To many American military nurses in the 1930s, the Philippines were a dream posting. A tropical paradise, American nurses spent their off hours enjoying the beautiful beaches and weather. This dream, however, turned into a nightmare in December 1941 when the Japanese invaded. To many of the nurses, including Ruby Bradley, a West Virginia native, what began as effectively a paid vacation became a fight to survive as prisoners of war held captive in Japanese camps.
While nurses of both genders famously served in the Civil War, the Army did not formally enlist nurses until the early 20th century. The Army Nurse Corps was first established in 1901, in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The first women allowed into the Army, they were first employed at the US Army General Hospital (Letterman General Hospital), at the Presidio of San Francisco. Nurses at Letterman treated civilians injured during the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires, the first major event in which Army nurses participated.[1]
The 1910s saw a period of growth in the Army Nurses Corps. Until 1911, Army nurses served at only three hospitals: Fort Bayard in New Mexico, San Francisco, and the Philippines. That year saw Army Nurse Corps postings expanded to Hot Springs, Arkansas, San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C. When America entered the First World War, there were only 403 Army nurses on active duty. The crisis of WWI and the subsequent 1918 Flu Pandemic meant that, by the signing of the armistice in November 1918, 21,460 officers served in the Army Nurses Corps with 10,000 serving overseas. According to the Army Nurse Corps Association, it is estimated that a third of all American nurses had served in the Army by the end of WWI.[2]
The all-female Army nurses received discrimination compared to their male counterparts. While they were authorized relative rank in the grades of Second Lieutenant to Major and thus entitled to wear the insignia of their rank, the Surgeon General ordered that they continue to be addressed as “Miss,” and their pay was about half that of male officers of their respective rank. Unlike enlisted men, nurses were not given any military training or orientation, and despite their military insignia on their collars, they were not entitled to the salute required by male officers.[3]
The Great Depression led many young graduate nurses to enlist as military nurses. Civilian nurses were only paid on average $2 a day, if they were lucky to find employment in the Depression-era job market. As such, a military nursing career provided a more secure, better paying career, if they were adventurous enough to brave the relative unpredictability of military nursing. As WWII began in Europe, America proclaimed a state of limited emergency on September 8, 1939. This increased the strength of regular nurses in the Army Nurse Corps from 625 to 949. In June 1940, 15,770 nurses enrolled as reserves of the American Red Cross and were considered available for active service if necessary.[4]
WWII-era Army Nurse Corps recruiting poster (National WWII Museum)
It was during this period of uncertainty that Ruby Bradley was posted to the Philippines. Bradley was born on December 19, 1907, near Spencer, WV in Roane County. Bradley originally aimed to become a teacher and spent four years in Roane County’s one-room schools before deciding to change her career to nursing. In 1930, Bradley enrolled in the Philadelphia General Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia. On October 16, 1934, she was appointed to the Army Nurse Corps, holding a relative rank to 2nd Lieutenant. In early 1940, Bradley was transferred from Walter Reed General Hospital, where she had served since beginning her career in the Army Nurses Corps. Bradley arrived at Station Hospital, Fort Mills, on February 14, 1940. Established in 1910, Fort Mills was placed at the mouth of Manila Bay on the island of Corregidor. In February 1941, Bradley was moved from Fort Mills to the Station Hospital at Camp John Hay in Baguio, 200 miles north of Manilla. At Camp John Hay, Bradley served as the surgical and head nurse, a position that she held until the camp was evacuated on December 23.[5]
As the clouds of war descended over the Pacific, the War Department began preparing for imminent conflict in the Philippines. In winter 1940, the War Department ordered the evacuation of all military dependents, which was completed in May 1941. Simultaneously, ships containing military personnel, including nurses, and supplies, began to increase their arrivals in Manila Harbor. The number of army nurses at the five army hospitals in the Philippines doubled in the second half of 1941, reflecting the larger American preparations for war.[6]
