Elizabeth M. Norman (43 page)

A while later at the Army Redistribution Center in Miami, Florida, Sally met “Zip” Millett, an army officer who had been captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Europe. Zip was twelve years her senior, but with so much in common, Sally instantly took to him.

“He was a real nice man, nicer to me than ninety-nine percent of the men I’d ever seen,” she said.

In May 1947 Zip and Sally were married. Sally left the service, and the couple moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “I was sure,” she said, that “there weren’t going to be any more horrible things in our lives.”

She still ached from malaria and dengue fever and started having
nightmares: “I must have been having horrible dreams—I don’t remember them—I just know I soaked my nightgown.” It was good to have someone like Zip at her side, someone who had also suffered the deprivations of prison. Most nights he would gently wake her and calm her.

Eighteen months after they married, their first son, Van, was born, then came their second child, Bill. Perhaps remembering the children of Santo Tomas, Sally turned their house into a palladium: “My husband used to say, ‘My God, if the children weren’t sick, you’d make them sick, the way you watch over them.’ ”

Nine years into their marriage, Zip Millett was diagnosed with leukemia, and he died shortly thereafter. “I never cried—I couldn’t—there was no time to cry,” Sally said. “I had two little boys and I was afraid that if I started weeping, someone would step in and make all my decisions, and I didn’t want anybody to do that.”

She moved her family to California, established a home and raised her sons to be self-reliant. In the early 1970s an acquaintance put Sally, then in her mid-fifties, in touch with a man she’d known in Santo Tomas, Dick McGrath. After a brief courtship, Sally and Dick were married. Soon, however, Sally was convinced she had made a mistake.

In good times Dick was fine, but “when things got rough,” Sally said, “he went to pieces. He couldn’t hack it. He just couldn’t relate well to people outside [of prison camp].”

Dick wanted Sally to take care of him, but “I had lived for seventeen years with my boys without a husband and I was tired of babying people,” Sally said. And in 1977 the two divorced—“dissolved is a nicer word for what happened,” Sally insisted.

In later years Sally settled in San Antonio, Texas, near some of her old comrades. Her back pain worsened and her joints ached so bad she had to wear braces to walk, but the supports did not slow her down. She simply bought bigger clothes to shroud her scaffolding.

“There is still stiffness and pain in my legs,” she said in 1993, “but Van told me two days ago, ‘Mother, you look fantastic.’ So I’ll settle for that.”

B
ERTHA “CHARLIE”
D
WORSKY
was the first of the Angels to marry. Two days after the American tanks broke down the front gates at Santo Tomas, Charlie and her prison-camp boyfriend, John Henderson, were wed in the university chapel. Home a year later, she resigned her commission and, for a long time, stayed away from nursing as well.

“I never wanted to see the inside of a hospital again,” she said. “I just sort of tried to meld into civilian life and be a homemaker and a mother [to her son, John]. I lived in the state of Washington for eighteen years. You just wanted to block everything out you possibly could and not even tell people where you had been or what you had been through. Eventually people would find out, but it wasn’t until later.

“After we moved to California, my husband lost his job and I decided, maybe, I should work full-time. I applied to the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto. They were so short of nurses, they were glad to see me. I worked on a geriatric ward with psychiatric patients. After my husband was able to find work again, I quit. The work was just too strenuous.”
³

In 1975, after thirty years of marriage, Charlie and John divorced. She never talked about her marital troubles, and her former comrades did not press her for details.

In February 1992 Bertha Dworsky Henderson died of cancer.

E
UNICE
H
ATCHITT
, one of the lucky group evacuated off Corregidor in June 1942 and, later, the nurse sent to Hollywood to serve as the technical adviser on the film
So Proudly We Hail
, went right back to the fighting, this time in Europe.

She was named chief nurse of the 53rd Army Field Hospital in the European theater of war, and on July 16, 1944, not long after D day, she landed with her unit in Normandy, France, then followed General George S. Patton’s Third Army into occupied Europe and the German heartland.

The surgeons who served with her were astonished by her skill. Her experience in the jungles of Bataan had left her one of the most experienced battlefield nurses in the army.

She was on duty in Europe in the early winter of 1945 when she read of the release of her comrades from Santo Tomas. “When I saw that in the papers, I cried, Oh, how I cried. People came up to me and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I’ve just had the most wonderful news.’ ”
⁴

Not long afterward, the assistant chief of the Army Nurse Corps, a major named Danielson, was touring the European battlefields and made a point of seeking out the former Angel of Bataan.

“Eunice,” she said, “after two and a half years in combat, don’t you think you’ve had enough? [Wouldn’t you like] to get started home?”

“Yes!” said Hatchitt. “Bless you.”

During the war Eunice Hatchitt married a man she’d met in Manila, Lieutenant Charles Tyler, a West Point graduate and ordnance officer. (Tyler had been ordered home in October 1941, two months before the Japanese attacked.) For two decades the Tylers made the military their life, then in 1966 Charles Tyler retired. He and Eunice looked forward to traveling and relaxing and spending long weekends with their son, Charles III, and their daughter, Patricia. Five years later, however, Charles Tyler suffered a massive heart attack and died.

Afterward Eunice moved to San Antonio to be near some of her old comrades. In 1998 at the age of eighty-six, she was regularly playing eighteen holes of golf, practicing yoga and signing up for sessions of ballroom dancing. And if anyone asked, the answer was “Yes!” she could still get into her uniform.

D
OROTHY
S
CHOLL
also married a boyfriend from the war, Harold Armold, a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

An engagement which began in Manila shortly before the defense of Bataan and Corregidor, ended in marriage in the Episcopal church in Evergreen [Colorado] last Thursday for Capt. Harold A. Armold and First Lieut. Dorothy Scholl, after four years of waiting, worry and fear
.

