← Against The Odds
Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:00]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of against the Odds ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible
- [00:08]
Cassie dePechel
app from Audible Originals. I'm Cassie depechel and this is against the Odds. In 1930s America, nurses joined the military to serve their country, to get a steady paycheck, and also to travel. Imagine if you grew up on a small chicken farm in Massachusetts, or if you came from Elk Point, South Dakota. Joining the army or Navy was your passport to the world. And some of those nurses found themselves stationed in the Philippines, ringed by Vietnam, China, and Japan. Before December 8, 1941, the Philippine Islands were a dream posting with sandy beaches, tropical flowers, and dancing under the stars. But in the hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces turn their sights on the Philippines, and the nurses found themselves caring for patients during intense fighting. As the Japanese advanced on Manila, Bataan and Corregidor, a lucky few slipped through the enemy blockade. But most of the nurses became prisoners of war. Dr. Elizabeth Norman is an RN and taught for many years at NYU. She's the author of We Band of the Untold Story of the American Women trapped on Bataan. Dr. Norman, welcome to against the Odds.
- [01:56]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Thanks, Cassie. Glad to be here.
- [01:58]
Cassie dePechel
So did I get the description about right? If I were a nurse, maybe from a farm in the Midwest, arriving in Manila around 1940, was this a tour in paradise?
- [02:09]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
It certainly was. The nickname for Manila in the military was it was called the Pearl of the Orient. And prior to World War II, nurses could get assigned to Manila, but that was reserved for for the senior nurses. But then what happened? In 1940, the United States instituted a draft. Lots more men were in the military, so they needed more nurses. That's how these younger nurses got to go there. A funny story was one of the nurses, Sally Blaine, was working at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. And she got to the nurse's quarters and there was a signup sheet who wanted to go to Manila. It was filled up. She couldn't do it. The next month, same thing. It was filled up. She couldn't put her name on it. The third month, she was so upset that she couldn't get her name on that she crossed somebody's name off and put her name on. And she laughed when she told that story. She said, and look what I got. She became a prisoner of war, but Manila before that. You landed in Manila after taking a transport ship dressed in civilian clothes. They didn't travel in uniform, and when they got there, a band greeted them. They got into chauffeured cars, took to the beautiful army navy club on Manila Bay. And even their work was easy. I often thought I could do that. They worked four hour shifts, basically. But things would get busy when the fleet came to town or men got injured in bar fights or injured in a polo match. Otherwise there were four hour shifts. They only needed, and they all told me there's three pieces of clothing to serve in the Philippines. They needed their white nurses uniforms for when they were on duty. They needed a bathing suit because it was very hot. And they needed evening gowns for the parties that occurred after sundown. So these women, young and older, went from a depression era life where things were tough and opportunities were limited. Now all of a sudden, they're having parties, they're having people do their laundry. The nurses quarters was a beautiful building with bamboo and wicker furniture. The windows were filled with shelves. There were ceiling fans. It was, as they said to me, all a paradise.
- [04:15]
Cassie dePechel
I'm curious, had the nurses serving in the Philippines received any training for combat conditions? Did they have any idea what they could be facing when they had arrived there?
- [04:26]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
No. The one time they all kind of laughed, I would ask that question of them and they said, are you kidding me? They didn't even have calisthenics, let alone survival training. They only had their white nurses uniforms and their army uniforms. There was absolutely no preparation for nurses doing anything but bedside care. I think nobody believed the Japanese would attack and this would happen, but they really got caught unawares. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner? Yeah, that's what grubhub does. Gives you deals so good you'll have to guard them. Gold days of grubhub is four weeks of grubhub's best offers all month long in May, only for grubhub plus members. And if you're not a member, you can sign up now for just 99 cents a month for six months. That's 90% off Grubhub plus membership. Auto renews and terms apply. Sign up now on the app or@grubhub.com plus gold. Don't miss it. Adobe Acrobat, your team's home base. Collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your specs, and then invite the crew to build what's next. Talk up the teamwork that this design could be a contender. When somebody wonders what's the next steps, AI helps you finish the rest. Bolts are tight now. Your plan's refined. Run a smoother Business when you're all aligned. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat.
- [06:07]
Cassie dePechel
How many of These World War II nurses did you track down? And were there any common threads to their interviews?
