-kilowatt generator powered by a diesel motor to pump water and provide electricity. Army planners envisioned this battlefield clinic, named Hospital #1, as a surgical facility, a place to reset shattered bones, suture gaping wounds, repair perforated organs, dress burns, resection intestines and perform amputations.

The senior physician at Hospital #1 planned to set up a surgical pavilion with nine operating tables, each staffed by a team of surgeons, nurses and medics specializing in a specific area of the body—arms and legs, the abdomen, the brain, the kidney and bladder, the chest. A central table in the operating pavilion would hold all the equipment; nurses would decide what they needed for each operation and put it on a small stand next to their operating tables. Surrounding the operating pavilion would be a complete military hospital: emergency station, registration room, fifteen post-operative wards, a dental clinic, pharmacy, staff quarters, laundry and mess.

Bouncing in the back of a truck as it made its way west around the bay, then south down Bataan’s East Road toward their new assignment, several of the nurses told one another they would probably be working
in a redbrick building with all the amenities. Many still had not accepted the reality of war, or, to give it the proper perspective, they likely could not envision the deprivations, hard labor and primitive living that war forces on those who wage it. They were accustomed to their comforts, and they had hope, hope that no matter how bad things got, they would always find some respite, some relief. A few, in fact, were convinced that the war would soon be over. It was only a matter of weeks, they told themselves, months at the most before everyone would be back in Manila in long dresses, dancing under the stars.

Instead of neat red brick, of course, their trucks pulled up to twenty-nine rough-hewn buildings, long sheds really, with walls of woven bamboo and roofs of thatched nipa grass.

“This is a hospital?” Leona Gastinger said, wide-eyed.
⁴

The day before, a handful of officers, physicians and medics had arrived to begin setting up. One of the men had spread a bunch of bed-sheets on the ground in the middle of the compound and on them had painted a huge red cross. Now some of the crew stepped forward to greet the fifty-one women.

The convoy had been delayed and it was too dark to work, so Rosemary Hogan, a well-liked Oklahoman and the senior nurse in charge, walked her nurses down to the beach to cool off.

It was a clear night, the stars were shimmering on the water, and the women, slipping off their shoes and shaking the road dust from their hair, sat in small clusters on the pristine sand. Most remember the quiet of that moment; they spoke in hushed voices and listened to the waves break on the beach. Then someone realized the date—it was Christmas Eve.

Back at the compound they rummaged in a warehouse for footboards, headboards, frames, braces and springs, which they hauled across the dusty compound to their new quarters, a screened hut, then knocked the parts together into beds and, finally, exhausted, slipped into sleep.

Christmas Day was “hotter than any August Day in Kansas City,” Dorothy Scholl remembered.
⁵
The quartermaster issued each woman tropical-weight khaki slacks, shirts, socks and army shoes, a uniform much cooler and more comfortable than their air-corps coveralls, then they headed back to the warehouse to unpack cartons of bedpans, steel trays and tin basins. The operating-room nurses discovered that their equipment had been coated in Cosmoline, a viscous petroleum preservant that only ether would dissolve; one nurse spent so many hours
stooped over a bucket with an ether rag cleaning the equipment that by nightfall she was almost anesthetized. The rest of the crew filled pails with water pumped from an artesian well and began to wash down tables and stands, beds and cabinets, doorways and walls. An enlisted man jerry-rigged a sterilizer from steel pressure cookers and a multijet Bunsen burner. (The women did a bit of jerry-rigging themselves; when they discovered a dearth of operating-room caps, they took a carton of white chef’s hats and cut them down to size.) That night a group of exhausted doctors and nurses sat down to enjoy a Christmas dinner of roasted pig, but the war interrupted their holiday meal; an ambulance rolled into the compound with eight wounded, two of whom needed immediate surgery.

On December 26 Cassie and six other army nurses joined the group at Limay. She and Rosemary Hogan were friends and Hogan gave her pal the assignment she wanted, the operating pavilion. A few hours after Cassie met her surgical team, the hospital received 212 casualties. The Japanese were bludgeoning the retreating American and Filipino troops, catching them as they withdrew over the roads and bridges leading to Bataan. Cassie worked for hours that afternoon, handing a surgeon the instruments he needed to cut and suture. The work went well, she thought, as clean and efficient as any redbrick operating room Stateside. But they weren’t Stateside, not with flights of bombers overhead, the drone of their engines an alarm that sent the doctors and nurses to their knees, squatting under the operating tables with their hands raised above their heads, trying to keep their gloves sterile in the surgical field. “It was strange to see these poor patients lying there with all these hands hovering over their bellies,” Cassie said. “When the bombers passed, everybody stood up, looked around and continued with their work.”
⁶
(As Cassie surveyed the room, she happened to glance toward the refrigerator that held the OR’s supply of blood and noticed two feet protruding from the bottom shelf; Ann Bernatitus had decided to turn the icebox into a one-woman bomb shelter.)

