Elizabeth M. Norman (6 page)

N
AVY NURSE
R
ED
Harrington, fair and freckled with hazel eyes and alabaster skin, was, at twenty-eight, an Irish beauty. Her real name was Mary Rose, but after one look at that auburn mien everyone called her “Red.”

Standing in a hallway of the Saint Scholastica Girls School just after New Year’s, Red was angry. Three weeks earlier the navy had turned the school into a makeshift hospital and had staffed the facility with navy doctors, corpsmen and the twelve navy nurses from its destroyed bases at Canacao and Cavite on the south side of Manila Bay. Since there were so few of them, the navy nurses were, for command purposes, folded into the army, and even though they had their own supervisor, Laura Cobb, they were put under the iron hand of Maude Davison.

One of the navy nurses, Ann Bernatitus, had managed to slip out of the threatened city in the company of a navy surgeon and corpsman and had joined the army on Bataan. A few days later the other eleven navy nurses were told to prepare themselves to flee the city. They watched the army pack to leave, and they patiently waited their turn. Waited … and waited … and waited.

What was happening? Red asked Laura Cobb. When was the army going to get the navy out?

“We have no orders to leave,” Cobb said. So “we stay put.”
¹⁴

Then the navy nurses began to notice that the army was sending them the most critically ill and injured patients, soldiers who obviously could not be moved any significant distance. The navy wards at Saint Scholastica Girls School began to fill with these hopeless cases. And Red and the ten other navy women began to wonder if they too were considered expendable.

O
F ALL THE
Angels, Red Harrington was the only one who could look on abandonment with a certain irony.
¹⁵

Born August 10, 1913, at a home for unwed mothers, she was immediately deserted and sent to St. Monica’s Orphanage in Sioux City, Iowa.

One day not long thereafter, in walked Petra Harrington, a childless farm wife from Elk Point, South Dakota. Mrs. Harrington quickly fixed on a cute little boy, but every time she looked at him or tried to pick him up, the child began to cry. Then she noticed an infant girl lying quietly on her back, holding a bottle. Here was the child for her, she told the director. And she wrapped the redheaded infant in a comforter and took her home to meet her husband, Maurice.

Elk Point was a quiet place to grow up. Maurice, who took up the life of a salesman, was on the road a lot, and as a child Red trailed after Petra like a puppy, and soon mother and daughter grew close. In the winter, Petra took her skating on the frozen town pond, in the summer to the banks of the Sioux River for a swim. A firm but fair woman, Petra determined to give her daughter a moral foundation that would last. “When the Lord gives you [a child], you don’t have any choice. But I went out and adopted one,” she said. “And I’m going to raise one right.” A skilled seamstress, Petra dressed her red-haired daughter well and, as the girl got older, let her roam a bit. On Tuesdays and Fridays in the summer, Red and her friend Dorothy would go down to the local dance hall and listen to the latest traveling band.

In school Red studied hard, worked on the school newspaper and dreamed of being a reporter, but with the Great Depression, newspapers were closing, and after she graduated, jobs were scarce, so Red Harrington decided to become a nurse.

When she entered the job market, however, the economy was still depressed. Instead of hiring new graduates, hospital administrators, looking for cheap labor, were staffing their wards with student nurses. Just then, Red’s father died and, knowing she would have to help support her mother, Red decided to join the navy.

The service, she reasoned, was her only escape from a hardscrabble life. She could marry, move in with some lonely farmer or grizzled rancher and bring her mother with her, but Petra had taught her to be independent and self-reliant, so in January 1937 she entered the Navy Nurse Corps and moved Petra from the cold gray landscape of Elk Point to the pink stucco, blue water and warm breezes of San Diego.

Red quickly took to navy life, and her supervisors at Balboa Naval Hospital were delighted with her work. Her mother settled in easily as well, and after a while Red decided that she could risk leaving Petra on her own and indulge her wanderlust. She put in for a transfer, requesting either the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York or the navy base at Canacao
in the Philippine Islands. In January 1941, she said good-bye to her mother and boarded the boat for Manila.

