Read Elizabeth M. Norman Online

Authors: We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan

Tags: #World War II, #Social Science, #General, #Military, #Women's Studies, #History

Elizabeth M. Norman (51 page)

8.
Ibid
.

9.
Williams, D., p. 6.

10.
This menu with an accompanying poem was given to the military nurses working at Annex G, the Holy Ghost Convent and College at East Mendiola Street. Used with permission, Red Harrington Nelson.

11.
Nesbit, J., p. 47. American nurses serving on Guam, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the Philippine Islands had been under fire since early December 1941 but the Philippine group was the first in the war to travel and set up hospitals in a combat area.

12.
Ullom, p. 32.

13.
Nesbit, p. 15.

In Josie Nesbit’s 1945 unpublished report, she gives no hint of a deliberate plan to abandon the navy nurses. She never even mentions the navy group when she reports the details of the army nurses’ evacuation from Manila, pp. 16–19.

In his 1946 official report, Colonel Wibb Cooper wrote, “The [navy] medical and nursing staff were merged with the Sternberg staff and assigned to appropriate duties” (p. 50). He does not say why the navy nurses and doctors were left behind.

14.
As recollected in Red Harrington Nelson’s 1989 author interview.

15.
Information about Red Harrington Nelson from a 1983 ANC interview, 1989 author interview, Sharon Eifried interviews 1990–91. Although Harrington Nelson is a former navy nurse, she participated in the Army Nurse Corps Oral History Program. Also see Rudin, E., pp. 15–20.

16.
“Army, Navy leave City,” p. 1.

17.
“Messages on Philippines,” p. 1.

18.
Mary Rose Harrington Nelson, 1989 author interview.

19.
Wartime translations of seized Japanese documents
. File 10-R-744.

20.
“Missing in action,” p. 183.

Chapter Three: Jungle Hospital #1

1.
Whitman, J., p. 11.

2.
Ibid
.

3.
Estimates of the numbers of refugees on Bataan vary from fourteen thousand to thirty thousand people. This estimate from the
Quartermaster Diary on Corregidor
,
8 December 1941 to 12 March 1942
. The kilometer posts used on Bataan measured the distances from Manila.

4.
Gastinger quoted in Knox, D., p. 35.

5.
Scholl, D., Section C, C1; 3.

6.
Helen Cassiani Nestor, 1990 author interview.

7.
Duckworth, James, p. 9.

8.
Second Lieutenant Alexander Nininger Jr. became the first World War II Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his actions during this battle.
Newsweek, 19
, 22, Feb 9, 1942.

9.
The Trendelenberg Position, as this angle was called, was the standard treatment for hemorrhagic shock. Researchers later discovered this position increased pressure on the brain and diaphragm and recommended it not be used in anyone suspected of head and chest injury.

10.
Weinstein, A., pp. 20–21. Dr. Weinstein was a surgeon with Hospital #1.

11.
Helen Cassiani (no date). Handwritten notes written during the war. Used with permission.

12.
“By command of General MacArthur: Carl H. Seals, Colonel, A.G.D., Adjutant General” was written under MacArthur’s name. From Seals, C. H.

13.
Beck, pp. 61–62.

14.
Beck, pp. 71–72.

Chapter Four: The Sick, the Wounded, the Work of War

1.
Sally Blaine Millett, 1990 author interview.

2.
H. C. Michie, Commander, Medical Corps. Hospital Memorandum #16, dated March 16, 1961, Camp Livingston, Louisiana. Garen files.

3.
Sally Blaine Millett, 1990 author interview; Clara Mae Bickford wrote her recollections about the first days on Bataan in Shacklette Haynes’s diary, p. 7. Used with permission.

4.
Unit History and Personnel Rosters of General Hospital No. 2, December 41 to June 42
. Author and date unknown, p. 2.

5.
Sally Blaine Millett, 1990 author interview.

6.
Mr. Calimbas, a local banana and coconut farmer who was loyal to the Americans, put together the carpentry crew.

7.
Sally Blaine Millett, 1990 author interview.

8.
When numbering the wards, the staff skipped the number thirteen.

9.
Unusual incidents at Hospital #2
, p. 1. From the command details and comments about the setting up of the facility, Major Jack Schwartz MC, who arrived with the first group from Sternberg on December 27 and who kept a roster of American nurses, officers and Philippine Army officers at Hospital #2 (RG 407, Box #4), was likely the author of this file.

10.
Josie Nesbit Davis, 1983 ANC interview.

11.
Josie Nesbit Davis, 1983 correspondence with Miss Dorothy Starbuck, Veterans Administration. Used with permission of Miss Starbuck.

12.
Biographical information on Josie Nesbit from a letter she wrote to a Colonel
Nichols dated February 21, 1980. In 1993, this letter was uncataloged at the Center for Military History, Washington, D.C.

13.
Josie Nesbit Davis, 1983 letter to Dorothy Starbuck.

14.
The
Unit History
lists two different census numbers for late January. On page 12, the number given for January 25 is 2,160 patients. On page 19, for January 24 the census was reported as 1,205. The author used the higher number because Josie Nesbit’s 1945 manuscript lists 2,000 patients in the hospital on February 6, 1942, p. 26.

15.
Twenty-two American dentists, doctors and medical administrators came to Hospital #2 in January 1942. Seventeen Filipino doctors and one dentist also served at the hospital but the dates of their arrival are not known,
Unit History
, pp. 56–57. A total of 250 American enlisted men also served at Hospital #2. Their arrival and departure dates are unknown,
Unit History
, p. 19.

