Elizabeth M. Norman (16 page)

Around dusk on April 8 at the battered Hospital #1, Colonel Duckworth summoned Edith “Shack” Shacklette to the riddled shell he called his office.

“The word is that Bataan will surrender tomorrow and we’re going to get the nurses over to Corregidor,” she remembered him saying. “We don’t want to have women around when the Jap soldiers come in. You go and tell everybody to stop what they’re doing and take what possessions they can. A bus will be down here in about thirty minutes.”
¹⁰

Shack protested at first—she had 1,800 defenseless men in her wards, but the colonel only repeated the order. Leave! he said. Leave, now! So she quickly rounded up her small group of nurses and led them to the bus.

“Of course there was crying,” she said. “We hated to leave our patients, hated to leave our group. The bus started off. It was about nine o’clock at night. Just then Colonel Duckworth stopped the bus, made me roll down my window. He handed me the American flag. We had the flag inside on the wall of one of the buildings. He told me when I got over to Corregidor to take it to the commanding officer.… I’m always sorry that I gave it away. It was probably just destroyed by the Japanese. I’d give anything to have saved that flag. I cry about it now.”
¹¹

As the nurses at Hospital #1 moved toward their bus, a few of the doctors gathered to say good-bye.

“The nurses scurried into their quarters reappearing almost instantly with a pitiful handful of personal effects,” said surgeon Al Weinstein of Atlanta, Georgia. “Farewells were hasty and tearful, kisses sweet and salty.”
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Some of the women wanted more time “to discuss the details about our patients … to leave instructions about those we were worried about,” wrote Juanita Redmond. “Some doctors and corpsmen said we’d be back again in a few days—‘We’ll be seeing you,’ they repeated firmly—but nobody believed them. They said it had been good working with us. They said we’d been brave soldiers.”
¹³

Geneva Jenkins of Sevierville, Tennessee, was asleep when word came for the nurses to flee. “I had gone to bed after laundering my clothes and had stretched them on the line. They said, ‘You have to leave,’ so I ran off with all my underwear on the line.”
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Meanwhile, at Hospital #2, Josie Nesbit was ordered to report to Colonel Gillespie. “Tell your American nurses to get down here to my office by twenty hundred hours and only take whatever they can carry in their hands,” he said.
¹⁵

The instructions stopped Nesbit cold. “What about my Filipino nurses?” she demanded, almost insubordinate.

“Only the
American
nurses,” the colonel said, cutting her short.

Nesbit had made the army her life. She obeyed orders and respected authority, but now, for perhaps the first time in her career, she challenged the chain of command.

“If my Filipino nurses don’t go,” she said, standing squarely before her superior officer, “I’m … not … going … either.” (The Filipinos “called me Mama Josie,” she explained later, “and I wasn’t going to leave them behind.”
¹⁶
)

Gillespie liked and respected Nesbit, and he called headquarters on
Corregidor and got permission to evacuate all the nurses—Americans, Filipinos and the civilian women working with them.

“Josie was a tiger,” said Sally Blaine.
¹⁷

Earlier in the day as the sounds of gunfire grew more pronounced, Anna Williams of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, climbed the hill behind Hospital #2.

“I wanted to see what was happening because the guns were closer and closer and the smoke was thick,” she said. “We were used to having gunfire and things close to us but this you could tell was much nearer. I climbed up the hill to see what was happening and I’ll never forget the dejection and the sadness and the awful look on the men as they came along [the road] retreating, covered in bandages and blood and dirt. It was very sad. I knew then that we were going to have to move.”
¹⁸

The women left so quickly that one nurse climbed into the trucks with her hair in curlers. Another abandoned a favorite Bible and a copy of Emerson’s essays. Leona Gastinger threw her wet laundry and a carton of cigarettes in a pillowcase. Jeanne Kennedy had only enough time to grab her toothbrush, a flashlight and a comb.

Lucy Wilson was assisting in the operating room when the orders reached her.

“By the time we received the word, took off our gloves and gowns in the middle of operations and walked down there, most of the nurses were already gone,” she said. “Walking out in the middle of an operation with hundreds lined up under the trees waiting for surgery was devastating to me. This I have to live with for the rest of my life.”
¹⁹

The women said nothing to their patients, but lying there in their bamboo beds or on the wet jungle floor, the patients knew. Everyone knew. “Those eyes,” said Minnie Breese. “Those eyes just followed us.”
²⁰

Back at the coast the bus carrying the fourteen nurses from Hospital #1 lumbered slowly along the main road toward the docks at Mariveles.

“Civilians banged on the bus pleading to be taken on before the Japanese got them,” said Juanita Redmond. “Captain Nelson [a transportation officer driving the women to the dock] would say, ‘Take it easy, girls, take it easy. I’m sorry for them too, but we can’t take all and it’s that or nothing.’ ”
²¹

On board the bus was Preston Taylor, a chaplain from the 31st Infantry who had been transporting patients from the front line to Hospital #1 and now was going to help the nurses reach the docks. In a book
after the war, Taylor remembered striking up a conversation with nurse Hattie Brantley from Jefferson, Texas, not too far from his own home in Fort Worth. He’d just come from the front, he told her, and wondered if she knew a nurse named Helen Summers.

“This is your lucky day, Chaplain,” said Brantley, then she turned in her seat. “Helen. Hey, Helen. The chaplain wants to see you.”

A young, short, dark-eyed woman dressed in army fatigues came forward and Taylor introduced himself.

“Helen, I’m Chaplain Preston Taylor and I’ve just come from the Battle of Mount Sumat, and …”

“Yes, Chaplain?”

“And I met this young Lieutenant named Benjamin.”

“Yes, Arnold Benjamin. We’re going to be married.”