Despite the looming conflict, the Philippines seemed to be a tropical paradise to those stationed there. Army nurses arrived in Manilla wearing high heels, chiffon dresses, large broad-brimmed picture hats, and white gloves and luggage filled with formal long dresses. As Lieutenant Earlyn Black later described, “each evening we dressed for dinner in long dresses. The men dressed in tuxedos, dinner jackets with the cummerbunds... even to go to the movies, we’d put on a long dress.”[7] At the five army posts and navy base in the Philippines, there were badminton and tennis courts, bowling alleys, and playing fields; at Fort Stotsenberg, north of Manila, officers held weekly polo matches. At Fort McKinley, a few miles south of Manila, a streetcar transported off-duty people between the post’s pool, a bowling alley, the golf course, and the movie theater.[8]
WWII-era Navy Nurse Corps recruitment poster (US Naval Institute)
To many nurses, the notion of war was a long way away, masked by the glamor and adventure of their tropical posting. Lieutenant Rita Palmer said that “we were just kids and we were in a strange and different country. We were excited by everything we did.”[9] Despite the warning signs, the military personnel in the Philippines felt complacent and secure in the waning days of 1941. Even as MacArthur’s staff planned to defend Manila, officers joked that they would be fighting a war and a hangover at the same time.[10]
Sunday, December 7, 1941, will forever be remembered by Americans as the “day that lives in infamy.” However, to military nurses in the Philippines, it was on Monday, December 8 (due to the international date line) that the idyllic tropical posting was plunged into war along with the rest of the United States. Ruby Bradley began her morning like normal: sterilizing the instruments to perform the first operation of the day, a routine hysterectomy. Her regular morning, however, soon changed. Bradley was summoned to post headquarters and told the news of the surprise attack on Hawaii. Soon after, Japanese bombs began to fall on Baguio.[11]
Only hours after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese struck the Philippines, bombing Camp John Hay at 8:19 AM local time, according to Bradley. Bradley and her colleague, Lieutenant Beatrice Chambers, were two of the first in the Philippines to see the horrors and devastation of war. Bradley later said that “we could actually see the Japanese. We could recognize them as they were looking down at us because they were so close in those tiny planes.”[12] More than fifty bombs were dropped in the initial salvo, but none actually hit the hospital.[13]
The first casualty Bradley treated was a one-year-old child who was visiting the post with his mother when the first bombs fell and exploded near them. Both of his kneecaps were shattered and his face was blue when he arrived at the hospital. Dr. Dana Nance, the head doctor on staff, told Bradley to move on from the dying child because they were to be inundated with casualties. In a last effort to save the child, Bradley asked if she could put adrenalin in his heart to stimulate it. Nance gave his assent, but she was concerned about making an error in the process of injecting the six-inch long needle into his heart, which could be fatal. Thinking on her feet, Bradley grabbed a nearby bottle of whiskey, remembering that liquor was sometimes effective as a heart stimulant. Taking a piece of gauze, soaking it in whiskey and lacing it with sugar, Bradley stuck it in the boy’s mouth, and, as he sucked the gauze, “it wasn’t five minutes until he was as pink as a rose and yelling his head off,” as Bradley later recounted.[14]
At approximately 12:15, nearly 200 Japanese airplanes flew over Clark Field, near Fort Stotsenberg. This attack devastated American airpower in the Philippines. Within fifteen minutes of the attack, 85 soldiers were killed and 350 left wounded. Off-duty nurses at Fort Stotsenberg were mobilized to care for the wounded. Anesthetist Second Lieutenant Phyllis Arnold later said that, when tending to her first case, a wounded soldier who was going to lose his feet, “was when I began to realize we were at war— look at this—this young man. We worked all night.”[15] Nurses were sent from Manilla—five army nurses from Sternberg General Hospital and fifteen Filipino nurses from local hospitals—arriving at Stotsenberg at around 9 in the evening to relieve the exhausted medical crew that had spent hours caring for the wounded. Ruth Straub, a nurse who volunteered to go to Stotsenberg because her fiancée was stationed there (he suffered a basal skull fracture after a December 10th air raid and passed shortly after), wrote in her diary on December 8th entry that “the hospital was bedlam—amputations, dressings, intravenous, blood transfusions, shock, death… one doctor, a flight surgeon, had a head injury but during the night he got up and went to the operating room to help with the other patients.”[16]