- [06:15]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
I was able to interview 20 of the nurses. I also spoke with their spouses, their children. I wasn't sure how they would trust me. These were women my mother's generation. But they started to trust me, mostly because I was a nurse. And several times they'd say to me, you know, you'll get what we're about to say because you're a nurse. And the other thing that I really realized is they were in their 70s and 80s, and they wanted their story preserved.
- [06:44]
Cassie dePechel
So can you tell us a bit more about the backgrounds of these nurses and what doors enlisting the military opened up for them?
- [06:51]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
You know, they were born in the early 20th century. Most of them were the daughters of immigrants or farmers or shopkeepers. These were working class girls, and they studied, they did their chores, they did their housework. But there was something in them that set them apart from every other woman their age. They wanted something more. They wanted to travel. They looked at their mothers working so hard, and they wanted something different. So from Illinois, from South Dakota, from Texas, from Massachusetts, they signed up, most of them to the Red Cross, and then they went into the Army. They got a steady paycheck. And imagine getting to travel across the Pacific to go to the Philippines when many of these women had not really left their hometowns.
- [07:38]
Cassie dePechel
I can imagine that's super exciting for them to be able to have that new opportunity. So during your research, one of the army nurses you got to know well was Cassie Nestor. What was her background?
- [07:49]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Cassie's parents immigrated from Tuscany, Italy, to Massachusetts. Her dad was a chicken farmer, and they lived on a farm. She did go to nursing school. And while she was in nursing school, her father died. I remember she told me that when she signed up for the military and she decided to go to the Philippines, her mother, who was now a widow, was upset. And she said, how could you go? And Cassie said to her mom, when you came to America from Italy, you didn't know it was gonna happen. Please give me the chance to do the same. And Cassie, she lived fairly close to me, so I got to know Cassie. And she was just a humble, smart, authentic woman. You know, when she talked to you, you were getting the truth.
- [08:33]
Cassie dePechel
That's so lovely. So the nurses experienced a pretty cushy posting until December 8, 1941. What did you learn from them about the first minutes of the Japanese attack on Manila, which came just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- [08:49]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, I'm gonna back up just a little bit. When I was working on this project, I found a reporter for the old UPI who was based in Hawaii, Frank Tremain. And I talked to him, and he said he got up that morning, it was December 7th across the dateline, and he saw the bombers coming over the mountains to bomb Pearl Harbor. His first thought was that they were German. But in those days, he called as a reporter. San Francisco and Manila told him what he saw. And the man in Manila said to him, tell your reporter to go back to sleep. This couldn't be happening. So that's exactly how prepared they were. The nurses were just coming off a really nice weekend of fun and parties, and one of the women woke up and she said to her friend, you know, this isn't going to happen to Manila. We'll be fine. It's going to take them days to get here. I just say those stories to show you how utterly naive and unprepared they were. But the first bombs fell in northern Luzon not long after Pearl Harbor. And there was a nurse working there getting ready for an operating room traditional day when the bombs happened. And they were so naive, she and the surgeon ran to the window to see what was going on. And she said the planes came in so low that they could see the pilots. So they went to work. Her first patient was now a young boy injured in the bombing, and they were able to save his life. And this nurse said that was one of the more rewarding things, when she could tell the mother that he was okay. However, down in Clark Airfield outside Manila, which was the site of the Pacific Air Corps, and there was a hospital there. Everybody ignored it. It was around noontime, and they went to lunch. They left their planes fully fueled with bombs on the Runway. So while they're at lunch, the Mitsubishi bombers came over the Zambales mountains and bombed, and they destroyed our air corps. At the time, the casualties were so many that the nurses at the hospital were overwhelmed. So many of the nurses, like Cassie, went up from Manila to work at the hospital. And this was, you know, nothing can prepare you for war. They'll all tell you this, but what they had to learn to do was to crawl around on the ground because it was dangerous. There was bombings going on, and they'd do very. What we'd call now triage, but it was very preliminary. And they would give men morphine for pain because they knew it would be a while until they could get to the operating room. And then they'd take their lipsticks or methiolate out and write an M on their foreheads so no one would overdose them. It was just amazing how this turned on a dime from paradise to a terrible battle.
