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"PURE GRIT"
THE AUTHOR Mary Cronk Farrell is an award-winning journalist, having been awarded recognition foe excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists, and two Emmy nominations. She lives in Spokane ,Washington. She is a member of our Society and the http://corregidor.proboards.com |
Pure
Grit How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific Mary Cronk Farrell Abrams Books for Young Readers ISBN978-1-4197-1028--5 Illustrated, 160 pages.
True Grit tells the important but little-known story of the more than 100 heroic women who served in the Philippines during WWII. Initially a posting of adventure and romance (in the classic sense), the Japanese invasion soon enough placed them under fire, necessitating their retreat into the field hospitals of Bataan, where common sense soon enough told them that they were bit players in a dire disaster. On Bataan, days stretched into weeks and there were no safe places far enough behind the front lines to avoid combat. Even the luxury of taking a few moments to relax upstream of one of the camps could be interrupted by strafing. "Did you hear about Denny being strafed" the story spread. "She didn't want to die with only her dog tags on." They still believed they would be rescued. Reality would soon enough disabuse them. "What's the sense of taking temperatures? No one will ever read the records." The book follows the women over to Corregidor Island, where they soon enough began to feel like rats, scurrying around in the hot, stuffy laterals of Malinta Tunnel. "It was like being in a steel bucket with somebody beating on the outside with a hammer." Some were evacuated by submarine, some by PBY-4 Catalina flying boats. Those who didn't make it off Corregidor left their names written on a bedsheet as a record in case they disappeared. The Japanese, though, treated them honorably, though confiscated anything they perceived of value. They remained on Corregidor until 2 July, when they were loaded on the Lima Maru, and then trucked from dockside to the Sto. Tomas Internment Camp. "We reasoned that if we hoped to remain integrated emotionally, our first and primary duty was to carry on in our most professional capacity," Josie Nesbitt stated. "Not for one moment did we ever lose sight of the fact that not only were we prisoners of war in every sense, but also that we were U.S. Army nurses." Navy nurses conducted themselves likewise. "I think the Japanese respected us because we were working all the time," Peggy Nash said.
The saddest part for me was how, with the war over, these U. S. Officers (who happened to be women) were deliberately forgotten. There was no framework existing in the 1940's for male organizations to understand women who had acted with enduring courage and strength on the battlefield and as prisoners of war, women who had acted like men. Had the nurses been male, they would have earned the Combat Infantry Badge. Had they been male, many of them would have reveived the Distinguished Service Medals that their superior (male) doctors recommended for them. Had they been male, the VA presumably would not have treated them as an embarassment. Presaging the VA's attitude of monumental bureaurcratic indifference to the welfare of returned servicemen from Iraq and Afghanistan, it spent thousands of dollars on a study that concluded that the nurses' POW experience was unequalled in the annals of American history, and denied them just compensation notwithstanding. I recommend it as one of the core books for students of the American experience of WWII in the Philippines, and of the unbelievable indifference of a bureaucracy gone wrong.
Paul F. Whitman |
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