Elizabeth M. Norman (30 page)

The “shower smoker” became one of many running jokes among the nurses. And as their collective sense of humor returned, so did their collective sense of mischief. The Japanese had ordered the internees to bow to the guards, and when the nurses entered Santo Tomas they were given lessons in the proper obeisance. Now the women decided to have some fun.

“Usually when a group of internees passed a guard, they all bowed together and he bowed once in response,” said Eunice Young. “Well, we hit on the idea of having thirty nurses pass the guard at spaced intervals. Just as the guard finished one bow, another nurse would come along and
bow; two dozen bows in as many minutes and the guard usually took a walk. After that when the guards saw the nurses coming, they’d turn their backs so they didn’t have to bow to us.”
²⁴

As the months passed, many of the women, ignoring Josie Nesbit’s admonitions about men, began to wander about camp and mix with the other internees. “We were at an age where we pretty soon formed alliances with men,” said Alice Hahn. “We had friendships pretty much the same way we would in normal life, the normal boy-girl relationships, what you would expect. I met my husband in prison camp. He was a Pan American operations officer who had worked at Cavite Naval Yard.”
²⁵

Still, in close company or on their own, the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor struggled like everyone else in camp to get through the dislocation of another prison camp day.

“We lived in the past, completely in the past,” said Inez McDonald. “We told things that we did as a child. We’d talk and talk and tell the same stuff until finally someone would say, ‘Oh, shut up! You already told that six times.’

“You couldn’t look forward to anything,” she went on. “We’d tell ourselves, Oh [our troops will] be here by my birthday; they’ll be here by Christmas; they’ll be here by my next birthday. Then Christmas would come, then Easter, then Thanksgiving. But I never felt they wouldn’t come. I never felt that I wasn’t going home.”
²⁶

Chapter 13

Los Banos, 1943

O
N
T
HANKSGIVING
D
AY
in 1942 the Americans in STIC decided to create something of a traditional holiday feast. The Finance Committee had approved the purchase of turkeys, and camp cooks roasted the birds until they were a golden brown and gave everyone a little bit of meat. After the meal, hundreds sat around the athletic field near the main gate and cheered as the East and West football teams, made up of young men from across the camp, met in the first Talinum Bowl.
¹
Some of the nurses in the crowd wore red hibiscus in their hair as a kind of substitute for lipstick.

As Christmas 1942 approached, the women were busy scrounging and making gifts. One nurse sewed images of shanties and tropical flora on small pieces of linen—Santo Tomas cocktail napkins, she called them. Another, a whittler, roamed the campus for scrap wood to carve into crosses. Still others scrounged for toy blocks and clothespins and used them to fashion necklaces. Eleanor Garen cooked up jam from native limes. A few women got together to make rag dolls for the little girls in camp. When everything was done they gathered to label each gift with tags cut from old Christmas cards.

Commandant Tsurumi had no interest in promoting Christmas spirit, however, and, as his captives prepared for the holiday, he announced a paper shortage and suspended publication of the internee newspapers, first the
Internews
, which was later called the
STIC Gazette
, a bulletin of new regulations and changes in the camp government along with a calendar of social and sporting events, then he suspended the
Internitis
,
a literary magazine that sold for thirty centavos and carried mostly short fiction and cartoons. (The last issue featured a rendering of Santa Claus on a Philippine donkey, muttering to himself, “I’ll have a tough time making it this year.”)
²

The South African Red Cross sent in several truckloads of packages stamped
PRISONER PARCEL
. Shared by the internees, each package held cans of bacon, meat spread, margarine, condensed milk, tomatoes, marmalade, cheese pudding, soda, crackers, tea, sugar, a chocolate cake and a piece of soap.

Just before Christmas, a Filipino courier secretly delivered to the nurses a special gift from three army engineers who had gotten to know the women on Corregidor. The Japanese had been holding the men on the Rock to help them repair Malinta Tunnel. During this labor the engineers had come across small amounts of cash that desperate soldiers had stashed in the walls, and when their captors weren’t looking, the engineers secretly collected the booty, stuffed it into an envelope and arranged to have it smuggled into STIC. “It won’t do us any good here,” they wrote in a note to the nurses. “Maybe it will make your Christmas merrier.”
³

On Christmas Day the army nurses set up a long table behind their quarters. At each place they set a handwritten name card. The entrée was canned meat. During the meal Josie Nesbit reminded her colleagues that prisoners or no, they were better off this Christmas than last—when the Japanese were dropping bombs on them.

On New Year’s Eve, lights-out came at 10:30
P.M
. At midnight the nurses who had not yet drifted off heard a lone siren wail in the warm night, then from beyond the wall and across the barbed wire came the sound of a few, desultory firecrackers.

A week or so later the army nurses were told that the Executive Committee was moving them into Main Building and planned to turn their present quarters into a children’s hospital. Some of the women balked at the move. They were settled in, they said, and sent a letter to the Committee protesting the relocation and outlining their grievances. A few days later they were surprised, if not slightly embarrassed, when they realized that their new quarters were a step up from the old. Their four rooms on the second floor of the Main Building overlooked the plaza, and outside in the hall they were able to set up their own private dining area, an arrangement that allowed them to eat together and share their food. But the privacy and the extra few inches they gained in their new quarters came with a price: they now had to share a bathroom with
three hundred other women. Cotton curtains around the four toilets allowed them a few moments of solitude, but there was usually a long, long wait to use one of the five washbasins or, in groups of eight, to pass under one of the four dribbling shower heads.