- [11:31]
Cassie dePechel
How did Cassie describe the scene at the hospital?
- [11:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
They found the hospital because as they were coming up from Manila, they could hear the moans and cries. It was noisy. People were terrified. People were hurt. There was dirt, blood all over the place. And they just got down to work. They crawled on the ground. They cleaned up what they could, they bandaged what they could. They gave their morphine. But about 80 people died. And Cassie talked about just looking around and seeing the discarded uniforms covered in blood or a helmet that was twisted. And she said, I wonder what happened to the head inside that. After working all night, she said she needed a break, so she went outside. And just as she stepped outside, another wave of Zeros came in. She jumped into an empty swimming pool and hit against one of the walls until it passed. So she was under constant shelling like everyone else during those early days.
- [12:27]
Cassie dePechel
What a devastating scene. Oh, my gosh. U.S. and allied troops held out in Manila for a few weeks during the Japanese offensive. The Navy nurses stayed in Manila. But around Christmas 1941, the army nurses evacuated to field hospitals on Bataan. For people who aren't familiar with Bataan, can you give us a brief geography lesson? And how did the nurses get there?
- [12:51]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
After December 8, the Japanese continued to attack the Philippines. And it was very clear to the American military leaders that they'd have to get out of the city or there would be a bloodbath there. So around Christmas, they started to order the army nurses out to field hospitals on the Bataan Peninsula or an island of Corregidor. Now, Bataan, and I've been there three times. It's sort of like a thumb. That is a peninsula right across Manila Bay from the capital city. Even when I was there in the early 2000s, it was dense, dense jungle. And when the nurses went there, they thought they were going to military hospitals. They came by boat and convoy truck. When I saw Bataan, it made it even harder for me to imagine what the nurses were able to do. But think about it. They're heading to this place. They don't know the city behind them's in flames. As you know, the Navy nurses stayed behind and became prisoners of war. When they would get together, there would be some teasing about, you know, hey, why'd you leave us behind. But the army only evacuated the army. That's why it happened. It was nothing to do with the nurses. By New Year's Eve, all Army nurses had evacuated from Manila. So the nurses quickly went from Manila into a battlefield. This message comes from Betterment Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment's Tax Impact Preview tool can help you make smarter investment decisions. Tax Impact Preview is a preview of what taxes you would owe if you sold out of a position today. Often when individuals are investing, there's a disconnect between when they sell something and when they pay the taxes on it. You might sell it in February and the IRS comes calling in April. What we wanted to do is make people aware of the consequences of their decision decisions before they made them. People might forget that short term capital gains are taxed at a higher rate than long term capital gains. We wanted to make that information salient and give it to them at the point in time so they can make more informed decisions before they go through with them. Learn more about Tax Impact Preview and all the other helpful investment tools@betterment.com the tax impact Preview tool provides an estimate of tax implications. Betterment does not provide tax advice. Investing involves risk performance not guaranteed.
- [15:16]
Cassie dePechel
This Message comes from Capital One with the SparkCash plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase and get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven Branton and Bruno, the business owners of sandcloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One what's in your wallet? Find out more at capital1.com sparkcash+ termsupply. The army nurses who retreated to the Bataan peninsula along with U.S. and allied forces underwent several months of trying to do their job in the jungle as the Japanese invaded. Can you imagine what Field hospital number one must have been like for the nurses?
- [16:09]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Field hospital number one that was sort of planned. When they had the retreat, they wanted to put a army hospital on the road facing Manila Bay. They thought it would be easier to handle casualties and they put it south in the peninsula towards the end of the thumb. But just to step back onto this Bataan Peninsula in December and January after the war started, 100,000 people came, civilians and military, I mean civilians, Filipino troops, and they set up hospitals. This hospital number one was a thousand bed surgical hospital and it had nine operating tables in tents. And they said when the bombers would fly over the hospital and bomb, everybody around the table would squat down but keep their hands on the table to keep them sterile. And when the bombing was over, they just stood up and kept going. You'd think that they'd all be terribly traumatized by what was going on. But interestingly, working constantly during the siege of Bataan helped the nurses because they were being respected. And once the bombing started, they became central to the effort. And that's important in trying to understand what these women did. So they kept going.
