Elizabeth M. Norman (3 page)

Some slipped off alone to their rooms while others rushed to a bank to cable money home. Two women, apparently resigned to whatever fate was going to bring, shrugged their shoulders and strolled over to the Army and Navy Club to go bowling.

At Fort Mills Hospital on the island fortress of Corregidor, Eleanor Garen and the rest of the night-shift nurses headed for the post restaurant for a cup of coffee or a glass of Coke. Their custom was to sit and relax after work, but on this particular morning they were chatty and impatient. Would war come to the Philippines? they wondered.

The news so concerned Eleanor that she took out a pencil and slip of paper and started a shopping list—supplies she considered important in case of an emergency: Noxema face cream, tooth powder, a comb, bath
towel, shampoo, Kleenex, chocolate candy and another pair of lieutenant’s bars.

At Fort McKinley Hospital just outside Manila, the day-shift nurses, doctors and medical staff were issued steel helmets and gas masks. Two women coming off the night shift stuffed their helmets and masks in their golf bags and headed for the links.

None of the nurses knew it, of course, but the war was already on its way to them.

T
WO HUNDRED MILES
north of the capital, in the cool mountain air of Baguio, Ruby Bradley, a thirty-four-year-old career army nurse on duty at Camp John Hay Hospital, was busy sterilizing the instruments she would need for her first case, a routine hysterectomy.

All at once a soldier appeared at the door and summoned her to headquarters. No surgery that morning, she was told; the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor, the high command was convinced the Philippine Islands would be next, and Baguio, the most important military and commercial center in northern Luzon Province, might be one of the enemy’s first targets.

Bradley stood there stunned, almost unable to move. What did it mean? she asked herself. Was the hospital truly in danger? Surely the Japanese would not waste their ordnance on such an up-country post. She reported to the surgeon’s office for further instruction.

Then the bombs began to fall.

The first hit so close the explosion left their ears ringing. Nurse and doctor ran to the window. Airplanes with big red circles on their wings and fuselage were coming in low, so low Bradley was sure she could see the pilots staring down at her. By instinct she glanced at her watch—it was 8:19
A.M
., December 8, 1941. Scuttlebutt was now substance; war had come to the Philippines.

A few minutes later the first casualties started to crowd the wards and hallways at John Hay Hospital. A civilian dependent named Susan Dudley and her year-old son had been out walking and were severely wounded in the attack. A Filipino passerby snatched up the wounded boy and rushed him to the receiving room. Bradley could see that the child was in bad shape; his face was blue—clearly something was wrong with his heart—and his kneecap seemed to be shattered. Bradley felt herself starting to flinch. She was a sturdy and experienced clinician, but
even years of practice had not prepared her for something like this. Her heart raced, her stomach started to tighten.

The doctor on duty tried giving the boy oxygen, then he and Bradley took turns at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but nothing worked, and it was clear that the child was slipping away.

Leave him, the doctor ordered. The wounded were beginning to mount, he said, and they had no time to linger over a dying child.

Bradley balked. “How about a stimulant in the heart?” she said, imploring him.

The doctor thought for a moment; it was probably hopeless, he said, but if Bradley wanted to try it, she should do it herself.

The needle was six inches long; if she plunged it into the wrong place in the baby’s heart she would instantly kill him. Meanwhile the boy was turning a deeper shade of blue, and the nurse, watching him wane, was growing angry and afraid. Then, looking around the room, she hit on an idea. In the medicine cabinet she spotted a bottle of whiskey and, remembering that liquor was sometimes effective as a heart stimulant, she took a piece of gauze, laced it with some sugar, soaked it in whiskey, and stuck it in the boy’s mouth. At first the baby did nothing. Then, slowly, he started to suck, harder, and harder, until, at last, blue gave way to white, white to pink, pink to crying.

“Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” his mother yelled from her bloody gurney. Bomb fragments had shattered the woman’s legs and she faced certain amputation.

