National Nurses United

seeking fun, adventure, and the chance to live overseas have asked to be transferred. It's early December 1941, and while there have been rumors of war, nobody believes the United States will enter the fray. Instead, most of the nurses are working their fairly sleepy shifts and figuring out what they will be wearing to the upcoming holiday par- ties. While most people know the Japanese surprise bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, many may not be aware that Japan also bombed the Philippines just hours later, crippling much of the military's fight- ing capacity in that area and launching the part of the war in the Pacific theater known as the Philippines campaign. The Army and Navy nurses on assignment in the Philippines were wholly unprepared for combat. They had never been trained, nor ever expected, to be on the front lines. Suddenly, they were thrust into combat nursing, triaging unspeakable traumas—broken bones, severed limbs, gaping wounds with shrapnel, scorched flesh—and assisting with emergency surgeries and amputations. On the defensive, Gen. Douglas MacArthur orders his people to retreat to the Bataan peninsula, where the nurses, doctors, and other personnel struggle to establish and run two "hospitals" in the dense jungle. With dwindling supplies, medicine, and food and no replenishments getting through the Japanese line, they heroically care around-the-clock for all the wounded soldiers that keep streaming in. By late March, Hospital #1 had 1,500 patients, and Hospital #2 had more than 3,000 patients. Patients are kept in open-air wards, some on bamboo cots and many simply placed on the ground. With malnutrition and little medicine, soon the medical staff as well as patients are all suffering from various tropical diseases, including malaria, dysentery, dengue, and worms. Living in the jun- gle also meant dealing with huge rats, snakes, wild pigs, and count- less armies of biting mosquitoes. By early April, military leaders know it is hopeless. They order everybody who is able to retreat to the underground tunnels of near- by Corregidor Island to make their last stand. The nurses are reluc- tant and broken-hearted to leave their patients (rightly so, because these are the men who are doomed to walk the Bataan Death March), but they follow orders. One particularly moving story shows the mettle of the second in command of the Army nurses, Josie Nes- bit, RN, in protecting her nurses. When Nesbit receives word that only American nurses would be evacuated to the island, she chal- lenged, "What about my Filipino nurses?" There were quite a num- ber of local RNs who worked alongside her unit. When the colonel emphasized that they would only be taking American nurses, Nesbit replied, "If my Filipino nurses don't go, I'm…not…going…either." The colonel then made some calls and got permission for all the nurses to be ferried over. On Corregidor, the RNs continue to labor and care for the wounded, all while the Japanese drop tons of explosives every day on the island, blasting "The Rock" into oblivion. On May 2, officers esti- mated that the Japanese used 1.8 million pounds of explosives on the island before they stopped bothering to keep counting. In these last days before capture, the commander sends some groups of mili- tary personnel home, including some nurses. Everyone remaining surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942. The nurses are eventually transferred in July to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, also called STIC, a converted university campus. At first largely self-governing, STIC was like a "teeming internation- al village" and housed about 3,800 internees from all walks of life, with many children and also older people over 60. As Norman writes, "The work of war is easy, 'kill or be killed.' Sur- vival, however, is another matter, much more diffi- cult, for it requires an endurance, a cunning and a strength of will that fighting does not." The nurses get down to the busi- ness of surviving, and take their direction from Maude Davison, RN and chief of all Army nurses. Davison was a severe but effec- tive and respected boss. She, along with Nesbit, gave the interned nurses structure and purpose, put- ting them on regular work shifts in the camp hospital and requir- ing above all else to conduct themselves as representatives of the United States Army Nurse Corps. The head of the Navy Nurse Corps did the same. "So it was work that would save them, their sense of themselves as professionals, the knowledge that they were part of something larger and more enduring than any one of them alone, and that something was the group," writes Norman of the 75 RNs imprisoned together at STIC. (Two were held at differ- ent camps.) Things go as well as they can during the first year. When the nurses are not working, they spend most of their time waiting; wait- ing in line for food, waiting in line to take a shower, waiting to use the toilet or brush teeth, waiting in line to wash clothes, waiting to hear from family at home or who was winning the war. STIC gets so crowded that, in the second year, some of the Navy nurses are recruited to help establish another internment camp in the town of Los Banos. Conditions at STIC get worse when administration of the camp is turned over from the Japanese Bureau of External Affairs to the War Prisoners Department of the Imperial Japanese Army. The depart- ment clamps down on outside packages and vendors and begins, whether intentionally or through neglect, and then perhaps in retri- bution when the tide starts to turn against the Japanese military, to starve the internees. The adults in the camp went from a diet of 1,490 calories a day to 1,180, then to less than 1,000. By January 1945, calories per day were down to 700 and the internees could only depend on one cup of vegetable gruel every 24 hours. Some people start eating weeds. People were sick and dying of malnutri- tion left and right, and there was little the nurses could do besides work. Many nurses were also ill from beriberi or whatever diseases their starving bodies could not fight off. Most of them had stopped menstruating. Finally, on Feb. 3, 1945, American troops fight their way to STIC and liberate the POWs. Amazingly, all the RNs had survived. 26 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 4

• Cover