Elizabeth M. Norman (14 page)

The general had been ordered off the rock by Washington, but many felt he could have refused his orders and stayed with his command. On March 18
The New York Times
announced the news with the headline:
MACARTHUR IN AUSTRALIA AS ALLIED COMMANDER; MOVE HAILED AS FORESHADOWING TURN OF TIDE
.
⁸

In fact there were those on Bataan, some nurses among them, who believed that MacArthur would now be able to rally Washington policy makers and the War Department to the cause of saving the Philippines. But, for the most part, the brave defenders of Bataan and Corregidor felt betrayed. “We were just about as down as we could get when MacArthur left,” said Ann Mealor, the assistant chief nurse in Corregidor’s Malinta Tunnel.
⁹

One soldier, whose name has long since been lost to history, coined the phrase “Dugout Doug” and offered some new lyrics to the melody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

Dugout Doug’s not timid
,
He’s just cautious, not afraid
.
He’s carefully protecting
The stars that Franklin made
.
Four-star generals are as rare as good food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.
¹⁰

MacArthur’s successor, General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright, assumed command of the sixty thousand troops on Bataan, then quickly estimated that their combat efficiency was less than 20 percent. Wainwright also guessed that facing him were 250,000 well-fed, well-equipped, well-supported Japanese infantry.

The nurses, doctors and fighting men admired Skinny Wainwright, an angular man who always wore a red kerchief tied around his neck and always seemed to have time for his troops. Before he left Bataan for the main command post on Corregidor, he visited the field hospitals and tried to raise the spirits of the nurses and their patients. Later he spoke to the entire army:

March 22, 1942

To all American and Filipino Troops in the Philippines

 … I am proud to have been given this opportunity to lead you, whose gallantry and heroism have been demonstrated on
the field of battle and who have won the admiration of the world. We are fighting for a just cause and victory shall be ours. I pledge the best that is in me to the defense of the Philippines. Assisted by your courage and by your loyalty we shall expel the invader from Philippine soil.

J. M. Wainwright
Commanding General
¹¹

On March 18, the same day word reached the Philippines that MacArthur had arrived safely in Australia, thousands of tomato-sized cans tied with red and white ribbons fell from the sky onto Bataan and Corregidor.

At first, the allies thought the cans were a new trick explosive and poked and prodded them with sticks. As it turned out each can held a neatly folded note. One enlisted man looked at the contents and quipped that the troops had finally received some mail.

[To] His Excellency Major Jonathan Wainwright:

We have the honor to address you in accordance with Bushido—the code of the Japanese warrior.… You have already fought to the best of your ability. What dishonor is there in following the example of the defenders of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands East India.… Your duty had been performed. Accept our sincere advice and save the lives of those officers and men under your command.… if a reply to this advisory note is not received … by noon March 22, 1942 we shall consider ourselves at liberty to take any action whatsoever.
¹²

Homma had already moved his reinforced troops into the front line and now Japanese warships appeared on the horizon. Shortly after noon on March 22, the bombers reappeared, the warships began a barrage and the Imperial Army attacked. The lull was over.

Whole areas of Bataan were leveled and the field hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. Now most of the nurses worked from daybreak till dark, stacking patients on triple-tiered bamboo bunks in the wards. When these ran short, a blanket on the jungle floor became a man’s hospital bed. One evening Sally Blaine happened to look around
her ward and, as if for the first time, noticed that there were patients lying everywhere, so many it reminded her of the railway panorama in
Gone With the Wind
, thousands of sick and bleeding men spread out on the ground in the jungle as far as the eye could see.

Supplies were critically short. An average ward of three hundred patients shared six medicine glasses, fifteen thermometers and a single teaspoon. The nurses were so busy they changed only the most bloody and foul of dressings. They stopped taking routine temperatures. A man literally had to shake with fever to draw their attention and treatment. In the operating room, nurse-anesthetists administered only minimal amounts of anesthetics and muscle relaxants, trying to husband their ether until the very last moment before the surgeon lowered his scalpel.

By late March, Hospital #1 at Little Baguio had grown to 1,500 patients, Hospital #2 to more than 3,000. Caring for this huge population were 67 officers, 83 nurses, 250 enlisted men and 200 civilian employees. (The civilians came from refugee camps located just outside the hospital.)

The Bataan doctors and nurses pleaded with their commanders on Corregidor for help. The rainy season, just six weeks away, would bring with it a whole new set of illnesses, pneumonia among them. Doctors at Hospital #2 estimated that they would need five thousand beds to house everyone. How would they feed these people? Keep the drinking water safe? Collect and dispose of garbage?

Colonel Wibb Cooper, the chief medical officer, could only listen and sympathize. Along with the other commanders at the USAFFE headquarters in Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, he knew that attrition from hunger and disease would soon leave the allied fighting force defenseless.

In the admitting wards of the hospitals, men were arriving barefoot, dressed in rags and limping from foot drop, a classic sign of malnutrition. Even the youngest and most able were faltering. Their skin hung loosely from their bones, they had no muscle mass, their gums bled, their faces were puffy, their hands numb. The wounded wanted food, not treatment for their wounds. They surrendered their rifles and begged for something to eat.

On Thursday, March 26, as the assault continued and as his troops wasted away, General MacArthur, safely in Australia, received the Congressional Medal of Honor from the U.S. minister there. General Wainwright, learning of the news, radioed his congratulations from Corregidor,
even as the bombs were falling on top of him. He also reported on the desperate state of his supplies.

Surveying his losses and the mounting casualties, Wainwright was forced to order limited access to the Bataan field hospitals. Henceforth only men who could not get the necessary treatment at medical aid stations on the combat line, or those who needed long hospitalization and were unlikely to return to duty, would be allowed a hospital bed—or a spot on the jungle floor. The others would have to survive on first aid.