America was at war, and the nurses had to quickly adjust to the new status quo. It became increasingly evident, as they tended to the wounded at Clark Field, that the white nurses’ duty uniforms were not fit for combat conditions. Several of the nurses told a male officer that they needed clothes to replace these uniforms and they were given air corps coveralls as a substitute; the following day, nurses were given combat boots and dog tags. Elsewhere, at Canacao Navy Hospital on Cavite, the navy nurses were given helmets and gas masks, with their white duty uniforms replaced by dungarees and blue work shirts. Eventually, the military allowed nurses in Philippines to wear fatigues, becoming the first American women allowed to wear field uniforms while on duty.[17]
Navy nurses faced their first air raid at noon on December 10. As 54 Japanese planes attacked Cavite, leveling the navy yard, the women took cover, fearing that if the ammunition depot was hit, the concussion from the exploding munitions would kill them. While the nurses all survived the nearly hour-long air raid, they had to face the challenge of treating the high number of casualties from the attack. Limited in both space and manpower, nurses were ordered to administer one-quarter grain of morphine to all patients and put the more severely wounded patients that needed surgery in the hallway because there was no space elsewhere. Because of the number of patients needing urgent care, nurses had to make decisions that, in the past, had been left to the physicians. This, too, caused difficulties in treating patients since, unlike doctors, nurses at this time did not carry stethoscopes. Lt. Bertha Evans described how she could not find a pulse on a wounded man, and, after asking her fellow nurse, Lt. Margaret Nash, to check for a pulse too, they considered the soldier dead and called another corpsman to take the body to the morgue. While he was in transportation, the wounded sailor sat up on the stretcher, confused at where he was being taken. Evans later noted that if they had had a stethoscope, they could have heard the heartbeat. Soon after, Canacao’s patients were all evacuated to Sternberg General Hospital; days later, the nurses learned that the Japanese had delivered an ultimatum: the hospital had to be evacuated within 36 hours, or it would be considered a military objective. Shortly after, all military hospitals except for the Sternberg were closed, and eight annexes around the hospital were established as emergency receiving stations. Nurses were expected to work 18-20 hours per day, treating the countless wounded patients as the Japanese continued their campaign in the Philippines.[18]
Nurses outside their quarters in Sternberg Hospital (National Library of Medicine)
Fort Stotsenberg evacuated on December 24. Helen “Cassie” Cassiani, one of the nurses who had traveled there from Manila on December 8, was told to report to a sergeant. Taking her into the nearby jungle, the officer showed Cassie how to fire a pistol, using a large bunch of banana blossoms as targets. When she returned to base, the nurse learned that she was in charge of the hospital train taking the wounded to Sternberg, and that she had to be armed to defend both herself and the patients. As the train approached Manila, it suddenly stopped as air-raid sirens began to wail. As Japanese planes flew overhead, traumatized patients, many still wounded, began to panic. Cassie shoved her way to the exit, blocking it, telling the men to stay put and her orderly to use his weapon to stop anyone trying to leave the car. The bombers, it turned out, had another target, and, after the raid, Cassie checked the wounded to ensure that they were still all right as the train continued to Manila. She received a commendation in February 1942 for her actions in calming the patients and ensuring that they remained uninjured.[19]
On December 22, Japan landed its main force at the Lingayen Gulf, the body of water nearest Baguio. Bombing raids over Manila intensified, and so did the casualties. The following day, on December 23, General MacArthur decided to retreat American and Filipino forces in Manila to the Bataan Peninsula. Along with the soldiers, of course, came the Army and Navy nurses. That same day, at Camp John Hay, approximately fifty people, including the nurses and Dr. Nance, evacuated the camp for the nearby mountains. The doctor and nurses went ahead to a lumber camp, through which American troops passed over the next couple of days.[20]
