Elizabeth M. Norman (9 page)

After the kitchen was established, the staff had to find the furnishings basic to any hospital, especially beds. Hospital #2 started with five chairs found in the brush, eight refrigerators and thirty tables, then a local planter loyal to the Americans hired carpenters to build what the Americans needed, and they fashioned almost everything from bamboo: mess
and dining tables, medicine cabinets, nurses’ desks, chairs, beds, trays, brooms, fly swatters, laundry baskets, wastebaskets, serving spoons, urinals, storage cabinets, benches, linen closets, ashtrays and floor mats.
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The staff stuffed rice straw into mattress covers, which made surprisingly comfortable beds. Chinese and Filipino civilians caught in the retreat volunteered to set up a laundry on the Real River. They boiled the linens in oil drums and strung several hundred feet of clothesline along the riverbank. At another spot along the river, engineers built a dam to divert water to a 3,000-gallon high-pressure filter and chlorination system.

Sanitation, a problem for any army, was particularly difficult in the tropics. With a high water table the open-pit latrines did not drain well, and without chemicals to kill insects, these privies became breeding grounds for flies. Almost everyone suffered from diarrhea until a new sanitary officer reported to the unit and had his men build wooden latrine boxes with removable seats. He accommodated the women with their own private facility, and they were so pleased with this small convenience, they lined up in front of it to pose for a photograph.

The most difficult task, of course, was to set up the open-air wards. After bulldozers cleared the ground of stumps and rocks, Filipino laborers swinging long bolos cleared out the underbrush. (Their crew bosses had strict orders not to remove climbing vines or tall brush that could serve as air cover.) Once the construction was done, the nurses and their assistants set up the beds and desks and medicine cabinets. One of the few available pup tents was reserved for a records room. “We had a tent over the records, but no tent over the patients,” said Sally Blaine. “I guess the army thought the patients would dry out quicker than the records.”
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Some of the open-air wards were square, some round, some with no identifiable shape at all, just a sprawl of old iron beds or rickety wooden cots under clumps of bamboo or acacia. Here and there between the al fresco wards, the staff hung canvas Lister bags filled with water. The medical supply depot sent over blankets, sheets, pajamas, pillows, morphine, quinine, sulfa and vitamins. (Drugs were enclosed in tins and bottles and buried in deep trenches to protect them from bombardment.)

One of the last tasks was to number each ward with small wooden signs nailed to the trees. In the end there were seventeen wards, each with between two hundred and five hundred patients—bed after bed after bed spread out on the jungle floor in the open under a canopy of branches and vines, literally as far as the eye could see.
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With so many patients, each day seemed endless. And, according to one of the surgeons assigned to the hospital, the danger of the work only added to the fatigue.

Hospital No. 2 had a peculiar and uncomfortable location. It is probably the first Army hospital of such size located near installations that were constantly being bombed. It was certainly in the zone of action. When the enemy air ships approached these installations they almost invariably do so directly over the hospital. This was disconcerting for two reasons: (1) It always drew fire from our anti aircraft guns. fragments [
sic
] of shells were constantly falling in the hospital area. Fifty calibre [
sic
] bullets also fell in the hospital area. (2) We were never certain that an enemy bomb, by accident, might not fall in one of the wards. On one occasion a 50 calibre bullet went through the only empty bed in one ward. Another 50 calibre bullet went through the [h]ead of a civilian kitchen police and the foot of one of our soldiers. One of our cooks heard the anti aircraft guns begin firing, jumped from his cot and fell flat on the ground 3 feet away just in time for an unexploded 3 inch shell to go through his chest and 3 feet into the ground. [The man eventually recovered.] Various sizes of shrapnel and or shell fragments fell in every mess and ward and twice in the dental clinic in our quarters. Only the operating room escaped. Several 155 shells fell in one mess, killing 5 and injuring 12 other persons. Every ward was riddled with fox holes which men often used. This was hard on the poor bed patients who could not get out of bed.
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On January 2, a week or so after it began receiving patients, the hospital recorded its first death. The body was buried in a rice paddy near the south end of the complex. There were no caskets on Bataan, so they covered the deceased with a sheet and lowered him into a hole. Later, when sheets were in short supply, the dead were simply covered with a blanket of damp earth. Soon there would be a graves registration unit and a cemetery on a hill to the southeast.

