Ken Beaton
I was researching for facts and dates to write about the 82-day brutal battle to capture Okinawa from the Imperial Japanese Army. In 1945 Easter Sunday was April 1, no joke. It was also D-Day for the massive bloody battle for Okinawa.
To my surprise, a story about 11 U.S. Navy nurses stationed in the Philippine Islands. They became prisoners of the brutal Imperial Japanese Army for 37 months. Those 37 months made hell look like a surfing vacation.
I spent most of the first five years of my life as a Coast Guard brat traveling during World War II with mom in a Pullman Sleeper railroad car. We crisscrossed the states during the war to dad’s next assigned USCG cutter.
I must admit that I have a “soft spot” for a true heroic story about women who quietly performed their job while solving daily life and death decisions.
Lt. Cmdr. Laura M. Cobb was the supervisor over 10 Navy nurses and three civilian nurses: Mary Chapman, Maureen Davis, Bertha Evans, Helen Gorzelanski, Helen Grant, Margaret Nash, Mary Nelson (nee Harrington), Goldie O’Haver, Eldene Paige, Susie Pitcher, Basilla Stewart, Dorothy Still and Edwina Todd.
During the Great Depression jobs were scarce. Margaret Nash’s uncle was a congressman from Pennsylvania. He suggested that she join the Navy to use her nursing skills while serving her country.
Everything was well until September 1941. Margaret was stationed in Guam when she received orders. She was transferred to the Philippines. She had two hours to pack her belongings and board a Navy transport to the “PI.”
The rush orders to the PI were from President Roosevelt. He wanted to increase America’s fighting strength in the Philippines. Between August to December of 1941 the Navy’s transports delivered men, women and material supplies to the PI.
The winds of war were beginning to increase in velocity until the Imperial Japanese Army invaded on Dec. 8, 1941. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s pilots destroyed every USAAF fighter and bomber neatly parked on the ground.
The IJA moved rapidly with victory after victory rapidly capturing the PI. Before Dec. 8, 1941, the nurses were preparing for the Japanese invasion by practicing nightly blackouts. In anticipation of the invasion, they made and sterilized hundreds of dressings, stocked up on blankets, plasma, saline solution and suture materials at their hospital in Cafiacao.
The nurses never thought that they use all the supplies treating our wounded. Because of the International Dateline plus five time zones, Gen. Mac Arthur learned of the attack at Pearl Harbor a little after 3 a.m. on Dec. 8, 1941, in the PI.
Unfortunately, he did not make any decisions for several hours. By the time he ordered the bombers and fighter to takeoff, they were being destroyed on the ground, not in the air, America’s worst defeat!
The nurses learned that they were under Japanese jurisdiction in Manila when they watched from the third-floor tower of Santa Scholastica as the Japanese troops led by Gen. Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander-in-chief of the Philippines, marched.
He issued the statement, “Offering resistance or committing hostile acts against the Japanese forces in any manner will lead the whole Philippines to ashes.”
It was the first week of January 1942, the nurses received the first occupation Japanese officers. “They didn’t believe we had patients, and we had to take the dressings off the patients to show the wounds.” Softly, the Japanese officers departed, leaving an armed guard behind, “to watch our every move,” Nash recalled.
During the early stages of occupation, civilian internees was measured. On Jan. 3, 1942, Homma ordered all civilians to sever their relations with the U.S. and obey and cooperate with the Japanese army.
This was enforced by the fear of being on the end of a Samari sword beheading! Yes, there were beheadings of Americans!
It took the Japanese two and a half months to break up the hospital and transfer the patients and staff to other prisons. The Japanese assigned the nurses as civilians and assigned them to the campus of Santa Tomas University, Manila’s prison camp for enemy nationals. There were Americans, Australian, British, Dutch, French, New Zealander, Norwegian, and Polish totaling 4,000 in Santa Tomas.
For the first half of the war between the U.S. and Japan, there were two Japanese prison systems. Enemy national prisons were run by the Japanese Department of External Affairs. The Imperial Japanese Army ran the prisons for P.O.W.s.
The 11 Navy nurses were at the Santa Tomas campus from March 1942 to May 1943 with Charles Leach. The Navy nurses approached Leach about gaining the support of other medical professionals there to form a makeshift hospital.
With the addition of several dozen U.S. Army nurses, the hospital began having patients in four months. Three thousand eight hundred civilian prisoners in a confined space.
A fourth of the prisoners were minors with another fourth of the population seniors, 60 years and older. Diseases spread rapidly in half the prison population. Just about every child internee had either measles or whooping cough with some having both.
Santa Tomas had an internee government of mostly male prisoners who represented the prison population with the prison authorities. The prisoners regulated accommodations, labor, supplies, behavior and entertainment in the prison.
Above everything, they never forgot that they were in a Japanese prison. Food at the prison was limited and poor quality. New prisoners at Santa Tomas were informed not to try to pick the bugs out of their meager potion of rice. “Just consider the bugs as protein.”
Everyone slept on hejucos, woven slatted cots with a generous helping of bed bugs. With groups of prisoners showering under one shower head, you lost your modesty. One solution was to shut your eyes while taking your turn under the single showerhead.
By 1943 American submarines were having torpedo practice with the Japanese merchant fleet as part of the “starving of Japan” strategy. Food soon became in shorter supply. Unfortunately, the Japanese and their prisoners suffered from the lack of food.
On May 14, 1943, the 11 nurses were trucked 40 miles of rural road to Los Banos, a former agricultural college in a rain forest. There was a hospital, but it was in disrepair.
With the help of prisoners with construction or manufacturing training, they built a 25-bed hospital with sheets of corrugated metal made into emesis basins and old cans became bedpans.
In spite of having bed bugs, not enough caloric intake and being thousands of miles from home, the 14 nurses’ main concern was for their patients. Each day between May 14,1943 and Feb. 23, 1945, must have seemed like an eternity.
On the 23rd, U.S. Army Airborne troops parachuted to Los Banos. The paratroopers and Allied troops liberated the nurses and patients. Finally, on March 10, 1945, the nurses’ landed in San Francisco to attend a banquet, but they couldn’t digest the food.
It took months before they could eat normal food and not regurgitate it. The 3-day-old girl that Lt. Margaret Nash carried off the beach to an amtrac while dodging bullets on Feb. 23, 1945, grew up to become a medical doctor.
She married and had two children. That baby girl had her 80th birthday six weeks ago. There’s hope for the world, with a happy ending.