Elizabeth M. Norman (40 page)

Minnie Breese and Rose Rieper decided to travel together to St. Louis.

Underweight and tired, but smiling happily, the two “angels of Bataan and Corregidor” arrived at Lambert–St. Louis Municipal Airport from the west coast at about 2
A.M
. to be met by rejoicing relatives. It was raining as they stepped from the big silver plane.…

“My little girl,” Mrs. Amelia Breese whispered as she pressed her heroine daughter tightly to her. “Thank God! Oh, thank God.”
¹⁵

Inez McDonald made her way back to Tupelo, Mississippi.

This excited little city of 9,000 offered the town today to its “Angel of Bataan”—and slim, blonde Lt. Inez McDonald chose a hair wave
.

The keys to the city—23 of them, opening the doors of the town’s leading business establishments—were turned over to the Army nurse who has returned home after nearly three years in a Japanese prison camp in Manila
.

“I think everything from curling irons to railroads is included,” said Mayor J. P. Nanney during ceremonies honoring the farm girl from nearby Plantersville
.

“I can use the curling irons,” smiled Lt. McDonald. “My hair got pretty straight during those years in prison camp. I’d like a hair-do.”
¹⁶

The “girls” were playing a role, of course, putting on a good show, the show the folks back home expected. Most of the women knew better than to discuss their abject despair, their death dreams and the lingering effects of starvation and malnutrition, effects that would one day perhaps cripple them or shorten their lives. That was the ugly side of sacrifice, the cost of all their tenderness, skill and courage. And only Eleanor Garen made the mistake of baring her psyche, exposing her wounded soul.

“Some people told me I was exaggerating things, that conditions could never be that bad,” she said. “Others told me to simply forget what happened. I knew I was not exaggerating and I have not to this day been able to forget any of it.”
¹⁷

So most simply put themselves on parade and allowed themselves to be the heroes people wanted. They did their duty and made speeches and public appearances, gave interviews and accepted awards. Soon the limelight became disabling. By the time Bertha “Charlie” Dworsky got home to San Antonio, she was “a nervous wreck.”

“Everybody wanted to talk with you. And everybody wanted you to make a speech,” she said. “You were trying to catch up on what life was all about, you were suffering from malnutrition, you were insecure in public, and suddenly you were thrown into chaos and confusion. Everywhere people wanted to ask questions: ‘How did the Japs treat you?’ ‘What were your experiences?’ Well, they wouldn’t understand if you tried to tell them. All I wanted was peace and quiet. I just wanted to go back to a normal life.”
¹⁸

How did the Japs treat them? The question was really an evasion, a backhanded way of asking what many people wanted to know but did not have the temerity to put into words: Had they been “violated?” Had the rapists of Nanking dragged them into a dark corner of Malinta Tunnel or caught them at night on the floor of a Santo Tomas shanty and defiled them?

Rosemary Hogan was so disgusted with the question, so provoked by all the innuendo and insinuations—prurience often posing as a concern for national honor—she sat down and wrote a candid answer:

As the folks back home in Chattanooga, Oklahoma, got the story, the Japs had chopped off my arms, cut out my tongue and left me pregnant. Just to vary the theme, someone said my legs had been amputated.…

After all the terrible, and terribly true, stories about Jap atrocities against soldiers and civilians, I suppose it was just too much for the people in the States to believe that any of us—the sixty-eight nurses from Bataan—could have escaped the same beastly treatment
.

Take the infantryman who had been celebrating the capture of Santo Tomas on beer
.

This soldier strolled casually into our little hospital, stopped, and stared in amazement to find Army nurses there
.

“Well, tell me,” he said, “how did the Japs treat you?”

“It could have been worse,” I said
.

“Didn’t they do anything to you?”

“Sure. They locked us up in this place.”

“Damn it,” he insisted, “I mean, did they rape you?”…

I never heard the ghastly rumors about myself until I had been home a week. Then a girl friend said:

“I guess you’ve heard all the frightful things that have been said about you?”

I had not, but it seemed that an officer from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I had been stationed before the war, called this girl and asked her, “Did you hear what happened to Rosemary?” That was when I was supposed to have lost my arms and tongue. “I know it’s true,” he said, “because I checked it.”

Someone else said I was seen coming home on a bus. I had a cape around me—to cover my mutilation and shame.… I learned that this same nurse-on-a-bus story went all around the country.… A reporter, checking with the War Department, said the maimed nurse was reported to have been seen on a bus in Texas
.

I am getting a little tired of this tongue-wagging.
¹⁹

W
HEN
E
LEANOR
G
AREN
returned to South Bend, Indiana, WSBT radio was at the airport to broadcast the event live to its listeners, and the South Bend
Tribune
assigned two reporters and a photographer to record the arrival and tributes that followed.

South Bend’s “first lady” came home Saturday after a 9,000-mile trip from the horrors of a Japanese prison camp in Manila to the
mother who has been waiting here through all those agonizing months .…

The big TWA plane bearing her on the last leg of the journey home glided out of the gray western sky, circled St. Joseph county airport, landed and taxied to a halt. The door opened, and there stood the girl for whom all South Bend has only admiration and respect
.

Lieut. Eleanor Garen, army nurse, heroine of Corregidor, stepped from the airline shortly before 3
P.M.
, neat and trim in her new army uniform, but thinner by many pounds.… She stepped alone from the big silver ship and directly into the waiting arms of her mother, Mrs. Lulu Garen, who had been counting the minutes since hearing that Miss Garen was on her way home
.