She loved the nightlife—dining at the clubs and dancing under the stars, riding horses, playing tennis, walking under the moon by the seawall with lights on the water. Bright, independent and beautiful, she was soon sought by a number of men, among them a handsome physician. They were together all the time and before long Red was in love and dreaming of marriage. One day, a season after their affair began, he came to her sober-faced. He was headed Stateside, he said, going home … to his wife. Later, much later, Red looked back and smiled. Never mind, she told herself. In three months with him, “I lived a lifetime.”

o
N
N
EW
Y
EAR’S
Day, 1942, a sign on the front of Manila City Hall announced:
OPEN CITY, BE CALM, STAY AT HOME, NO SHOOTING
. The
Manila Bulletin
warned its readers to “Stay where you are located.… You are as safe where you are as you would be at the place where you plan to move.”
¹⁶

In a shortwave-radio message to the islands, President Roosevelt told his countrymen and the Filipinos, “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected.”
¹⁷

Red Harrington and the ten other navy nurses stood by calmly as an enlisted man slowly lowered the American flag in the front of Saint Scholastica.

The women were worried. Most had visions of being overrun by a wanton conquering hoard. Red was sure the enemy was bent on murder, not pleasure, and would just walk in and gun them down. “I wondered, were they just going to come in and shoot up the place or take us all out and shoot us?”
¹⁸
Someone showed her a leaflet the Japanese had dropped on Manila the day before. The illustration was a caricature of Uncle Sam with a severed head. Underneath was the word
DESTINY
.

On January 2, 1942, General Homma and his victorious troops marched smartly into the capital. From their porch at Saint Scholastica, the navy nurses had a front-row seat on the welcoming celebration at the nearby Japanese embassy. They watched Homma’s car, flying miniature flags with the Rising Sun, pass in review. Out front, cheering and yelling support, were hundreds of ecstatic Japanese residents. The next day, uniformed Japanese officers arrived at Saint Scholastica and accepted the
surrender of twenty-seven physicians and dentists, eleven American nurses, a Filipino nurse, a Red Cross director, a Catholic priest and several dozen enlisted men. The enemy ordered the sailors to string barbed wire around the building, then the Japanese politely began to loot the place, “confiscating” the contents of the school safe, radios, knives, flashlights and anything else they wanted and could carry off. They ransacked every room in the building—every room, that is, save the quarters of the American nurses.

As it turned out, the Japanese were baffled by the presence of women in uniform. In their country, women did not join the military. When a Japanese woman wanted to help the war effort, she would volunteer for one of three patriotic societies: Joshi Teishen Tai, or the “Women’s Benevolent Force,” which encouraged volunteer war work; Joshi Hokotu Tai, the “Women’s National Service,” which organized working parties to help rural families, especially farm families with men in the military; and Aikoku Fujin Kai, or the “Women’s Patriotic Society,” which prepared “comfort bags” and other packages for soldiers overseas.
¹⁹

At Saint Scholastica the Japanese at first maintained the status quo, and the nurses simply continued to care for their badly wounded patients. From time to time enemy officers would come through the wards, but there were few incidents. When they ordered Laura Cobb and her nurses to catalog their store of supplies, the women became convinced that their captors meant to filch their precious serums, painkillers and other medications, so they shrewdly mislabeled things. Valuable anti-malarial drugs, like quinine, became “bicarbonate of soda” and were passed over when the looters came back through.

The women, disgusted by the looting and the harassment, started to utter epithets at the guards, then they discovered that a few of their captors spoke English, so they bowdlerized their invective. Now, for example, instead of calling the guards “yellow-bellied bastards,” the nurses would smile and say, “There go the yellow bees.”

Then the humor stopped. Four Filipino patients escaped and the guards posted a notice: for every patient that turned up missing, two other patients—and the
nurse on the ward—
would be shot.