Skinny Wainwright and his staff knew well that soon the Japanese would wear them down. For all practical purposes, they had been abandoned by their country, their supreme commander fleeing to safety. They fought on, in part because there was still plenty of fight in them and because they simply had no choice.

“The Defenders of Bataan,” as the War Department called them in all its public communiqués, stood in sharp contrast to the “victims” of Pearl Harbor and the quick devastating defeat the country suffered that December Sunday. The ability of the Defenders “to hold the line” (another War Department phrase) against an overwhelming force was offered as an example of American valor. Wrote Hanson Baldwin of
The New York Times
,

These men of Bataan have done their country valiant service … service far greater than that which can be counted merely in military terms.… On Bataan they redeemed the American soul. There had been doubt: our men were soft, it had been said. It may have been so. But not on Bataan.… They found and they proved that courage does not die and that the American soldier need yield to no man.
¹³

B
Y NOW THE
nurses were as seasoned and weathered as any front-line trooper. They too had struggled to survive on less-than-survival rations. They too were tired and weary from a long day’s fight. They worked through fever and through chills, through the heat and the driving rain. Most of all, they had learned to live with death.

The battlefield philosopher John Glenn Gray has written that combatants often become so accustomed to death, they soon lose their fear of it: “As a consequence of temperament and experience, some soldiers can learn to regard death as an anticipated experience among other experiences, something they plan to accept when the time comes for what it is.”
¹⁴

The surgical staffs began witnessing ghastly sights. Outside their tents were piles of shrapnel removed from bodies. Anesthetists, now without nitrous oxide, sodium Pentothal or curare, were putting men to sleep with ether, a drug that filled the operating room with an eerily sweet odor. Toward the end of one long workday, a surgeon was removing shrapnel from a belly wound when an eight-inch worm crawled from the patient’s stomach. Some on the surgical team thought it was going to hiss.

At the end of March quartermasters shot the last cavalry horse, and the troops began to forage along their own lines. At Hospital #2, a monkey adopted by a number of people as a pet—Tojo, they called him, after the notorious Japanese militarist—mysteriously disappeared and everyone suspected he’d become someone’s dinner. Food was so much on everyone’s mind, the chief nurses at both hospitals gathered their staffs to discuss the situation. With bombers constantly overhead, they explained, no supplies could get through. “We’ve got to make what we have last,” Edith Shacklette told her nurses at Hospital #1. “If necessary we’ll have one meal every two days. I know you won’t complain.”
¹⁵
At Hospital #2 Josie Nesbit said simply, “Look, all of us are starving.”
¹⁶

The night shift no longer got sandwiches and tea when it reported for work, so Eleanor Garen and a friend who shared night duty began to save crusts from their breakfast bread. Each night they arranged to take their work breaks together so they could toast their crusts over a small fire built in a hollow. Nothing, Garen thought, exposed the false glory of war more than a stale crust of bread.

No one talked about a relief convoy anymore. Optimists became realists, realists pessimists. “I put my cards on the table,” Cassie said. “We were losing on Bataan. There was no convoy. We were indeed expendable. You’d have to be pretty dumb not to know that this was it, buddy.”
¹⁷

One day when flak started flying through the trees, Sally Blaine threw herself on the ground. When she looked up at the bed nearest her, she saw a sergeant who had earlier lost both his legs. I’m a coward to protect myself and not him, she thought, and thereafter when among her charges she never again took cover.
¹⁸

The battle reminded Ruth Straub of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness “because by that time I had been in the jungle for more than 40 days.”

[Straub Diary, March 23]
Japs active again today. Formation of nine planes flew back and forth about eight times. With planes overhead
and shrapnel flying with such terrible force, there comes a fright I cannot express in words.…

[March 27]
Patients are being admitted in droves, all medical cases. Had to clear another section of the jungle for beds. Casualties of the day’s bombing are still coming in, and the operating room staff has been called back to work.

[March 29, Palm Sunday]
Radio Tokio [
sic
] announced that the relief convoy was sighted and several boats sunk. More propaganda … Many of the girls have taken to their beds.

[March 30]
Many good rumors today: Radio Tokyo announced 27 ships of our 80 ship convoy had been sunk. Perhaps our convoy really is on its way.… Hit one Jap Plane. Shouts of cheer. Pathetic, isn’t it, to cheer another’s tragedy and death?
¹⁹

Some of the nurses found solace in religion. They carried their Bibles to work and on breaks read and re-read their favorite passages. At the chapel at Hospital #2 a group of staff calling itself the Church of All Faiths gathered for services.

No one talked much about their families anymore. Some people wrote letters but now nothing was getting through the blockade. On her twenty-sixth birthday, Leona Gastinger walked down to the creek to cool off while she jotted a note to her mother but she ended up just sitting at water’s edge, sobbing instead.

Sometimes the gloom would break. A new joke might make the rounds, or someone would remember a funny song. One evening a pilot returning from a rare supply flight to the southern Philippine Islands delivered a belated Christmas package to Edith Shacklette at Hospital #1. News of the parcel spread quickly, and a crowd gathered to watch Shack tear off the wrapping. What was inside? they asked one another. Cookies, perhaps? Canned peaches? Shack opened the box. On top were layers of tissue paper. Slowly she peeled back the layers. People were on their tiptoes trying to see. And all at once the whispers gave way to a roar of laughter, for there in the bottom of the box was … a straw bonnet, an absurd black straw bonnet with a veil. Shack just smiled. She carefully
removed the hat from the box, twirled it on her finger, and, with a great show of vanity, set it very carefully upon her head, then the five-foot four-inch blonde in soiled coveralls and heavy army boots vamped around the compound as her comrades howled with delight.