Hi I'm the history guy. I have a degree in history and I love
history and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
It is International Nurses Day and National Nurses Week, and that is an opportunity for a historian,
because there are so many stories of heroism and hardship that are tied to the profession that is
dedicated to the alleviation of suffering. And often those stories become overshadowed
by the broader events. One such example is the story of 77 US Army and Navy nurses,
who were taken as prisoners of war, after the Battle of the Philippines
in 1941 and 1942. And theirs is a story that deserves to be remembered.
When Japanese attacks on American positions in the Philippines began on December 8th of 1941,
there were about a hundred nurses of the US Army Nurse Corps and the US Navy Nurse
Corps assigned to various hospitals and bases throughout the islands. Many had requested duty
in the Philippines, as even as the Japanese began their offensives in China and Manchuria,
the Philippines were thought to be safe, an assignment that offered adventure. As
navy nurse lieutenant Dorothy Still Danner recalled, “Nobody thought that Japanese
would be silly enough to try to do anything to Uncle Sam”, and as army nurse Mildred Dalton
Manning later recalled, “I wanted to see the world. What I saw was a prison camp.”
The twelve nurses of the US Navy Nurse Corps faced their baptism by fire on December 10th
when the Japanese bombed the nearby Navy Yard and their, normally quiet Kennesaw Naval Hospital,
was overwhelmed by wounded. As the fight went on those nurses were moved to hospitals in the
capital of Manila, where they treated both wounded soldiers and civilians.
By the end of December it became clear that the capital was going
to fall to the Japanese and the military settled upon a plan to
evacuate many of the wounded troops on the inter-island coconut steamer Mactan.
It was the largest humanitarian evacuation of military personnel in history to that point,
but it was extremely risky. The Mactan was barely seaworthy and even though it had been
newly painted white with bright red crosses to indicate that it was a Ship of Mercy,
there was no guarantee that the Japanese would not fire upon her.
Because of her surgical training, Army Nurse Lieutenant Flora Falmouth was asked to go
aboard the Mactan, even though the mission was so dangerous, it was considered near suicidal.
Told that it was risky and voluntary she said, “It never really occurred to me to refuse.”
Despite the odds the Mactan did eventually make it to Australia with 224 wounded soldiers.
On January 2nd 1942, the US commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur,
declared Manila an Open City. That indicated that the army had given up defending Manila,
and by rules of war, should have meant that the city was spared further attack,
although the Japanese did continue bombing the city.
The Army nurses and one of the Navy nurses managed to escape with the army to their new defensive
perimeter on the peninsula of Bataan. But the 11th Navy nurses stayed behind in the hospital
in Manila to tend to the wounded and became prisoners of war. They were sent to the Santo
Tomas internment camp, where thousands of enemy civilians, most of them Americans, were housed.
The 86 army nurses and one navy nurse who made it to the Bataan
Peninsula were assigned to one of two field hospitals. They were the first
U.S. women in uniform who were assigned service in a combat zone. It was there,
treating wounded in those fetid jungles that they earned the nickname, ‘The Angels of Bataan’.
The conditions in the fetid jungle were horrible and the hospitals were frequent bombing targets.
Two of the nurses were injured in the bombings. Initially the hospitals were well supplied but
as the battle progressed the supply started to dwindle and as the food supply and medical supply
started to run out the nurses and soldiers became more vulnerable to tropical diseases like malaria,
beriberi and dengue fever. The two hospitals had each originally been built to handle a
thousand casualties. As the three-month battle went on each handled more than 5,000. And when
it became clear the Bataan Peninsula was going to fall, the nurses were evacuated to the fortress
of Corregidor. They were forced to leave behind wounded soldiers, the same soldiers that would
be forced by the Japanese to endure the Bataan Death March. Many of the nurses said later that
the guilt of having to leave the soldiers on Bataan, haunted them their entire lives.
The hospital on Corregidor was a dank overcrowded tunnel deep beneath the
fortress. Sometimes Japanese bombing would knock the power out and as one of the nurses noted,
“It was pretty ghastly in there feeling the shock of each explosion and not knowing if it would
plunge you into total darkness.” As it became clear that Corregidor was also going to fall,
the new American commander, General Wainwright, tried to have the nurses evacuated. Ten made it
out on a navy float plane and ten more Army nurses and the one remaining Navy nurse made it out on a
navy submarine. But the remaining 66 nurses were taken into captivity when Corregidor surrendered.
The Japanese didn't really know what to do with women in uniform and they weren't quite treated
as soldiers thankfully they were spared the Bataan Death March, but they were sent to the
civilian internment camps where they spent the rest of the war enduring terrible conditions,
tropical diseases and near starvation, they lost on average, 30 percent of their body
weight. And yet they managed to maintain normal nursing schedules, throughout their captivity,
treating the internees in the camp. The camps were liberated in 1945 when the American
army reconquered the Philippines. And almost miraculously, all 77 of the nurses survived,
despite having no survival training. As one of the nurses said “What could they
do to prepare us? There was no precedent for women, nurses, being taken prisoner”.
All 77 were awarded the Bronze Star for bravery and yet they never seemed to seek attention,
and everyone who was asked seemed to deny that they were heroes, they seemed to think
that they had merely done their duty. Mildred Dalton Manning, the last survivor of the Angels
of Bataan, passed away in 2013 at the age of 98. In 2001 she told a reporter of the Atlanta
journal-constitution, “I have never felt bitter. I always figured if I could live through that,
I could live through anything.” The Angels of Bataan gone, but not forgotten.
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