Meanwhile the camp census was beginning to grow. In January 1943 Santo Tomas Internment Camp was “home” to 3,263 men, women and children.
⁴
By May 1 there were nearly 4,200 people in STIC and, fearing epidemics, riots and worse, the Japanese decided to set up a new internment camp at a relatively remote site not far from the town of Los Banos, roughly 42 miles, or 68 kilometers, southeast of Manila on the shores of Laguna de Bay. The commandant told the Executive Committee that he wanted a group of eight hundred male volunteers to establish the new camp and settle there. If the committee could not supply the names, the Japanese would come up with their own list.

In effect the mandate for such labor pulled from STIC the eight hundred most able-bodied men in camp, young men who had the skill and strength to set up a water and sanitation system, a kitchen, a hospital and general housing—in short, to build from scratch a new prison. While most of the younger, unattached men looked forward to a change of scenery, many others, husbands and boyfriends of the women in STIC, did not.

Among those on the list was Dr. Charles Leach, a physician from the Rockefeller Foundation who, in early December 1941, was on his way to Chungking, China. The outbreak of war stranded Leach in Manila and he was taken into custody when the Japanese entered the city. In early January he and a handful of civilian nurses set up a camp hospital; then, when the navy nurses arrived in March, he invited them to work with him, and soon the civilian doctor and the eleven women in blue became close. In July when the fifty-four army nurses arrived in camp, the Bluejackets worried they would lose their military identity. They were “Navy” and they had no intention of letting the army reign over them. (No doubt there was some lingering resentment from the first days of the war when, in the minds of the navy women, the Army Nurse Corps had fled to Bataan, abandoning the small navy contingent to the enemy.) Still they managed to get along with the army, even work together in the camp clinics, but when the navy women heard that Leach, their advocate and ally, was leaving for Los Banos, they again felt abandoned.

That night as Laura Cobb lay on her cot, her friend, Mary Rose “Red” Harrington, knelt beside her and whispered through the mosquito netting.

“Laura,” she said, “why don’t you volunteer us to go up country with Leach and the men?”
⁵

Cobb knew that her young redheaded friend had a point, and the two began to list the pros and cons of leaving Santo Tomas for the wilds of Los Banos. They liked the idea of a fresh start and of a smaller camp. They especially liked working with Leach. Most of all they wanted their own hospital again, wanted to do things the “navy way.” A few hours later Laura Cobb went downstairs to the offices of the Executive Committee and offered her navy unit for the new camp.

The next morning Red Harrington got up early, waiting for word that the Executive Committee had reached a decision. She badly wanted to go, to get out from under Davison and the army and away from the overcrowding. She waited and waited, but the morning passed without word. Perhaps something had happened, she thought. The Japanese were always reversing themselves. When the afternoon arrived, Harrington reported for ward duty. Around four o’clock, navy nurse Goldia O’Haver came through the door.

“You’re relieved of duty, Red,” she said, smiling broadly, as if something was up. “We’re moving in the morning. Go pack your stuff.”
⁶

When this word reached the army nurses, Maude Davison found herself with a crisis. Several of her younger charges had fallen in love with men who were being transferred to Los Banos, and now the women wanted to accompany their paramours to the new camp. As always, Davison was unswayable and flatly refused the requests. No matter what the cost, she told Josie Nesbit, she was going to keep her corps together.

In truth Maude Davison’s authority was empty, her power an illusion. Though no one ever tested or vetted her official position, the nurses at that point, by law, likely held the status of civilians; they were in a civilian internment camp, not a military prison, submitting to civilian rules and living under civilian oversight. Davison could insist on good order and military discipline all she liked; the young nurses were free, relatively speaking, to do as they pleased. And yet …

In the end they followed orders. They submitted to their captain because they had been raised and trained to respect authority, even when that authority no longer applied to them. What’s more, they were nurses, members of the community of healers, and honest healers always put the interests of their patients ahead of themselves. There were hundreds of sick internees in the hospital at Santo Tomas and barely enough nurses to treat them. Finally and above all, they were comrades, bound by a fidelity and love born of sacrifice and suffering. They had been bombed
together, escaped together, captured together. Now the Angels would wait together too, wait for deliverance.

On moving day, Friday, May 14, 1943, the entire camp awoke before dawn. The internees who were being transferred to Los Banos filled the plaza in front of Main Building with their luggage, pots and pans, folding chairs and large woven bags filled with clothing and linen. The Japanese guards, of course, poked through everything. After breakfast, the eight hundred men who were being transferred lined up for a roll call. The new Japanese commandant, A. Kodaki, wished everyone in the group good luck and good health, then twelve army trucks appeared and the internees loaded their gear and climbed aboard as the crowd on the plaza shouted and cheered and waved good-bye. Here and there in the throng, a number of young women stood sobbing.

The navy nurses climbed aboard the last truck. Helen Grant, a Scottish nurse, and Mrs. Basilia Torres Steward, a Filipino nurse married to an American, joined them. The driver started the engine and all at once over the camp loudspeakers came the melody of “Anchors Away.” As their truck turned down the esplande toward the iron front gates, the women looked back at the crowd, tears streaming down their faces.

By the time the truck carrying the navy nurses reached the Tutban railway station, the male internees had already been loaded into boxcars for the journey north. Japanese soldiers ordered the women to break into groups of two or three and join the men in the cars, then they slammed the metal doors shut, and the train pulled away from the station.

The temperature inside those sealed steel containers rose steadily and quickly, and soon the cars began to stink of sweat and the leftover stench of cattle. Guards cracked the doors a bit for some fresh air, but whenever the train slowed they shut them tight again, sealing the prisoners inside. The noise, odor and heat were so overpowering that the men and women could do little more than sip from their water bottles and shut their eyes against the discomfort. Soon everyone was soaked in sweat and struggling for breath. For seven hours the prisoners were locked inside those metal boxes. Edwina Todd figured she lost almost ten pounds along the way.