- [17:25]
Cassie dePechel
As US and Filipino troops fought the Japanese on Bataan, the casualties mounted, and they had to build another field hospital. The army nurses treated patients in essentially a jungle hospital. What was hospital number two like?
- [17:40]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Hospital number two just floored me. The first hospital couldn't handle all the casualties, so the military went into the jungle a ways, found a flat area of land, and they bulldozed the area. But what they did is they kept the canopy of the trees above them so the Japanese couldn't see them. The wards were open air. Beds with mattresses stuffed with hay were used. Bamboo made the beds. You were outside in the open, looking up at the trees. They had wooden latrine boxes. They buried medicines in tins and bottles. And I'm sorry, I can't show you photos of this because people have said to me that this reminds them of the Civil War hospitals. They had thousands of casualties. And the nurses would walk on the paths at night between the wards with flashlights that were covered in blue. And one of the nurses said it was something. It was pitch dark. And she said one night she was walking to her ward when something smacked her in the head, and it was a python. So that's what it was like. The issue, though, in addition to the horrible bombing, is that American leaders did not bring enough food, enough medicines to the peninsula. So right away, people were getting sick. And it seemed like everybody at some point had malaria, dysentery. You started to see malnutrition. So not only were men getting injured in the battles, but they were also very sick, too, and there wasn't much to help them. That's what hospital number two was like.
- [19:15]
Cassie dePechel
Oh, my gosh. Incredible. So how did nurses like Cassie Nestor and Mildred Manning describe their time on Bataan?
- [19:23]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
When they evacuated from Manila to Bataan, they had no idea where they were going. And some of them laughed and said to me, we packed curlers, face cream, we just thought would be a nice military hospital. But now they had very little to eat, and they were getting sick with malaria and dysentery. They worked under blackout conditions. There were animals, as I said. A python, wild pigs, water buffalo, monkeys and rats. So the women learned to eat on the run. And they also had a sense of humor. As the food started to run out, one of the nurses said to me, well, I had weevils in my cereal this morning. At least I was getting protein. They did keep a sense of humor about it all. They were wildly undersupplied, but they kept working and they kept reassuring their patients. And not only did they treat us and Filipino soldiers and civilians, but they also treated Japanese prisoners of war. And they also had to deal with the infection. Maggots. And gangrene was a problem.
- [20:25]
Cassie dePechel
Yeah. I have to ask about gangrene. This is a time before widespread use of antibiotics. So what did the nurses and doctors do to help with gangrene?
- [20:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, it was such a problem that there was a doctor who had just this new idea and he improvised what he called a sun cure for gangrene. What he would do is, in the area that was infected, is make a deep incision, clean out the dead tissue, shrapnel, anything that was in there, and then cleaned up with hydrogen peroxide. They did have enough peroxide. And then he left the incisions open. But he did cover them with netting so the mosquitoes wouldn't get in. And the patients were put in direct sunlight. And he thought oxygen might help destroy the bacteria that was causing the gangrene. He was right. Within 24 hours, the nurses said everything was better. The pulse rates were better, the blood pressure was down, and they called it a sun cure.
- [21:19]
Cassie dePechel
Of course, the nurses developed a strong sense of camaraderie, and somehow, amidst the terrible conditions, they managed to sometimes have a small bit of fun. Can you share some of those examples?
- [21:31]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Sure. I mean, it sounds like, what a contradiction. How could you be taken care of severely injured and ill patients and still have fun? But I think that helped them survive too. They called themselves the Battling Bells of Bataan. And they had a little ditty that they sang, and it was in just a side to a famous called the Battling Bastards of Bataan, which the men used. The fighting would peak and then there was a lull for a little while, and that's when they had some time off and they'd have a couple birthday parties. They were able to listen to the radio from San Francisco, KGEI, or the Voice of Freedom, and a lot of spur of the moment things. When work wasn't going on, three couples got married in foxholes and they had their honeymoon there, and interesting weddings. But what happened was they kept wanting for reinforcements to come from the United States. And MacArthur kept saying, Help is on the way. Help us on the way. They'd climb up trees, they'd look for the mast m a s t mast of ships coming in, but no help was coming. And then in March, MacArthur left the Philippines with his family and his senior staff. And that's when they knew, and as Cassie said, that's when we knew we were expendable. And things got very bad after MacArthur left because the Japanese increased their attacks on the peninsula.
