Elizabeth M. Norman (11 page)

Often the journalistic errors were glaring. “One night when the doctors and nurses had amputations on every table, they donated their own blood,”
¹³
the Jacobys wrote. In fact most of the staff had malaria and thus their blood was contaminated and never used for transfusions.

Of all these fictions, however, the most revealing were the stories about the nurses. In combat women were a novelty, and no one, including the press, was quite sure what to think of them.

In many ways the modern debate about the role of women in combat can be traced back to those bleak early days of 1942 when fivescore nurses traded their hospital whites for battle dress. War is an exercise in raw animus and fifty years ago it was almost unthinkable that women would have a part in it.

In the middle of the twentieth century American women were still thought of primarily in terms of their relationships to men—girlfriends or wives, sisters or mothers, not self-contained individuals bent on careers or in search of adventure. To be sure there were anomalies—tough, resourceful, accomplished women: Isadora Duncan, Dorothy Parker, Georgia O’Keeffe, Amelia Earhart, Gertrude Ederle, Helen Wills, to
name a few. But once the shooting started, once men went to war, the American press—the mostly male press—naturally “feminized” women, softened them and made them a metaphor for home, for safety and comfort, for desire and love. Women served by waiting—Mom in her apron at the stove, Betty in her bathing suit—for men to finish the fight and come home to them. The best way, the American way, for a woman to help the cause was to look and behave like a woman.

So when Brunetta Kuehlthau, a physical therapist assigned to Hospital #2, sent a letter to her mother, a letter she likely slipped to a pilot or officer on a boat running the blockade, it was not surprising to see the text of it in
The New York Times
under the headline:
NURSE ON CORREGIDOR FINDS IT
“
NOT TOO BAD
”:
LETTER SAYS HAIRPIN SHORTAGE CAUSES WOMEN TO CUT HAIR
. “We are comparatively safe here,” Kuehlthau wrote, a fiction of a different kind and for a different reason. “If we have to stay long food may be a problem but so far we have done very well.… Could bring very little [when evacuated].… Did have the sense to bring the diamond bracelet and rings, but that is all in that line.… Finally had to have my hair cut. Impossible to buy hairpins.… Haven’t had to work very hard.… Don’t worry too much. Things are not too bad and I’m sure I’ll get back safely.”
¹⁴

D
URING THE FIRST
week in February, five nurses were transferred from the tunnel fortress on Corregidor to Hospital #2 on Bataan, among them Ruth Straub.

[Straub Diary, February 5, 1942]
This is a place of another world. The only covering is the sky. It is jungle land and everyone lives under the trees. Rows of beds snuggled under the trees with narrow winding paths between them and the night sky overhead. It is eerie and fantastic. I found a cot, no mattress, beside a brook, but not far from the latrine. Can look up from my cot and watch the moon and stars.

[February 6]
They call this a Jungle hospital and it is. I am assigned to ward 17, a new 300 bed ward a mile away which we are to open. I walk there through sinuous paths. We take five grains of quinine a day as prophylaxis. Had caraboa stew at supper. Couldn’t eat it. O[h], O[h], it’s bombing again.

[February 7]
More bombing this morning. It seemed awfully close. I have taken a turn or two at chopping trees. The food is dreadful. Caraboa, rice and tomatoes with hot tea, no cream. I have a bed now, a pleasant surprise. If I get a head shelter to keep the mosquitoes, moisture, and leaves out, I’ll be all set.

[February 8]
Two months since the war began. Rumor of the day: We’re being evacuated to Australia. That is a joke. What will we sail in? Attended church services tonight at 5:30. Seats are made of bamboo. There is a little bamboo altar, and many of the boys sit on the ground. The preacher pointed out two foxholes to be used by the ladies and admonished the men to scatter about in case of bombing.

[February 9]
Today I was transferred to a busy surgical ward up on the hill where the operating room was moved. At 12:15
P.M
. several of our P-40’s zoomed back and forth just above the treetops. A little later they opened their machine guns against Jap planes. We were terrified. I kept working to keep from thinking. The fighting was hot and heavy, we shot down five. Worked until 8
P.M
.

[February 10]
Started out early this morning doing dressings and kept at it until 3:40. I was so tired I could hardly stand.… Thought I was hungry tonight but I just can’t swallow food.… No dogfighting today, thank goodness. The Japs are still trying to land troops on the west coast.… I have a real delicacy tonight, a doughnut. I fill my canteen with cold water and have a feast.… More of the nurses are coming down with malaria. Others have dysentery.

[February 11]
They got us out of bed at sunrise. More dogfighting overhead. Our main danger—O[h], just as I was writing, the Japs dropped bombs nearby. Much more of this and we’ll all be nervous wrecks. To continue, our main danger is shrapnel from our own antiaircraft. Yesterday, a piece went through a mattress. Fortunately, the patient had just left his bed.… Here they come again. Whew! Where is all the bravery I thought I possessed.

[February 12]
Jap planes flew low and bombed near here again. We ducked under patient beds, patients and all. What a helpless sensation.… Rations are to be cut again, but we had beef for supper. Rice, rice, rice … Didn’t sleep again last night. A huge iguana kept prowling through the underbrush by my bed. Sounded like it might be a sniper. They are hideous things with tails, like a snake. The creaking of the bamboo adds to the weird atmosphere at night.… It’s becoming very damp. Our clothes are sticky.

[February 13]
Japs overhead about 11:30 bombing Cabcaben again. Many women and children killed, injured and burned. What will become of all of us? One soldier brought in a four-month-old Filipino baby. Both parents were killed during the bombing.… I am so hungry—rice, cold salmon, tomatoes. Couldn’t eat any of it. Found a heel of bread and some jam.

[February 15]
Am so tired and hungry I just scribble along. Surely help must be on its way, but when will it arrive?