“You hear him in there yelling?” said the nurse, bending over her. “Well, he’s … he’s all right now.”
⁵

A
FTER
B
AGUIO, THE
Japanese attacked their primary target, Clark Air Field and Fort Stotsenberg, the main base of the Army Air Corps in the western Pacific. There on the runway sat scores of American fighters and bombers, lined up wingtip to wingtip, fully armed, unmanned, a perfect target.

The Japanese pilots probably could not believe their luck. They had approached cautiously from the South China Sea at 25,000 feet, hoping to elude radar and observers on the ground. The Japanese high command had been convinced that the Americans at Clark Field, having heard the news of Pearl Harbor, would be waiting to repel them, but through a series of communication and command blunders, American air chiefs and MacArthur’s staff had left their airplanes like so many sitting
ducks for the Zeros Mitsubishis now coming in from the sea.
⁶
In fact, as the enemy approached, almost everyone at Clark Field was enjoying Monday lunch.

At 12:35
P.M
. a tight group of twenty-seven Japanese aircraft making a low moaning sound appeared suddenly from the Zambales Mountains and startled the Americans at their noon repast. American pilots scrambled to their planes, but it was too late—the bombs were already falling. And the ground shook from the shock of the attack.

Some of the startled soldiers and airmen took potshots at the attackers with Springfield rifles, antiquated firearms from an earlier war. In a matter of minutes the diving, screaming attackers reduced the squadrons of planes at Clark to seven aircraft, seven.

A second wave of twenty-six Zeros followed, machine-gunning the field. By 1:37
P.M
. the raid was over, and the once beautiful and tranquil Fort Stotsenberg and Clark Field were littered with shrapnel and thousands of pieces of mangled, twisted and burning aircraft. The oil dump was ablaze. The enlisted men’s barracks, officers quarters, aircraft hangars and machine shops were leveled. A flash fire was raging in the tall grass around the perimeter. And everywhere, everywhere, lay the wounded, and the dead.

Off-duty nurses sprinted to the hospital and found themselves almost overwhelmed by the slaughter. Some of the women filled large syringes with morphine dissolved in sterile water, then walked among the wounded administering injections to kill the pain and quiet the screaming. Others performed triage, literally deciding who might live and who might die, a practice they had read about in their textbooks but never imagined they would have to employ.

Many of the wounded had dived head first into holes and ditches and were lying facedown during the raids, and the concussions from the bombs and strafing runs had blown dirt and cinders into their faces, lacerating their eyes. Using bath towels soaked in cool water, the women tried to wipe the debris from the faces of the blind.

By mid-afternoon, three hours after the raid ended, the doctors and nurses at Fort Stotsenberg were so overwhelmed with work, they put in an urgent call to Sternberg Hospital in Manila. Send help, they pleaded. Send it now!

E
ARLY ON THE
morning of December 8, army nurse Helen Cassiani, “Cassie” to her friends, reported for her regular shift at the ear, nose and
throat clinic at Sternberg Hospital in Manila. At twenty-four she was pretty and bright, with dark, curly hair down to her neck, a round face and an inviting smile. She had been in paradise only some six weeks, but already she was taken with the place—the exotic trips, the spectacular landscape, the impassioned encounters. Now suddenly “public events and private lives had become inseparable,”
⁷
crowding out a future she had been planning for a long time.

When word of the bombings at Baguio, Stotsenberg and Clark reached Manila, the nurses at Sternberg Hospital began to wonder whether the capital would be next. And now someone came through the wards spreading word that an invasion force had been spotted; General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army was streaming toward the Philippines to launch a ground attack.

Headquarters tried to reassure everyone that Manila was safe, but the assurances sounded empty, and Cassie, a bit stunned by the turn of events and somewhat bitter that her tour in paradise was about to turn into an exercise in anxiety and distress, went about her tasks like an automaton, shifting without thinking from one little job to the next. Soon her feet began to hurt and she got a helluva headache.

