Elizabeth M. Norman by We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan

Author:We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: World War II, Social Science, General, Military, Women's Studies, History
ISBN: 9780307799579
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Los Banos, 1943

ON THANKSGIVING DAY 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.

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