Despite the order to retreat, several nurses were able to stay behind in Manila to equip a ship that carried wounded patients to Australia, and others yet stayed to prepare for the impending Japanese takeover, including destroying papers that might be useful to them. Army Nurse Lieutenant Frances Nash was one of the nurses told to prepare herself to be taken prisoner and remain until all the other staff members and supplies had been evacuated. Nash and the other Army staff were, however, evacuated to the Bataan Peninsula by the end of 1941 (the Navy nurses stayed in Manila tending to the wounded who were too ill or hurt to be moved). While they escaped Manila before Japan captured the city, Nash and her fellow nurses would later become POWs after the American surrender at Corregidor in April 1942. Lieutenant Nash carried enough morphine to give each army nurse a lethal dose; once they became captives, each nurse hid it in their hair until their liberation in February 1945. Knowing the reputation of Japanese brutality, the morphine was their last resort to potentially save themselves from torture or worse, but thankfully, was never used.[21]
Japanese General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army marched into Manila on January 2, 1942. Accepting the surrender of twenty-seven doctors and dentists, eleven American and one Filipino nurse, a Red Cross director, a Catholic priest, and several dozen enlisted men, the Japanese sacked the makeshift field hospital at the former Saint Scholastica Girls’ School. The Japanese, who did not have female participants in their military, were initially confused seeing the American women in uniform and maintained the status quo at the hospital. When they ordered Navy supervisory nurse Laura Cobb to catalog the store of supplies, the women mislabeled valuable medicine like quinine so that, when the Japanese looted the drug storage, they overlooked the “bicarbonate of soda” and other medicines they believed worthless. In early March 1942, most of the patients, doctors, and corpsmen were sent to Bilibid Prison in Manila, while the Navy nurses—Laura Cobb, Mary Rose “Red” Harrington, Mary Chapman, Bertha Evens, Helen Gorzelanski, Margaret Nash, Goldia O’Haver, Eldene Paige, Susie Pitcher, Dorothy Still, and C. Edwina Todd—were sent to Santo Tomas University, now converted into a civilian internment camp.[22]
In addition to the POWs at Manila, Bradley and her fellow nurses in the north were captured in late December. On December 26, news of increasing casualties in Baguio reached the lumber camp where Bradley and the other nurses were sheltered. The nurses and several other military personnel decided to return to Camp John Hay to tend to the wounded civilian women and children in the area; however, as they reached the foot of the mountain, they were stopped by Japanese troops and captured, taken to Brent School in Baguio. From the start of their captivity, it was evident that they would face difficulties at the hands of the Japanese. Lieutenant Chambers described finding a big ham in the kitchen of Brent School, smuggling it out by putting it under her shirt and acting pregnant. Despite the Japanese nearly executing them at Brent School, on December 29, the approximately five hundred prisoners were marched two miles to Scout Hill at Camp John Hay, their first internment camp. All five hundred were placed in one fifty-man barracks, devoid of lights, sanitary facilities, water, or food. [23]
While Bradley and the other Americans in the north and Manila were taken captive, the nurses who evacuated from Manila before its fall spent early 1942 on the Bataan Peninsula, treating wounded American and Filipino defenders. However, on April 8, the Allied line broke and the Japanese pushed within three miles of the hospitals on Bataan. Orders to evacuate to Corregidor Island were delivered that evening; Filipina nurses were excluded from this evacuation order until Lieutenant Josie Nesbit successfully argued for them to leave alongside their American counterparts. With the hurried evacuation, the nurses were forced to leave their patients, despite their protests otherwise. Some of the nurses, like Lieutenant Maude “Denny” Williams even had to leave their wounded or sick husbands who were still hospitalized. However, they were given the direct order to evacuate and were told that they would be needed on Corregidor, where American officials planned to mount a final stand. Bataan surrendered the following morning; the Americans left behind were forced to endure the horrors of the Bataan Death March and imprisonment at the infamous Camp O’Donnell.[24]