“He’s dead, Helen.”

“Oh, God, no.”

“Yesterday, during the battle for Mount Sumat.”

She began weeping and coughing. Taylor placed his arm around her and drew her close to him. He told her—

“He wanted to leave you these—”

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a gold watch, a key chain, and a college ring.
²²

When they reached the dock at Mariveles, Taylor and another man “helped carry bags and belongings down to the pier and pitched them to the crewmen” in the launch. As the boat pulled away, the chaplain kept his eyes on Helen Summers. She “managed a faint smile” at first, he said. Then she looked up again “and waved good-bye.”
²³

Cassie remembered the docks at Mariveles as a chaos of terror and flight. “Groups of panicked evacuees … streamed into the area,” she said. The nurses were packed tightly in the small launch. “Some of us sat on our baggage, some on the bottom of the boat, others on the boat’s gunwales.” On shore the ground rocked each time the allies blew another of their ammunitions dumps, but “we became a little immune to these sounds,” Cassie said. Then “suddenly, a deafening explosion … echoing and re-echoing against the cliffs surrounding the harbor. It shocked and shook us as we huddled on the floor of the boat. Then came another and still another.… We looked back toward Bataan and saw that the three Navy tunnels burrowed into the harbor’s hillside were being destroyed lest they fall into the hands of the enemy. We stared … 
mesmerized. Then … looking forward … we saw directly in our path the … spectacle of the flaming submarine tender
Canopus
. She had been cut loose from her moorings … to be scuttled.… The explosions of fuel barrels in her magazines was deafening.” The launch could not proceed around the exploding vessel so it stopped to wait. “Suddenly the launch rocked and quivered.… The helmsman shouted, ‘Earthquake!’ We could feel the tremors.… It was uncanny.” Then “the waters calmed” and “we seemed oblivious” after that. “We dreamed dreams and thought thoughts of times, people, places” long gone. Then all at once the launch bumped against the pilings on Corregidor’s wharf and “we were … jolted back to reality.”
²⁴

M
EANWHILE BACK ON
Bataan the eighty-eight women from Hospital #2 seemed trapped.

Knots of tired refugees and straggling soldiers clogged the road, and the trucks, buses, jeeps and battered sedans that carried many of the women either broke down or were stuck in traffic. Just then engineers blew up one of the largest ammunitions dumps along the road and for hours nothing on wheels could move around it.

“It was a big mess,” said Sally Blaine. “[Some] troops were retreating from the front lines [while others were marching in the opposite direction to face the enemy]. They were worn out and exhausted. Vehicles were breaking down. The noise and the confusion—it was bedlam that night.”
²⁵

Minnie Breese was sick with malaria and dysentery. A doctor had issued her thirty grains of quinine and the drug was making her “deaf as a post” and nauseous.

“I remember vomiting and running behind a bush with dysentery,” she said. “I didn’t care if I lived or died. I got on the truck and Sallie Durrett took care of me.”

The truck broke down and the nurses were forced to the road.

“We couldn’t get down to the dock because they were blowing up the ammo dump, so I laid down [next to the road],” Breese said. “Once in a while I’d open my eyes and see the most beautiful fireworks going up through the trees.”
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Finally, some of the women from Hospital #2 reached the water, but they were so late in arriving, the boat that had been ordered to take them to Corregidor was nowhere in sight. Sally Blaine spotted an officer on the dock and ran after him.

“Hey! You! With the red cross on your arm,” she yelled. “Where’s the boat that the nurses are supposed to go over on? We’re down here to take the boat over to Corregidor.”

“Oh,” he said. “It came and left.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

“How many are you?” he asked.

“Five.”

“Well, I can take you.”

The officer loaded his passengers into a small craft with an outboard motor.

“When we went across,” Blaine remembered, “the water looked silvery gold. It was calm, early in the morning. I kept looking at the sky and the water and I thought, Well, this may be the last time I see a sunrise.

“We didn’t talk,” she went on. “This may strike you as funny but during all that time we didn’t cry, scream or carry on. You were quiet. You kept your fears to yourself.”
²⁷

Back at the dock another group of nurses arriving late slumped down at the water’s edge, exhausted. It was morning by now; the sun was beginning to blaze and the Japanese dive bombers were returning to look for targets on the bay.

The women found a bit of shelter at the water’s edge and huddled together, more weary and hungry than afraid. They had not eaten for a very long time and sat on the sand, talking of food.

As women, of course, they attracted some attention and, as it happened, some sailors who stopped to talk with them had a stash of provisions nearby. So there on the derelict beach some of the nurses from Hospital #2 had a kind of last supper on Bataan, an impromptu banquet of corned beef hash, tomato juice, crackers and beans—all left behind by the U.S. Navy. Even the women wracked with dysentery “ate like wolves.”
²⁸
They finished off their feast by passing around cans of peaches, spearing the sweet, wet, delicious slabs of fruit with the ends of their toothbrushes.

At length Josie Nesbit arrived. Delayed reaching the docks, she now gathered around her the final group of nurses.
²⁹
The docks were quiet now, not a boat in sight. They’d been abandoned, all right, and now there seemed nothing to do but wait.

A strange kind of quiet descended over the group, a prelude, they felt, to something ominous. They walked to the beach and waited … waited quietly for the Japanese to march out of the jungle.

Then someone heard the sound of a motorboat and they rushed to
the water. Suddenly, dive bombers appeared overhead, and the boat quickly wheeled about and pulled away.

A few minutes later the threat passed and the skipper tried a second approach, but just then the bombers reappeared, and, for a while, the boat and planes played cat and mouse. At last the pilots seemed to tire of the game and turned away, and the skipper turned back toward shore and cautiously approached the dock.