 … Miss Garen’s first words were, “Oh Mother, it’s good to be home.” But Mrs. Garen could find only the words, “Eleanor, Eleanor, you are here at last.”
²⁰

Lulu Garen wore a white gardenia for the occasion, a gift from a few of the men at a local Bendix plant who regularly ate at her restaurant. Eleanor’s three brothers—Reese, Paul and Dana—were there. The temperature was below freezing and the wind was up, and as Eleanor, dressed only in her uniform, began to shiver, one of her brothers slipped off his topcoat and placed it across her shoulders.

Eleanor didn’t shed a tear and neither did her mother, but the reunion was touching and few others in the little knot of relatives and friends were dry-eyed. The brothers, in particular, made no attempt to hide their tears and clutched their sister in tight embrace.
²¹

A Red Cross volunteer acted as a chauffeur and drove the family home to 3001 Roger Street and a living room filled with bouquets—“like walking into a flower garden,” the paper said—and beaming relatives.

In the days that followed Eleanor sat for interviews that led to a series of three articles in the
Tribune
. She said things like “Why are people making a fuss over me?” or, “I’ve heard they call us ‘the Angels of Bataan.’ The only angels of Bataan are the angels in Bataan, those wonderful boys who fought and died there. The angels of Bataan are still there.”
²²

Then when the interview was over and the reporters and relatives retired, Eleanor Garen isolated herself and refused to leave the house.

“I was not used to all this freedom,” she said. “I had a hard time going out.

“I felt lost.”
²³

R
ED
H
ARRINGTON AND
the ten other navy nurses from Los Banos arrived in San Francisco in mid-March. By that point the press was weary of the story, so there were no banner headlines to greet them, only a small article in the
San Francisco Chronicle.
²⁴
The reception was so low-key the navy women sardonically began to call themselves “the Silent Angels.”
²⁵

Still their professional kin remembered. At Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, they were treated like military royalty. (Three of the women needed immediate care: one’s knees kept buckling from dry beriberi, another suffered from a heart ailment and could barely walk and a third had difficulty breathing.) The hospital staff gave each nurse an orchid, and a cosmetics company supplied them with a box of makeup. Later movie star Jeanette MacDonald paid them a visit and joined eight of them in a group photo. Standing there fresh as an April day in her black, lace-topped gown and holding a bunch of long-stemmed red roses, the actress made the tired, emaciated women surrounding her stand out in sharp relief.

A week or so later, Red Harrington went home on a ninety-day leave to San Diego to be with her widowed mother. She also learned that a ship from the Pacific carrying some Los Banos internees was soon to dock in San Francisco, and she wondered if Page Nelson was among the passengers. Early on a Sunday morning in April she made her way down to the city pier to wait for the liner to arrive:

“I got to the dock and there was the ship coming in. Then I saw quite a few guys I knew standing along the rail, guys from the Treasury Department who had been in camp. They were yelling, ‘Hi, ya, Red! Hi, ya!’ It was thrilling. There were eight hundred men on that ship, but I did not see anything of Page. Well, guess what? He was over on the other side of the ship, standing there, looking at a tugboat.

“The Treasury Department had rooms for their employees at the Plaza Hotel so that’s where we stayed. Next day we went into town and tried to find Page a white shirt, which was in really short supply. One of the clerks looked at him and said, ‘Say, did
you come in on that ship yesterday?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So she reached under the counter and said, ‘How many shirts do you want?’

“We went back to San Diego so Page could meet my mother, then we visited a local church to find out about getting married. The Father said, ‘Well, by law we have a four-day waiting period in California and I could marry you on Friday night.’

“We went down the street and had a beer. Page said, ‘You know what day that is?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Friday the thirteenth.’ And so we married on Friday, the thirteenth of April. He went to Washington the next day and I followed him soon afterward.”
²⁶

C
ASSIE CAME HOME
and found sorrow waiting.

She had sensed something was wrong a few days after she landed in San Francisco. One of the city’s newspapers had set up free long-distance telephone service for the nurses at Letterman Hospital, and Cassie eagerly queued up to call:

“Well, everybody was calling so you had to wait your turn. When my turn came, I called home and my sister [Rose] answered and, of course, it was great. I wanted to speak to Ma because she’d been sick [with heart disease]. Rose said, ‘She’s upstairs,’ and not able to come downstairs. When I called home the second time my brother [Charles] answered and he gave me pretty much the same story and I accepted that too. The third day comes along and I called again and they tried to put me off again, saying that she was not able to come downstairs. After that call, I went back to my room and got to thinking, ‘This is crazy. There’s something going on.’ Even if my mother was nothing but skin and bones she would have insisted to be carried downstairs to talk to me on the phone.

“I talked to Maude Davison. I said, ‘I’d like to check out of here as soon as possible because I want to get home as soon as possible.’ Well, she tried to say that we would all be arranged transportation … blah, blah, blah … and I said, ‘No, I’m going to get home on my own.’

“The next morning at breakfast, General Bliss was sitting at the head of the table and I overheard him say that he was going
back to Washington the next morning. I don’t know what possessed me, but, just out of the blue, I said, ‘How are you getting back, General?’ He said, ‘Well I have my own plane, of course.’ And I said, ‘Would you like to have some passengers?’ And he looked at me kind of funny. I said, ‘I live on the East Coast and I have reason to believe that I need to get home as quickly as possible.’ And he said, ‘By all means. You’re welcome to fly with me. If you can round up other nurses that are ready from the East Coast that are free to go, I can take six of you.’