- [22:59]
Cassie dePechel
And then one day in early April 1942, US commanders ordered the nurses to evacuate Bataan. What was this like for the nurses?
- [23:08]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, of all the story about this group to tell, this was the most traumatic moment they knew. Once MacArthur left, as Cassie said, we were losing Bataan. There was no convoy. She said, you'd have to be pretty dumb not to know that nothing was coming. People were gloomy. And then they targeted the hospital, hospital number one that I talked about. First they bombed it, even though it had a big red cross on it. They killed 73 people and they injured over 100, including nurses Rosemary Hogan from Oklahoma and Rita Palmer from New Hampshire. They had shrapnel wounds, but patients were blown up into trees. It was a catastrophe at that point. They were going to annihilate that peninsula. So the nurses were ordered off of Bataan. And some thought about disobeying the order, but this is what they'd say to me. Can you imagine walking through a ward? The patients are scared, they're hurt, some are crying, and we leave. We walked off the wards. We obeyed the order, she said. Men handed us watches and handed us things, gave us their names. They thought maybe we would survive. But they said there was nothing worse for a nurse and they thought they were abandoning their patients. What happened at hospital number two is the order to evacuate Bataan was only for American nurses. And Josie Nesbitt, who was the chief nurse of this 6,000 bed hospital, hospital number two, she called her superior officer and said, either I take the Filipino nurses or none of us are going. He was so shocked, he changed the order and the Filipino nurses got to evacuate with the Americans. Thank goodness, because if they'd been left behind, they would have been on the infamous Bataan death march. But they got across from the peninsula to this little tadpole shaped island called corregidor. But all 87 army nurses made it out of Bataan to Corregidor.
- [25:12]
Cassie dePechel
So a tunnel complex on the tiny island of Corregidor became the nurse's New home. Can you describe their new surroundings?
- [25:20]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Corregidor. It really is if you think of a tadpole. It's a small island in Manila Bay at the mouth. And it was fortified in the 1930s by the American military with supplies and ordnance. It had a railroad line going through it to move supplies. And also there was this very small hospital with beds, and they were like bunk beds. But once the war started, the hospital had so many casualties, particularly after Bataan fell, that the beds were no longer bunk beds. They were triple tier beds. At first, when the nurses from Bataan got there, they said, wow, this is okay. They have a roof over their heads, decent meals, there were no snakes or iguanas. However, once Bataan fell, the Japanese turned their sights on Corregidor and it was bombed all the time. And that's when they discovered things had their own problems, particularly in the operating rooms or wards when the bombs would fall and the electricity would go out. One of them said to me it was just like being in a pyramid. But they just kept working because as one of them said, we had no choice.
- [26:27]
Cassie dePechel
After many waves of attacks, US forces surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942. How did the nurses prepare for this moment and what did the Japanese do with them?
- [26:40]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, I mean, how do you prepare for something you just can't even imagine? But they kept working. The chief nurse, Maud Davison, she was the chief nurse and assistant, Josie Nesbitt, got the whole group together and what they did is someone ripped a piece of cloth from a bed and they all signed it. And it's really quite an amazing document. And it just says these were the civilian nurses and army nurses who surrendered to the Japanese and everybody's signatures on it. I saw the cloth, it's down in San Antonio at the Medical Museum. And I said to the nurses like Cassie, why did you do this? And they said to me, we had no idea what was going to happen to us. We thought the Japanese could put us on a boat and dump us in the South China Sea, shoot us. And it was really important that our parents knew that we were alive on this date. Thank goodness the Japanese didn't know what to do with these nurses because they did not send them to military prison where the men went. They sent them to a civilian prison camp, which wasn't a camp before the war. Santa Tomas University, this sprawling camp with babies and 90 year olds in it, probably 4,000 people. It just seemed like a good place to put the thousands of engineers, missionaries, Spanish American war vets, and now These nurses,
- [28:11]
Cassie dePechel
The army nurses from Bataan and Corregidor arrived at Santo Tomas internment camp in July of 1942. Santo Tomas housed foreign nationals and while the conditions were not what military prisoners of war experienced, they grew increasingly awful as the war progressed. What did army nurses like Cassie tell you about Santo Tomas?