Conditions at Corregidor were poor beyond the continued Japanese siege of the island. Military personnel and civilians were sheltered for nearly a month in Malinta Tunnel, a dusty, dirty, hot, and hard to breathe underground shelter. Cassie later recalled that wet masks were necessary to breathe through the dust, especially after shelling and bombing. In addition to a prevalence of tropical diseases and other illnesses caused by the environment, sheltered quarters, and lack of proper materials and sanitation, the nurses had to face suffering and death on a nightmarish scale as the Japanese continued attacking the island. One night, for example, a group of men recovering from their wounds gathered outside of the entrance, enjoying the fresh air, when a Japanese mortar fell nearby. The concussion of the shell was so large that it slammed the entrance gates shut, trapping the men outside. When the corpsmen and nurses arrived at the entrance, they were met with carnage. Fourteen men had been killed and seventy wounded. With the graphic and brutal nature of the siege, it is no surprise that many of these men and, likely, several nurses, developed mental health problems. The men fighting on Corregidor often suffered from trauma, and the nurses had to incorporate psychiatric care into their treatment routines. [25]
Underground hospital ward at Corregidor (Golden Gate National Recreation Area Park Archives)
By the end of April, the Americans had decided to evacuate as many officers and nurses as possible to Australia. Captain Maude Davison, the chief nurse in the Philippines, gave two senior nurses, Lts. Ann Mealer and Nesbit, the option to stay or go. Both decided to stay with their patients. Later that evening, Capt. Davison ordered twenty nurses to report to the mess hall, informing them that they would leave that night. While Davison claimed that she picked the names of these nurses out of a hat, many of her choices were deliberate: older women, seriously ill or wounded women, and those who whose mental health was flagging. Josie Nesbit said that Davison believed that only the most physically and mentally fit women would be able to survive what was coming. Additionally, several of the younger women, many romantically connected to high-ranking officers, were placed on the list. Women chosen to evacuate were ordered not to speak of their departure nor say their goodbyes to anyone. Two of these nurses asked if they could give their places to a specific substitute; these requests were refused. The twenty nurses climbed aboard two seaplanes, leaving their comrades behind. Only one of these planes reached Australia (from there, the nurses traveled back to America); the second was damaged by a rock beneath the waterline and its takeoff from Mindanao Island was delayed. After repairs were made the following day, the plane had to make a last-minute emergency takeoff, leaving behind fifteen of its passengers, who had spent the night further inland hiding from the rapidly advancing Japanese forces and were unable to return to the plane in time. Soon after, these passengers—ten nurses, three women dependents, a naval officer, and an army colonel—were captured by the Japanese and held as POWs.[26]
In addition to the seaplanes, another group of evacuees made their escape from Corregidor aboard the submarine U.S.S. Spearfish. Twelve staff officers, a navy wife, two enlisted stowaways, a navy nurse, and eleven army nurses joined the submarine crew, creating extremely tight quarters in an already cramped vessel. Several people passed out from the lack of oxygen, made worse by the malnutrition caused by the siege; the crew had to pump extra oxygen into the ventilation system to compensate for the additional crew. The Spearfish had to slowly and deliberately make its way through the minefields around the island, passing through the Japanese blockade. If the enemy attacked, the crew told the passengers, they needed to cover their heads with pillows and blankets and pray for their survival. Thankfully, after twenty-two hours, the submarine had broken through the blockade and was able to surface; throughout the rest of the journey, the vessel surfaced whenever possible during nighttime to fill its compartments with fresh air. The crew of the Spearfish were very generous to the nurses, giving them undershirts and cut-off dungarees to help them bear the tropical heat. The women, in return, helped work the galley and mess, contributing to the crew’s duties as much as possible. After three weeks, the Spearfish arrived at Australia, where ten of the Army nurses began their journey home to the United States. They arrived in New York in early July.[27]
Back on Corregidor, the Japanese shelling reached a climax on May 4. In the morning alone, 1.8 million pounds of artillery shells fell on the island, which also withstood thirteen air raids that day alone. To everyone on the besieged island, this was the predecessor to invasion; the Japanese would imminently land. Nurses were told to remain dressed at all times and wear the Red Cross armbands they had been issued denoting them as medical staff rather than combatants. Nurses hid their valuables on their bodies to prevent Japanese troops from confiscating them upon their capture. One nurse, Lieutenant Verna Hively, was asked by a wounded soldier to keep his West Point ring safe and give it to his wife and daughter upon her return to America. She kept her promise more than three years later, after a long and difficult period of captivity.[28]