[February 16]
Another busy day. Don’t feel badly until 1
P.M
. when it gets hot. Washing hair at night and while it was frowzy with soap the Japs came back. Scared? We just huddled near a tree and sat.… Eight of us jumped into a small foxhole in a raid today and nearly killed each other. One of the cooks was shot through the head.… Rats are chewing up our clothes. Iguanas every night. Food progressively worse. More malaria. All in all, we are pretty low.… We nurses look very strange in our air corps dungarees. Mine are size 42. All of us have long hair now. We part it and tie it in two braids, fastening the braids with the flannel we found around the hospital.… Lately I have been having nightmares. I am always stealing heads of fresh lettuce from dead men.
¹⁵

T
HE GENERALS IN
Tokyo were angry. Their plan for the Philippines had called for total victory by the end of January, but General Homma was still stuck on Bataan. What is more, he had suffered massive casualties,
seven thousand killed and wounded. And now he was calling for reinforcements.

While Tokyo debated his request, there was a lull in the fighting, six weeks of relative quiet from mid-February until the end of March, and General MacArthur’s staff used the lull to regroup.

Worried about the monsoon rains, Josie Nesbit got permission to transfer twelve 1926 and 1928 Dodge buses from a nearby motor pool to Hospital #2, where enlisted men removed the seats to create makeshift barracks, or “improvised apartments” as Nesbit dubbed them, space that allowed roughly half the nurses to get off the wet ground.
¹⁶

Also during the lull Maude Davison came over from her command post on Corregidor to inspect the two jungle hospitals, but her visit ended abruptly. Walking the seventeen wards of Hospital #2—five difficult miles—exhausted the fifty-seven-year-old commander and aggravated her injured back. She saw enough, however, to convince her that the medical staff was overwhelmed and she transferred some additional women from the tunnel hospital on Corregidor.

Even during the lull, work in the jungle hospitals was long and hard. The weather was either hot and humid or just plain hot. Clouds of dust and whorls of dirt blew through the open wards, covering the beds and patients with grime. The nurses began the day by bathing the bedridden, then leading the ambulatory men to the river. Afterward they made their rounds, changing dressings and administering medications and treatments. Later they checked their stores and equipment, sharpening dulled needles on rocks, boiling glass syringes and dissolving morphine tablets in solution. In the afternoon they worked with men newly disabled, teaching amputees how to shave or guiding the blind on walks over the uneven jungle floor.

A few of the women volunteered for shifts in the prison ward, some five dozen cots encircled by barbed wire where captured Japanese were recuperating. It was the women’s duty, of course, to minister to these men—medicine’s oaths and ethics make no distinction between enemy and ally—but in truth it was more curiosity than duty that made them volunteer. They wanted to get a good look at the “sons of Nippon,” the vaunted imperial troops that had been spilling so much American blood and causing the Allies so much suffering. To the women’s surprise, many of the enemy were just boys, and when they spoke—a few knew English—they sounded just like the young Americans they had been trying so hard to kill. They too wanted to know about the latest movies; they too longed for the day they could go home.

As the lull wore on, everyone, medical staff and patients alike, discovered something new in their day: a bit of free time. One group of patients transformed a marshy area near their ward into a scenic rock garden. Another patient, obviously a comedian, took to hanging signs on the jungle trees. One read:
FREE SHAVES FOR JAPS: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR MISTAKES
!
¹⁷

Some of the men caged a bit of cardboard and cut it into jigsaw puzzles and playing cards. Others made marbles for Chinese checkers out of plaster of Paris dyed violet with gentian and blue with methylene or took pennies and painted them red and black for checkers. Old Tarzan comic books were the literature of the day. And the patients who could manage it even tried playing a bit of baseball, volleyball and badminton on fields marked out in clearings.

A Red Cross official evacuated from Manila with the army started a two-page mimeographed newsletter, “The Jungle Journal.” Written on a manual typewriter, the little sheet had an amateurish look, but the troops and the staff eagerly awaited each ribald issue.

F
OXHOLE
F
ORECASTS:
Hottest rumors of the week. [A] B-19 flew over Japan and dropped a bomb in Fujiyama volcano and now there’s 2 inches lava all over Japan! … [B] The U.S. Navy steamed toward Japan so fast that they created a tidal wave which completely swamped the island. Well, after all that the Japs can’t help but lose.

At Hospital #2, Josie Nesbit converted her bamboo shack into a nurses recreation room, and at night the women gathered around her radio to listen to the Voice of Freedom transmission from Corregidor or the news broadcast from station KGEI in San Francisco.

With a coal-oil lantern casting a cheerless yellow glow, the group
would sit in Nesbit’s shed drinking cups of watered-down coffee, longing for news of the outside world. Sometimes the news cheered them, sometimes it brought a cruel reality to their door. In late January they learned that the convoy they had desperately been awaiting had been routed to Northern Ireland instead.
¹⁹
And in February they heard news of the Japanese conquests of nearby Java and Singapore.

Meanwhile at Hospital #1 in Little Baguio nurses and doctors delivered a baby—Victoria Bataana Sullivan, so named for her Irish-American father, her birthplace and the spirit of those fighting there—a healthy girl with big blue eyes. A few of the nurses scrounged a skein of twine and knit sweaters and booties and some of the Filipino patients wove the little girl a rattan bassinet. A birth amid all the suffering and death seemed to renew everyone. As a nurse carried the little girl through the wards to her mother for a feeding, the bedridden soldiers propped themselves up on their elbows to look at the child. Soon word of the delivery spread beyond the hospital, and it was not long before seasoned infantrymen were stopping by as well. Eventually mother and daughter left Hospital #1 for a refugee camp deep in the jungle. That afternoon the wards seemed more cheerless than they’d been in weeks.