- [28:33]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, these nurses were tired and scared and they had no idea about their future. But what they did is Maud Davison and the navy nurse. They set up with the interned physicians and surgeons a hospital right across the street from the university in Santa Catalina. Nuns had lived there and they started to work as nurses again. And it was really interesting because there were beds so they, it was not like Bataan. But they didn't have any of the medicines that they normally would have. So what they would do is for bandages, they reused bandages. They had pharmaceutical reps who were in camp tap the rubber trees and make stick em to make bandages that would stick. They did all kinds of dietary stuff. They did do surgeries but they didn't have the silk that they needed. So they improvised. It really was healthcare and nursing improvised and it worked well. The interesting thing because the hospital was across the street that they'd have to walk past a Japanese guard going to work and they hated bowing. Sometimes 10 of them would be going to the hospital and they'd bow individually. So the soldier would have to bow individually and by about the fifth person he just let them all go through. So that was sort of a humorous funny thing that kept them going. But Santa Catalina was an effective hospital and Maud Davis and their leaders. She was 57 years old, so these were not all 20 year old people. She was a by the book officer. And when I first heard about her I thought I don't think I could work with somebody like that. She insisted everybody call her by Ms. Davison. She had no family, no life but the army. Of course the nurses, the younger ones would call her Ma Davison. She gave pep talks to the nurses and encouraged them to work. Many of the nurses said some days they didn't want to go to work, they were tired. But the mere thought of facing Maud Davison and saying I'm not going to work was so bad they went to work.
- [30:32]
Cassie dePechel
So how did Cassie and the other nurses work to survive their three years of imprisonment at Santo Tomas?
- [30:40]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
At this point Cassie was 25 years old, as were roughly the age of many of the younger nurses. She knew that one of the ways she was gonna survive was to keep busy, to read, to exercise and to work. She took care of her patients all the time, as they all did. She gave their medications. But remember, this had been a university with professors now intern, and you were able to have books to read. She had a little patch of garden, and they offered classes to the internees. I was surprised. And she learned Spanish, she took a writing class, and she was able to lose herself in other things. There were us golf pros as prisoners in the camp, and she took golf lessons. I mean, think about that. But it helped her get through the day. They set up a baseball league, and she and the nurses formed a team. The hospital was busy, kids got hurt, and the campus itself got very crowded. This goes on 1942, goes into 1943, and the camps started to get worse treatment. In 1944, a new commandant took over, and there had been a package line that allowed civilians to deliver food, clothes and supplies. They shut that down, so there was nothing to come in from the outside. Just to give an example, Cassie said she weighed 145 pounds before the war, and she was maybe 100 pounds at this point. The calories were about 900 a day. And by 1945, there were 700 calories a day. People were dying of malnutrition and starvation.
- [32:16]
Cassie dePechel
And what happened to the health of the nurses?
- [32:19]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
Well, one of the things that happened at first is they no longer had a baseball team. And Cassie said every day when she would get ready to go to work, she filled. It looked like a little pencil holder. She filled it with everything she needed for the day because she'd go down a flight of stairs, rest, and then go down the final flight of stairs. And she knew she couldn't go up again, so that's what she did. And it was very hard in the hospital because people were dying. Some of the first people to die were parents who gave their food to their children. And I said to them, why did you keep working when you were so sick and so starved? And they would say to me, you know, they needed us. And I realized that nursing for them was a mission, and it was a reason to get up and go through the hunger and want of a sorrow of another day. So in a way, this unbearable scene helped them psychologically get through.
- [33:13]
Cassie dePechel
How did the nurses describe liberation when it finally came to Santa Tomas in early February of 1945?