Between rounds of casualties, the off-duty nurses at Hospital #1 would sometimes stroll down the road to a local bodega for a bottle of Coca-Cola and a few minutes of rest on the bodega’s front porch. The rural market reminded some of the women of country stores back home, and sitting there on a bench with their feet propped up on a rail, they would chat about their lives before the war and wonder if they would ever get back to them.

Shortly after New Year’s Day 1942, Japanese dive bombers attacked a barrio some one hundred yards from Hospital #1, but the Americans
and their patients were lucky. Shrapnel fell harmlessly onto the sheds and pathways. Still the bombing worried James W. Duckworth, the senior physician, and he decided to move the hospital west and inland to the cover of the jungle and away from its exposed position on Manila Bay.
⁷

During the first weeks in January, General Homma’s soldiers punched holes in the allied line at the neck of the peninsula and began to push their way down the East Road toward Limay. When the enemy reached Abucay barrio, the first major town on the road and thirteen miles from Hospital #1, the allies regrouped for a fight. For twelve days Japanese artillery lobbed volley after volley on Abucay while Japanese pilots strafed the beaches. Then came the infantry. The fighting was fierce, often hand to hand, and the casualties came pouring into Hospital #1 on trucks and buses and mules and horse carts.
⁸
In one twenty-four-hour period on January 16, the OR teams performed 187 major surgical procedures, four to five times the average number of cases at the largest Stateside hospital. So many men were so badly wounded that as they were lined up for their operations, the staff set them on sawhorses—angled head down to prevent shock—to wait.
⁹
When the generator went out, or during a blackout, orderlies took up kerosene lanterns and the doctors cut and stitched in the narrow beams of light. Some men came in with multiple wounds received across several days of fighting; they’d get hit, a field medic would patch them up at a battalion aid station, and they would head back to battle, only to be wounded again. There were so many critical injuries at the hospital, chaplains were on permanent duty in the operating room, stepping carefully around the tables, whispering last rites and anointing the foreheads of those on their way to the morgue.

In some ways, war is at its ugliest, its most grotesque, in an operating room. Alfred Weinstein, a surgeon from Georgia, was never able to leave behind memories of

the zzz-zzz-zzz of a saw as it cut through bone … the plop of an amputated leg dropping into a bucket, the grind of a rounded burr eating its way through a skull, the tap, tap, tap of a mallet on a chisel gouging out shell fragments … the hiss of the sterilizer blowing off steam, the soft patter of the nurses feet scurrying back and forth, the snip of scissors cutting through muscle, the swish of a mop on the floor cleaning up blood … the gasp of soldiers with chest wounds … the snap of rubber gloves on outstretched hands, the rustle of operating gowns being changed. Rivulets of sweat washed away the nurses’ rouge and powder, leaving only lipstick to match the ruby-red blood.
¹⁰

After hours of this, time lost all meaning. Was it noon or near dusk? Who could tell? One patient began to look like another, there were so many of them. The operating tables became a kind of assembly line, torn limb following torn limb, sucking chest wound after sucking chest wound. The utility rooms were piled high with bloody linen, detritus that measured the surgeons’ work.

Cassie and her surgical team simply kept at it, sometimes kidding one another to break the tension at the table. Now and then between cases they might grab a quick doughnut or cup of coffee. Mostly they tried to concentrate on the job in front of them. “I was thankful for the hard physical labor,” she remembered. “The work gave me … the weariness to put [my mind] to sleep.”
¹¹

General MacArthur was forced to order his troops back from their initial line of defense and set up a secondary position farther down the peninsula, but the relentlessness of the enemy was only one of the general’s problems.

The officer in charge of food and supplies informed MacArthur that without relief supplies, Bataan would run out of provisions in less than sixty days, so the general ordered his command to cut its diet to fewer than two thousand calories a day, less than half the amount of food a soldier needed to carry the fight to his enemy. At Hospital #1 the order meant that everyone would now live on two meals a day, even as those days got longer and longer.

In mid-January MacArthur sent a message to his forces on Bataan from his headquarters in Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, two miles across the bay.

H
EADQUARTERS
U
NITED
S
TATES
A
RMY
F
ORCES
IN THE
F
AR
E
AST
F
ORT
M
ILLS
P.I.

January 15, 1942