16.
In 1940, Jimmie Davis composed “You Are My Sunshine.”

17.
Unit History of Hospital #2
, p. 26.

Chapter Five: Waiting for the Help That Never Came

1.
Harrison, G., p. 10.

2.
Cooper, p. 35.

3.
Nesbit, p. 28.

4.
Bumgarner, J., p. 69.

5.
Cooper, p. 35.

6.
Cooper, p. 84.

7.
Mr. Hewlett’s poem is published in many primary and secondary sources. This version is from Wainwright, p. 54.

8.
Redmond, p. 101; Williams, p. 61.

Although the women were later called the “Angels of Bataan,” a literature search revealed that the term did not appear in print until 1945. Several of the women told the author they remembered General Wainwright and other men calling them “angels” on Bataan.

9.
Bacillus Welchii
is an obsolete term that was used during World War II to describe the gas gangrene bacteria. The causative agent is
Clostridium perfringens
, a member of the
Clostridium Bacillaceae
family. McCance, K., and Huether, S., p. 72.

10.
Redmond, p. 56.

11.
The surgeon who developed the new treatment for gas gangrene was Colonel Frank Adamo. “Jungle hospital,” p. 58.

12.
Ibid
.

13.
Ibid
.

14.
“Nurse on Corregidor finds it ‘not too bad,’ ” p. 3.

15.
Ruth Straub (September 23, 1942), p. 1; 5.

16.
Nesbit, p. 29.

17.
Redmond, p. 56.

18.
“Jungle Journal,” February 25, 1942. Miss Catherine Nau, Managing Editor. Army Nurse Corps Archives, Center for Military History, Washington, D.C. Uncataloged mimeographed file.

19.
The first U.S. convoy of troops arrived in Northern Ireland on January 26, 1942. Army nurse Leona Gastinger Sutphin was quoted in D. Knox, “Everybody felt worst when we heard on the radio that a convoy of our troops had gone to Ireland instead of coming to us” (p. 86). Another army nurse supports this claim, but why government censors allowed this information to be broadcast is a puzzle.

20.
Helen Cassiani Nestor, 1990 author interview.

21.
Ibid
.

22.
Redmond, p. 79.

23.
Weinstein, p. 30.

24.
Engel, D. Davis, pp. 26–27; 112–16. In an October 1997 telephone interview, Dorothea Engel said that Lieutenant Emmanuel “Boots” Engel Jr. was captured by the Japanese and spent almost three years as a POW in the Philippines. He died in late 1944 on an enemy transport ship that was heading toward Japan when it was mistakenly sunk by an American submarine. According to Mrs. Engel, seven Americans survived the sinking to tell this story and list some of the dead POW’s. Dorothea Engel never remarried. At the war’s end in 1945, she “kept searching the newspapers for lists of survivors,” but did not see her husband’s name. “Gradually I came to see that he was never coming home,” she recalled. Mrs. Engel remained in the army until 1947, serving a tour in Germany with the occupation forces. She eventually settled in her Midwestern hometown and worked at various nursing positions until her retirement in 1987. In the fall of 1997, Mrs. Engel was eighty-one years old and living alone.

25.
Bumgarner, pp. 72–73.

26.
Army nurse Blanche Kimball wrote the slogan in Eleanor Garen’s spiral notebook titled “Nurses addresses, July 1942.” Garen files.

27.
From a handwritten, undated note Cassie wrote in Santo Tomas Internment Camp. Private collection. Used with permission.

28.
Helen Summers’s song was handwritten in Inez McDonald’s diary, located in the archives at the U.S. Army Medical Museum, Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas. McDonald’s diary had many pages ripped out; only songs, poetry and a few pages of dates remained in the back of the book.

29.
Ruth Straub (September 24, 1942), pp. 1; 7; and (September 25, 1942),
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, pp. 1; 9.

Chapter Six: “There Must Be No Thought of Surrender”

1.
Eleanor Garen personal communication, February 7, 1942. Eleanor most likely got her letter off Bataan in one of the few remaining planes that allied pilots flew to Cebú for supplies. Garen files.

2.
Eleanor Garen’s 1941 letters to her mother in the Garen files.

3.
Wartime translations of seized Japanese documents
, File 40-B-17.

4.
Quartermaster Diary on Corregidor, 8 December 1941 to 12 March 1942
, March 3, 1941, entry.

5.
“Battered Bataan,” p. 17; “Still holding,” p. 17; Bulosan, C, p. 20.

6.
Sutherland, R. Typed message to Bataan troops. National Archives, Philippine Archive Collection, Washington, D.C. RG 407, Box 10.

7.
Josie Nesbit Davis, 1983 ANC interview.

8.
“MacArthur in Australia,” p. 1.

9.
Ann Mealor Giles, 1983 ANC interview.

10.
The lyrics to “Dugout Doug” appear in many books including Karnow, p. 298, and Toland, p. 280.

11.
Wainwright, J. Typed message to Bataan troops. National Archives, Philippine Archive Collection, Washington, D.C., RG 407, Box 10.

12.
Carroll, G., p. 83.

13.
Baldwin, H. W., p. 5.

14.
Gray, J. Glenn, p. 122.

15.
Shacklette quoted in Redmond, p. 100.

16.
Josie Davis Nesbit, 1983 ANC interview.

17.
Helen Cassiani Nestor, 1990 author interview.

18.
Sally Blaine Millett, 1990 author interview.

19.
Ruth Straub (September 26, 1942), pp. 1; 4.

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