Soon the enemy was pressing the sick and injured into work gangs, forcing patients who could barely stand to spend the day at hard labor.

Laura Cobb reacted to all this by insisting that her nurses maintain good order and military discipline. She assigned each woman to a ward and coordinated shifts to make sure every ward was adequately covered. The nurses worked from 7:00
A.M
. till 9:00
P.M.
, then, because Cobb was
afraid to leave her women alone at night with the Japanese, corpsmen took over.

They lived thus for weeks and weeks. Finally, in early March 1942, the enemy shipped most of the patients and the doctors and corpsmen to Bilibid Prison, a civilian penitentiary in Manila used to hold American prisoners of war and a place that soon became known for its barbarism and cruelty.

Laura Cobb, Red Harrington and the others—Mary Chapman of Chicago, Illinois; Bertha Evans of Portland, Oregon; Helen Gorzelanski of Omaha, Nebraska; Margaret Nash of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Goldia O’Haver of Hayfield, Minnesota; Eldene Paige of Lomita, California; Susie Pitcher of Des Moines, Iowa; Dorothy Still of Long Beach, California; and C. Edwina Todd of Pomona, California
²⁰
—all were ordered to pack their belongings and were shipped across town to the grounds of Santo Tomas University, a large suburban campus that the enemy had turned into an internment camp for foreign nationals.

Meanwhile west of the city and across the bay, the American army was bottled up on the peninsula of Bataan in a desperate struggle for survival. Back home newspapers and magazines carried accounts of the battle, portraying the defenders as brave and resolute. And indeed they were. In truth, however, the Philippines were falling.

Chapter 3

Jungle Hospital #1

T
HE PENINSULA OF
Bataan, located on Luzon’s southwest coast, is twenty-five miles in length and, at its widest point, twenty miles across, twice as long and ten times as wide as the island of Manhattan.

On a simple map Bataan looks like a lone fat toe extending south from the mainland foot into the South China Sea. The tip of the toe bends back slightly east forming a body of water, Manila Bay. In the mouth of the bay, between the tip of the peninsula and the mainland, lies the tiny island fortress of Corregidor, “the Rock,” guarding the entrance to the bay and Manila, the capital city, on the bay’s western shore.

In 1941 Bataan, named for the Bata, or diminutive Negritos that once lived there, was an untamed place, part jungle, part mountain preserve, with small towns and barrios of nipa and wooden huts, holding no more than thirty thousand Filipinos, a land of monkeys and snakes, wild pigs and quail.
¹

Bataan was so infested with mosquitoes that health authorities considered it the worst malarial breeding ground in the islands. In 1930 a large lumber company abandoned its logging and milling operations there and fled the disease-ridden land.
²
The lumberjacks were through with the mosquitoes, the dengue fever, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, the flatworms and roundworms, the skin fungus, the open supperating sores.

Most of the peninsula was covered by the slopes and foothills of two extinct volcanoes. Only the land along the coasts was passable, and these narrow corridors were mostly marsh and thick, tropical forest. Bataan
was so wild and unsettled that the military referred to its various encampments by kilometer posts—kilometer 143.5 or kilometer 162.5, numbers in the middle of nowhere, places where no one wanted to go.

Densely wooded ravines, malarial swamps, heavily vegetated jungle—that was Bataan, as uninspired a piece of geography as anywhere in the world, but it was there, in that thick and tangled terrain, that the United States of America, along with its Filipino allies, fought its first major land battle of World War II.

The plan was simple: pull all allied forces onto the big toe, set up a line of defense at the top, and hold on for 180 days, time enough, so military planners thought, for Washington to send help. During the year the American command in the Philippines had established supply depots and dumps on Bataan, but instead of stocking them to capacity, MacArthur, who wanted to meet the enemy upland, had moved much of his food, ammunition, spare parts and equipment north off the peninsula.