At 2:00
P.M
. the thirty-five doctors and thirty-seven nurses at Sternberg were ordered to a meeting with their commanding officer, Colonel Percy Carroll. Aides passed out gas masks and issued instructions on their use. The Japanese, the colonel explained, were known to use a variety of poison gases. Cassie, listening carefully, began to feel a little dizzy.

At that point an aide rushed into the room and summoned the colonel to a telephone. A few minutes later he returned; Cassie thought he looked pale and seemed to be struggling to maintain his self-control.

The commanding officer at Fort Stotsenberg had just called him, the colonel said. It seemed the attack there had been a disaster for the Americans, and the medical staff desperately needed more nurses, preferably women with surgical skills. The colonel said that he and Maude Davison had decided to send five army nurses from Sternberg and fifteen Filipino nurses from local hospitals north to Stotsenberg. Were there any volunteers?

The room was quiet. All at once, a nurse whose fiancé was stationed at Clark Air Field raised her hand. Then came another, and another, and one more after that. Davison waited; she needed a fifth. Who would it be? Cassie looked around the room, studying the faces of her colleagues. She wanted to go, wanted to be part of what was unfolding, this great
historical convulsion. But she was afraid. Then, as if acting on its own, her hand went up, and before she had time to think, she was collecting her helmet and gas mask and heading toward a bus that would take her to war.

S
HE WAS, AT
heart, a farm girl, and like many farm girls, she had a capacity for hard work and a curiosity about the ways of the world.

Her parents, Sarah, a diminutive woman, and Peter, well over six feet, had left their Tuscany village as newlyweds and arrived in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with plans to build a new life. Peter Cassiani worked in a foundry at first, then saved enough money to buy a five-acre chicken farm at 54 High Street, a plot of ground surrounded by two-story houses filled with Irish immigrants. The Irish, of course, resented the newcomers—“the wops on High Street,” the neighborhood called the Cassianis—but as Peter and Sarah began to have children, and as those four children exposed the family to the neighborhood and brought the ways of the new world into the family’s house, the Italian Cassianis and their Irish neighbors made peace.
⁸

Born on January 26, 1917, Helen, or “Eleana,” as her mother liked to call her, was an outgoing girl with dark brown hair, deep brown eyes and an easy laugh. As the youngest of the four, she had the benefit of her siblings’ experience and the gift of their attention. Her older sister, Rose, for example, once bought Cassie a doll with money Rose earned selling soap bars door to door, and one of her brothers, Louis, a minor-league shortstop, taught her to play baseball and gave her a lifelong love of the game.

When her siblings were grown and gone, Cassie spent part of each day helping her father with the farm chores. She loved her father and flourished in his company. They built chicken coops together, repaired fences, fixed farm implements. “I learned the busy end of a hammer,” she said.

Her father was not an educated man but he tried to turn his farmyard into a kind of school for his daughter. To be a farmer, he taught her, was to learn to deal with the unpredictable and unexpected. A farmer, he said, had to know how to size up a problem and quickly find a solution. She listened closely and learned well; it was a skill that would later help her survive.

Cassie found pleasure in the hauling and hard labor and often used the work as an excuse to ignore her studies. She was smart enough, curious
too, but no one had ever taught her how to study, and, untutored as she was, school work was often overwhelming, and her lack of skill left her feeling embarrassed. Then one day two friends from the neighborhood sat her down in the library and showed her how to study. Soon she acquired the habit of reading—history, science, stories. Somewhere in all those books an idea took hold of her. “I became fascinated with illness and taking care of people,” she said. And after high school, with some money she had saved and a little help from her parents, she moved to Boston and entered the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital School of Nursing.

Then tragedy struck. Her father, in a freak accident, died of carbon monoxide poisoning and, concerned for her mother, she considered leaving school and returning to the farm. She wrote home often that semester, always in Italian, reassuring her mother that she would not forget the family or her roots.

After graduation Cassie joined the Red Cross. That winter, January 1941, the army, desperate for nurses, invoked a provision of the mandatory national military service law that allowed it to mobilize Red Cross professionals, and Helen Cassiani became a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant in the Army Reserves.