That first week of the new year, 150 military patients who had been part of the final exodus from Sternberg Hospital in the Christmas retreat arrived after a journey that took them from Manila to Corregidor by one boat, then by another to Bataan. An admitting physician looked at these travel-worn stretcher cases with a strange kind of awe; it was the first time, he said, that someone had decided to evacuate patients toward the front line instead of away from it.

Accompanying the group were five doctors, two dentists, two supply
officers and Josie Nesbit, the perfect choice to lead the staff of nineteen nurses at Hospital #2. Even before the shooting started, Nesbit, who had been working in an underground hospital on Corregidor, had proven herself an agile administrator and leader and had won the respect of almost every woman under her command.

Nesbit was handed her assignment on Corregidor by Colonel Wibb Cooper, the chief medical officer in the Philippines. “Colonel,” she said, “if you want to send me out there to be in charge of a hospital, don’t you think I should be promoted?”
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Indeed he did, and Josie Nesbit arrived in the jungle a newly minted first lieutenant.

Privately, however, she doubted herself and worried whether, at the age of forty-seven, she had enough endurance to organize the care of thousands in a jungle hospital. “Admittedly,” she said, “I tired more quickly and much of the stamina I had in the past may have been somewhat lacking when we withdrew to the combat zone on Bataan, but … there was absolutely no time for self-pity.”
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J
OSÉPHINE NESBIT, SECOND
in command of the army nurses in the Philippines in 1941, was as resolute and uncompromising as her superior, Maude Davison, but no two women could have been more different.

Everyone, from the most junior nurse to the most senior surgeon, called Lieutenant Nesbit “Josie.” A formidable-looking woman from Missouri, she was tall and large-framed with brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a size thirteen shoe. But her bearing hardly matched her demeanor. She had an almost maternal affinity for the women under her—“my girls,” she called them in a voice of reassurance and understanding. Indeed the Filipino nurses referred to her as “Mama Josie.”

Born on December 23, 1894, on a farm near Butler, Missouri, Josie was the seventh of ten children. It was a hard life that took its toll. Her parents died early, and by the age of twelve, Josie was an orphan living first with a grandmother and later with a cousin in Kansas.

She left high school at sixteen, went into nurse’s training with a sister and in early 1914 became a registered nurse. Four years later, an army recruiter traveled to Kansas City, hoping to recruit nurses to help with an influenza epidemic that was decimating the ranks of the military, and on October 1, 1918, Josie Nesbit became Reserve Army Nurse N700665.

She was first stationed at Camp Logan Hospital near Houston, Texas, and in the years that followed she lived the life of a military nurse,
a good life free from want and filled with interesting work and adventure.

She hiked the American Rockies, worked in Hawaii, rode a camel in Egypt through the Valley of the Kings. She did two tours in the Philippines. During the first, on maternity duty, she befriended the wife of an officer, who persuaded her “to go on a 12-day hike with them from Baguio up through Ifugao country to the region of the famous rice terraces. Those RICE TERRACES were such a beautiful sight when we arrived at the top of them at sunset, that tears came to my eyes!”
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When she returned to the Philippines in the summer of 1941, she was named Maude Davison’s assistant. She was a well-traveled forty-six-year-old second lieutenant with twenty-two years of military service.