On the night Captain Armold was taken prisoner at Bataan, Lieutenant Scholl, an army nurse, was evacuated to Corregidor. Neither knew what became of the other and thru three and a half years of imprisonment each feared the other was dead. When they met again recently at Fitzsimmons General Hospital, where both were convalescing, their marriage planning was resumed.…

“We were the fortunate ones, you know,” Captain Armold commented. “Not many came thru.”
⁵

Dorothy and Harold had four children: Harold Jr., Carolyn, Norman and Edward. Harold Armold was a career military officer, while Dorothy stayed at home.

“She cooked the meals and took care of everything,” Carolyn, their daughter, said.

But Dorothy was feeling restless, and early in 1970 she told her family she was thinking of going to work again, back to nursing.

“You’re a mother,” Carolyn protested. “You can’t work.”

And that seemed to be the end of that. But a year later, Harold was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, and when he died shortly thereafter, Dorothy took a refresher course in surgical nursing and went to work at a local hospital.

She nursed for almost a decade, then retired. In 1980 she signed up for a special trip to the Philippines arranged by American veterans who had fought there during the war. And perhaps because of her health, or the memories she knew the trip might evoke, she asked Carolyn to accompany her.

Growing up, the Armold children had heard little of their parents’ military service. Dorothy and Harold rarely raised the subject, and the children knew not to prompt them. Once, for reasons she never explained, Dorothy dug into a drawer and brought out her medals to show to her son, Harold Jr.

“I thought it was unusual for a woman to have a war medal,” he said. “I was proud that she had received the Bronze Star, but I didn’t think of her as a hero.”
⁶

Now, as Carolyn watched her mother and a few of the other Angels slowly navigate the old laterals of Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor and talk of what had happened there and in the jungles of Bataan, she began to look with new eyes on the woman she had thought of as only a housewife.

“I took Mother out of the traditional role and began to see her as a pretty remarkable lady,” Carolyn said.

In 1991 Dorothy Scholl Armold had a stroke that left her with some weakness on her left side and forced her to walk with a cane. She lives with Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband, Rick Torrence, in central Oklahoma.

I
N
J
ANUARY 1964
, after twenty-eight years of service, M
ADELINE
U
LLOM
, fifty-three years old, retired from the Army Nurse Corps and moved to Arizona to live in the sun.

She kept busy in retirement, working as a member of various veterans groups, including the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (A
DBC
), and speaking out on veterans’ issues.

On January 26, 1982, she testified before the U.S. Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, then investigating the sometimes scandalous neglect and indifference at the hospitals and treatment centers run by the Veterans Administration.

Her testimony, which included a dramatic summary of the nurses’ time on Bataan and in Santo Tomas, marked the first major public appearance by an Angel since the end of World War II.

Not until later did I apply to the Veterans Administration for compensation and I was granted 30% disability for arthritis I contracted during my stay in prison camp
.

I have great reluctance now to apply for further disability because I am acutely aware that such application results only in a hassle
.

 … I know dozens of my former nurse companions who have made application and have met with nothing but opposition
.

If I have a gripe to air it would be that not only I but many of my former Nurse-Prisoners-of-War went through the throes of a living hell above and beyond what is normally required of nurses.… Sherman’s observation that “War is Hell” was a mild description of what we faced in combat as well as in the prison camps and still be denied if we apply for what we deem to be just compensation
.

 … I know of no other group in our history who are more entitled to total compensation yet fail to receive their just dues.…

I cannot understand why those who survived the Bataan Death March and subsequent imprisonment under the Japanese have to go through life feeling rejected by the very government they served
.

I wonder if I can state to you … that of our original sixty-eight army nurses, twenty-six have died since our release
.

I do not, and I repeat, I do not believe all of their deaths were attributable to old age, although some Veterans Administration individuals would have us believe so
.

I am convinced their deaths were premature and directly related to their stay in a Japanese prison camp.
⁷

D
ENNY
W
ILLIAMS
came home to the news that her husband, Bill, had been killed in 1945 when Allied bombers unknowingly sank a Japanese ship ferrying American prisoners of war to the Japanese mainland.

“I was happily married and madly in love,” Williams recalled. “I loved the Philippines and always said I’d live there the rest of my life. What a turmoil Bill’s death threw me into. I lost my home, my husband and my health was not so good. I did not know what the future held for me.

“Every time I’d see the back of a big man in uniform I’d think, ‘That’s Bill! They made a mistake.’ Of course, they didn’t.”

So Denny turned to the sanctuary of the army.

“The army was security for me,” she said. “I knew people and I wanted to be with my own kind.”
⁸

She spent over a decade serving as a nurse-anesthetist at various hospitals Stateside and overseas. In the early 1960s she retired as a lieutenant colonel. She too lived quietly in San Antonio, Texas, until her death in 1997.

T
ERRY “LITTLE
C
ASSIE”
M
YERS
, the teenager “adopted” by some of the Angels, moved to the United States after the war and for a number of years roamed the country: “I was a little wild for a while. I’d spent so much time in prison camp that I had to do some of the crazy things adolescents do—only I was a bit older. I ran around, traveled, did my own thing.”
⁹

She married an air force officer, had two sons and two daughters, divorced, and worked at various jobs. In 1967 she became chairperson of the National Convention of American Ex-POWS, and this experience gave her a taste for public life. In the early 1970s she settled in Las Vegas, Nevada, became involved in Republican politics, including two presidential campaigns, and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Along the way she also started a public affairs and market research company.