Elizabeth M. Norman (15 page)

The bonnet reminded the nurses that Easter was only a few weeks away and Imogene “Jeanne” Kennedy of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Helen Summers of Queens, New York, sat down to write some new lyrics to the “Easter Parade.”

This year’s Easter bonnet
Is an army helmet—darn it!
With olive paint and chin straps
They won’t give us the eye

With all the dust upon it
We surely hate to don it
But we won’t be self-conscious
At the Easter Parade
²⁰

o
N
M
ONDAY
, M
ARCH 30
, the staff at Hospital #1 in Little Baguio were busy caring for their patients when Japanese pilots took direct aim at them and let go their bombs.

The whiz of the falling bombs sounded exactly like the sharp, high-pitched grind of axles and gears made by trucks that climbed the steep, zigzag road on the hill behind the hospital, and so the doctors and nurses showed no alarm. Then the incendiary and high-explosive missiles found their target.

Most of the bombs landed just outside the hospital, spraying the wards with shrapnel and destroying the officers quarters and mess hall, the headquarters tent and the main operating room. Twenty-three people were killed and seventy-eight injured, most of them Filipino workers. American commanders, Colonel Duckworth among them, were convinced the bombings were accidental, a mistake by green Japanese pilots.
²¹
But the violation of such a neutral site infuriated almost everyone, including General Wainwright:

It was so shocking it made one cry with rage and want to wade in and simply throw fists at the perpetrators. The smooth-voiced Japanese announcer who came on the Manila radio on March
31 to say that the raid was “unintentional” added no balm to the dead and the rewounded.
²²

A week later, however, the bombers returned to the same spot and, unintentional or not, this time their deadly payloads fell directly on the large red cross in the yard.

Nurse Juanita Redmond, a young beauty from Swansea, South Carolina, could barely contain her terror:

This time they scored a direct hit on the wards. A thousand-pound bomb pulverized the bamboo sheds, smashed the tin roofs into flying pieces; iron beds doubled and broke jaggedly like paper matches. Sergeant May had pulled me under a desk, but the desk was blown in the air, he and I with it
.

I heard myself gasping. My eyes were being gouged out of their sockets, my whole body was swollen and torn apart by the violent pressure. This is the end, I thought
.

Then I fell back to the floor, the desk landing on top of me and bouncing around drunkenly. Sergeant May knocked it away from me, and gasping for breath, bruised and aching, sick from swallowing the smoke of the explosive, I dragged myself to my feet. I heard Freeman, a boy with no legs, calling out: “Where’s Miss Redmond? Is Miss Redmond alive?”

Father Cummins said calmly: “Somebody take over. I’m wounded.” He had shrapnel in his shoulder
.

Only one small section of my ward remained standing. Part of the roof had been blown into the jungle. There were mangled bodies under the ruins; a blood-stained hand stuck up through a pile of scrap; arms and legs had been ripped off and flung among the rubbish. Some of the mangled torsos were almost impossible to identify. One of the few corpsmen who had survived unhurt climbed a tree to bring down a body blown into the top branches. Blankets, mattresses, pajama tops hung in the shattered trees
.

We worked wildly to get to the men who might be buried, still alive, under the mass of wreckage, tearing apart the smashed beds to reach the wounded and the dead.…

The bombing had stopped, but the air was rent by the awful screams of the new-wounded and the dying. Trees were still crashing in the jungle and when one nearby fell on the remaining segment of tin roof it sounded like shellfire.…

I saw Rosemary Hogan being helped from her ward. Blood streamed from her face and her shoulder; she looked ghastly
.

“Hogan,” I called, “Hogan, is it bad?”

She managed to wave her good arm at me. “Just a little nose bleed,” she said cheerfully.… “How about you?”

 … Then Rita Palmer [from Hampton, New Hampshire] was taken from her ward. Her face and arms had been cut and her skirt and G.I. shirt had been blown [open].…
²³

In fact, Rita Palmer had more than a few cuts. “I remember coming to and having long beams of the roof over me and struggling out from under those,” she said. “I have no idea how long I was knocked out. I could breathe all right, but one finger of one hand was incapacitated. I didn’t even know about the piece [of shrapnel] in my chest for several hours. It didn’t penetrate my lung. I had shrapnel in my legs too.”

Nearby Cassie, off duty, had taken cover by a tree near the nurses quarters: “A chunk of shrapnel came whistling by and took a hunk out of that tree. [Then she caught sight of Palmer.] I was relieved to see that she was alive, then I noticed her clothes and I thought it was funny to see her running around with her skirt hanging by the buttons.”

The ten bombs that fell on Hospital #1 killed seventy-three people instantly and injured 117 others, the three nurses among them.

By now the Japanese had broken through the front lines and were preparing for a final attack. Even though it was clear to everyone—including the War Department—that Wainwright and his emaciated garrisons could not defend themselves against another push, General MacArthur radioed from his offices in Australia, “There must be no thought of surrender.”
²⁴

[Straub Diary, April 7]
Our line had broken.… The 31st had been forced to retreat. How serious the situation is we do not know. Morale is very low tonight.

[April 8]
Heard a wonderful rumor a few minutes ago. Our convoy with three airplane carriers is 24 hours from here. Almost unbelievable, oh, how wonderful, if true!… This serial bombardment is wearing and nerve racking.… It is getting dark again and now we will sit under the trees and talk about what tomorrow will bring.
²⁵

Now the nurses focused on one task—keeping themselves and their patients alive. The women who worked in the admitting wards noticed that
in those last desperate days, the wounded came into the hospital wide-eyed with dread.