Japanese troops landed on Corregidor the night of May 5. General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered the island the following morning. The defenders of Corregidor were now prisoners of war. The sixty-nine women stationed in the tunnels, unsure of what would happen, tore a large square from a muslin bedsheet and signed their names underneath the heading “Members of the Army Nurse Corps and Civilian Women who were in Malinta Tunnel when Corregidor fell.”[29]
As a stipulation of the surrender agreement, Wainwright demanded that the nurses would not be sexually assaulted or harassed by any Japanese soldiers or officials. General Masaharu Homma and his staff agreed, adding the stipulation that no nurse could have any contact or speak with any Allied soldiers or officers, unless discussing patients or receiving orders for treatment. Japanese officers, curious to see women in military positions, spontaneously toured the nurses’ quarters at all times of day and night; this, of course, represented a significant breach of privacy for the women living and sleeping there. To ensure their modesty, the nurses slept in their duty clothes and posted someone as guard to ring a bedside bell and wake their colleagues when the Japanese arrived. The women would then stand at attention beside their beds until the soldiers left. After several days of this, Captain Davison complained to her commanding officer about the situation, and the hospital area and nurses’ quarters were made off-limits to every Japanese soldier except those in high command.[30]
Newly captured Army nurses on Corregidor, photographed by the Japanese (Naval History and Heritage Command)
On June 24, the Japanese forced all nurses and patients who could be moved to leave the tunnels into the hospital at Topside Barracks, above-ground on Corregidor. Patients too seriously ill to be moved were forced to stay in the tunnel. After six weeks of imprisonment in the tunnel, fresh air was a luxury for many of these women and their patients able to move to Topside; however, many of the nurses were stricken with dengue fever, malaria, and dysentery. Despite their illness, however, any nurse not completely incapacitated by their sickness remained on duty.[31]
The Japanese decided to move the nurses and patients to Manila on July 2. The prisoners had to climb a rope ladder from smaller boats onto the freighter, something that proved difficult for many of the ill nurses and patients. Lieutenant Madeline Ullom, who had contracted dengue fever a few days prior, said that she had a temperature of 104 degrees and that when she was “about three rungs from the top, everything started swimming around. I knew the bay was full of sharks and if I fell in the water that was the end of it. So I climbed the last rungs and got up.”[32] Many of the nurses, Ullom recalled, were so sick that many just laid down upon reaching the top of the ship. As the freighter left Corregidor, an English-speaking officer offered the women tea and rice cakes and told them that a hospital had been set up in a school on the outskirts of the city. The wounded men, he said, would be taken there, and the nurses would be brought there soon after. This news brought a wide feeling of relief amongst the nurses; this relief, however, was misplaced.[33] When the ship arrived in Manila, the nurses were separated from their patients and the male doctors; Ullom thought the Japanese drivers were lost and tried to give them directions before her guard “tapped [her] on the back with a bayonet. I decided they didn’t want my help, and that I’d best keep quiet.”[34] The women were driven to Santo Tomas, despite their protestations. They told their captors that they were military nurses and wanted to be taken to a military camp, where they could care for their wounded and do their duty. The guards, in response, threatened the use of force if the women did not disembark.[35] As Lieutenant Hattie Brantley later said, “when someone with a bayonet insists you get off the truck—you get off.”[36]
Whether at Santo Tomas, Camp John Hay, or another internment camp, the nurses remained POWs until their liberation in 1945. For three long years, despite the adversity caused by the terrible treatment and conditions of Japanese camps, these nurses continued to do their duties and treat ill patients. The experiences of these nurses in Japanese camps will be explored in a follow-up post.