- [33:21]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
They knew the Allies were coming because there had been radios and gossip in camp, and they could hear it. So they knew something was going to happen. But the internees were afraid the Japanese were going to blow up the camp and kill them all. But they Saw flares, and they heard machine gun fire. Then all of a sudden, they said, these ornate iron gates that were the entrance to the university. They came crashing down with tanks. And somebody got out of the tanks, waved his hand and said something so American, they knew that they were saved. She said, hello, folks. Pandemonium broke out. People cried, and they noticed on the side of the American tanks an American flag. And it was the first one anyone had seen in almost three years. And somebody in this group of thousands of civilians and soldiers started to sing God Bless America. And it started slow, and it spread out through the crowd till everyone was singing. One of the correspondents for Life magazine said, one of the most poignant moments of the war. But it ended quickly because the Japanese put all their sights on the camp and people were wounded and needed care. The soldiers. So what did these nurses do? They got to work. They got the ORs going. They got the patients prepared for surgery. But this was when they knew that they'd been away a while, because one of the nurses in surgery, the surgeon turned her in, said, get me some penicillin. And she had no idea what it was. Another nurse said to an enlisted soldier, they were starving. Could I have one of those? And he said to her, ma', am, if you're gonna eat K rations, you must be hungry, and gave it to her. And then the nurse who scratched somebody's name out to go to the Philippines, she went up to a soldier getting ready for surgery, and she put her hand on his shoulder and said, you have no idea how good you look to me. And he reached up and he pinched her cheek, and he said, you look pretty good to me, kid. And then he said to me, would you like to go home? And Sally said, I was a tough cookie. I wouldn't cry or anything. But as soon as he said that, I cried.
- [35:24]
Cassie dePechel
And what was it like for the nurses to get their freedom back?
- [35:29]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
They were incredibly lucky that they got their freedom back. And one of the things that the whole group is most proud of is that nobody died. None of the nurses died. But they put the nurses on a plane. And as they were flying the army nurses down to Leyte, a southern island, they had to spray them with ddt. And they had donuts for the first time and Coca Cola for the first time in a long time. So they just said, the relief, the joy. It's almost hard to describe what it was like at Leyte. They were promoted one rank, military rank. They were given bronze stars. And the two nurses who were wounded in the bombing of the hospital number one got purple hearts. It was overwhelming, they said, to sleep in clean sheets, to have enough food. And they headed home on February 19th in Hawaii, where they got facials and perms and manicures and stockings and then to San Francisco. And there are photos of the nurses at that time. And these are all, of course, propaganda photos using to raise war bonds. And I said to them, didn't you feel a little exploited? Here you are sick, away from home for three years. And they said, oh, no. They said, not at all. You've never lost your freedom like us. We would have done anything. And we were happy to help other people. But what happened with Cassie is she came home and she was in a hospital in Washington, D.C. being checked out. And one of the nurses told her that her mother had died three days before liberation. So she never lived to know that her daughter survived. And that really bothered Cassie. But, you know, she went home, the other nurses went home and they tried to re acclimate themselves. And some did successfully and some didn't. Cassie married another World War II vet and they had three children, one of whom is a Vietnam veteran. And they had a quiet life, but she said it was a good life.
- [37:26]
Cassie dePechel
Finally and sadly, all of these nurses have passed away. Do you think there's a lesson in all of this that they would want us to know?
- [37:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
The commitment to their work was a lesson that I think they'd want people to know and also to be perfectly honest, and they'd say it too, you need some luck. And the fact that they were not put in the military prison camps was their biggest stroke of luck. Towards the end, I spent a bit of time with Millie Dalton Manning, who was from Jefferson, Georgia, and she and Cassie were nearby. So we went out to lunch a couple times. And after Cassie died, Millie was very aware that she was it and what was going to be the lasting thing she wanted people to know about the group. And I end the book with this. Millie said, we spent our lives helping people and we did it with honor, love, and never looked back.
- [38:16]
Cassie dePechel
That's beautiful. Well, Dr. Elizabeth Norman, thank you so much for taking time with me today on against the the Odds.
- [38:23]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Follow against the Odds on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of against the Odds ad free by joining Audible.
- [38:45]
Cassie dePechel
From Audible Originals. This is the sixth and final final episode of our series, World War II Nurses Turned Prisoners of War for against the Odds, produced by Audible. I'm your host, Cassie depechel. Polly Stryker produced this episode, engineered by Sergio Enriquez original theme music by Scott Velasquez and 2K for freeze on Sync series produced by Emily Frost Managing Producer Desi Blal senior producers Andy Herman and Austin Rachlis Executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie, Chief Content Officer Rachel Gyazza sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC.
- [39:39]
Dr. Elizabeth Norman
It.