The women could hear the sound of small-arms fire nearby in the jungle. Meanwhile the enemy had captured Mount Samat in the middle of the peninsula. The Japanese were ready to drive south now, and Hospital #2, with its seven thousand sick, bleeding and mangled patients, was directly in the enemy’s path.

Major General Edward King, the senior American officer on Bataan, ordered all allied artillery pieces and ammunition destroyed, lest they fall into enemy hands. Then he sent one of his aides to Corregidor to meet with Wainwright. It was time, he told him, to think about the unthinkable.

Chapter 7

Bataan Falls: The Wounded
Are Left in Their Beds

T
HE
W
ORLD
W
AR
II militarists who ruled Japan had spent decades fashioning the Imperial Japanese Army into a swift, mobile and ruthless force that showed its true face to the world in the late fall and early winter of 1937 as it prepared to attack the city of Nanking. Tokyo’s marching orders were simple—take the Chinese city, kill every enemy soldier in it, loot any supplies necessary to sustain the troops during the winter and, by whatever means necessary, prevent the civilian population from mounting an insurgent movement behind Japanese lines.
¹

The battle for the city was over in less than forty-eight hours. Then the real bloodshed began. Japanese troops looted homes, burned villages and rounded up groups of men—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred at a time; old men, young men, boys, it did not matter—and, point-blank, executed them. After that the soldiers of the Rising Sun went house to house, neighborhood by neighborhood, seeking out women and, in an almost methodical way, raped every one of them.

All of this was witnessed by a number of foreign observers: “One poor woman was raped seven times,” wrote the American director of the Nanking Refugee Committee. “Another had her five month infant deliberately smothered by the brute to stop its crying while he abused her. Resistance means the bayonet.”
²

Thousands of men, women and children were shot, stabbed, raped, beheaded, disemboweled, mutilated, burned alive, buried alive, hung, castrated and beaten to death. This orgy of blood, this highly organized and officially sanctioned slaughter, became known around the world as the “Rape of Nanking.”

Now elements of this same army were poised to savage Bataan, and their reputation for brutality, pitiless lust and torture preceded them.

To the Japanese soldier such savagery was an almost sacred rite, a part of the code of Bushido, the ancient credo of the samurai. In its pure and early form, Bushido called for compassion and generosity toward one’s enemy, but the rabid militarists who took over Japan twisted and perverted their history and inculcated in their soldiers a contempt for the defeated and a hate for other races, the white race included. The Japanese soldier obeyed no moral authority other than the emperor and the army. He listened to no inner voice of restraint. When he was ordered to scorch the earth or subdue the civilian population, he fixed his bayonet and took and did what he wanted. If he failed in his duties, he was slapped by his officers or beaten by his sergeants, brutalized so that he might learn brutality’s way. He was expected to prove his manhood during battle and after. “Rape in particular, for which the Japanese army was notorious, had much to do with boasts, challenges and competitive virility in a male subculture” that looked on women as chattel.
³

In 1942, few Americans on Bataan understood the cultural or historic origins of this wantonness, but they knew the facts of 1937, the official reports, the newspaper stories. Nanking had been a shambles, a knacker’s yard, gruesome and depraved, and the cries and screams of its men, women and children sounded deep in the American imagination.

o
N THE MORNING
of April 7, General Wainwright cabled Washington, “The Japanese have thrown fresh reserves into the fight.… Heavy losses have been sustained by our forces and by the enemy.” He also mentioned the bombings at Hospital #1, concluding, they were “intentional.”
⁴
Late that afternoon an aide to General King, the commander of ground forces on Bataan, made his way to Corregidor to meet with Wainwright.

“General,” the aide said, “General King has sent me here to tell you he might have to surrender.”
⁵

Wainwright, of course, knew King’s situation well, even agreed with him, but on his desk lay MacArthur’s message—“When the supply situation becomes impossible there must be no thought of surrender. You must attack”—and that is what he ordered King to do.
⁶

That evening in another communiqué to Washington, Wainwright reported, “The present Japanese attack is the longest sustained drive of
the enemy.… Waves of shock troops have attacked almost continuously, without regard to casualties.”
⁷

The next morning, convinced that King could not hold his ground, Wainwright ordered three battalions of infantry on Bataan—some three thousand men—transferred to the island of Corregidor for what surely was to be his last stand. He also issued orders to the medical corps: the American nurses were to be evacuated as well, immediately.
⁸

In a military light, the order transferring the nurses to the relative safety of Malinta Tunnel was simply part of Wainwright’s final maneuver; surely the defense of the island would create mass casualties and the nurses would be needed to treat them. But it seems equally clear that Wainwright was reflecting the ethos of his age, the feeling of men that the “fair sex,” as the eighteenth-century English journalist Richard Steele first labeled women, was weaker, more vulnerable than men and needed to be protected, preserved, shielded from harm’s way. Honor left Wainwright, the old horse soldier, no other course.

For their part, most of the women were appalled by the order and many considered disobeying it. Their code, the Nightingale Pledge, a credo of care, demanded that they stay with their patients. A man’s notion of honor was driven by ego, a woman’s by an inviolable sense of self built on the sentiment of sacrifice. Real courage required that they think first of their patients, not of themselves. What’s more, they did not want to leave their comrades, the doctors and corpsmen who had stood with them under fire; if the men on Bataan were going to surrender and face the enemy, so should the nurses. “We knew what we had to do—take care of these guys,” said Cassie. “And we were willing to do anything we had to do, to do it.”
⁹