On Bataan she worked herself to exhaustion, roaming Hospital #2 from one end to the other and back, but every day she took the time to make herself presentable, always gathering her dark brown hair in a bun or a turban. She believed that a woman should look like a woman, even—or as she would argue, “especially”—in combat: “We were the first Nurses in the United States Army to be subjected to actual combat; on Bataan there simply were no ‘rear areas.’ Although we worked around the clock, we were careful to ensure that when our troops saw a woman Nurse, that Nurse had to look as much a woman as circumstances would permit. In light of our situation, this was not easily accomplished.”
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When her nurses, her “girls,” needed something personal—underwear or shoes, for instance—she would beg pilots who might be flying to the other islands to ferry the gear back. If she came upon a woman at work burning with fever or in a malarial ebb, she would relieve her of duty and put her to bed. She did not suffer slackers, or fools, either. But if a woman had a problem, Josie helped her work it out, always in private. She took care of her charges, and in return they gave her their loyalty, their labor, their love.

B
Y THE END
of January 1942 the initial wards at Hospital #2 were full and the staff were preparing to open additional wards. At first they had tried to group patients by their condition or injury, but so many people had a combination of problems, usually wounds on top of tropical diseases, each ward became a hospital within a hospital, housing patients with a wide variety of medical and surgical problems. Indeed, many wards had more patients than the whole of Sternberg Hospital before the
war. Overall, counting the hundreds of patients sent over from Hospital #1 when that facility moved from Limay to Little Baguio, Hospital #2 had a census at the end of the month of 2,160 patients.
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Some wards looked like tropical greenhouses, with beds set between trees and under palm fronds, a tangle of vines hanging close overhead. Other wards looked like hobo camps, with clothes hanging from tree limbs or bushes, and with pieces of poncho or shreds of canvas stretched between stalks of bamboo. The mess hall resembled a scout-camp dining hall without a roof, its long, picnic-style tables and benches stacked row after row under the acacias.

By February 1, Hospital #2 had a nursing staff of forty-three army officers, twenty-one Filipinos and eight civilian nurses.
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Despite the withering workload, morale was high. Many of the women had grown up on farms or in towns like Bible Grove, Missouri, and Prairie Lea, Texas. They had labored in the fields, made their own clothes, and read by lamplight, and they knew how to live lean, without amenities, and were accustomed to hard work. The army had given them luxuries and a new life, and now it was time to pay the army back.

Each day they carried out the banal duties of battlefield nursing. They washed their patients down, scrubbing off the dirt and sweat of war with water from the Real River. Then they cleaned out the abrasions and lacerations, scrubbing the men with green soap before they sprinkled sulfa powder on their open wounds. They changed thousands of dressings, often giving morphine shots beforehand to ease the pain they would inflict when they lifted bandages from incisions and burns, bandages bound to raw flesh by blood and pus dried hard as glue.

At night they worked under blackout conditions, using flashlights or kerosene lamps painted blue. After a few hours of stumbling around, their eyes would become accustomed to the night, and they learned to recognize light and dark spots on the jungle floor. Sometimes animals wandered around in the darkness. Wild pigs would brush against their legs, and geckos, those small lizards with suction-cup feet, came diving out of the trees. A large caraboa appearing in the dark like an apparition was beast enough to frighten anyone. One night a nurse hiking between beds was smacked in the forehead by a snake swinging from a branch.

On their way to work on the night shift, the women would stop by the mess hall and grab a packed lunch—cold salmon, corned beef hash, cheese or jam sandwiches with cups of cold cocoa or coffee—to eat later, usually around midnight. Soon, however, the rations they had set aside began to disappear. Monkeys and rats were carrying them off, so the
women learned to eat on the run, right away, before the jungle left them hungry.

Living in a world of men, the women tried to achieve some seclusion, some separation. Josie Nesbit begged and borrowed as many canvas shelter halves as she could find so her women could section off the area of jungle where they slept. She also screened off part of a stream where the nurses bathed, a kind of elysian water garden where, for a few moments away from the eyes of men, the women could be women with themselves. The younger nurses would strip naked and sit on the cool wet rocks and slowly let the water rush over them. The older nurses, raised with a sense of Victorian discretion, were too shy to peel off everything and bathed in their panties and bras. Sometimes together in the water, for a rare moment they would break into song: