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  • Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific by Mary Cronk Farrell
  • Elizabeth Bush
Farrell, Mary Cronk. Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific. Abrams, 2014. 160p. illus. with photographs ISBN 978-1-4197-1028-5 $24.95    R* Gr. 6–10.

The war was raging in Europe, but the Pacific region was still calm—at least in public perception—and a posting on the island of Luzon was a plum assignment for military nurses, with its gorgeous terrain, comfortable quarters, light duty, lavish social life: paradise with a paycheck. Then came Pearl Harbor and in a flash the Japanese were moving through the Pacific, the Allies were infamously backed into Bataan and onto the tiny island of Corregidor, General MacArthur had decamped to Australia, and nurses and their gravely wounded patients were taken captive and herded off to internment camps. Farrell tells the gripping story of the nurses’ three year ordeal on the college grounds of Santo Tomas in Manila and at the inland encampment of Los Baños at Laguna de Bay, highlighting their attempts to provide the best medical care possible with few or no supplies, and to keep up their own physical strength and morale as starvation set in. Interviews and memoirs supply plenty of primary source information on which this title is based, and a wealth of photographs, as well as a pair of useful maps, supplements the text. Although the discussion of the Japanese military advance is flag-wavingly pro-American, Farrell tempers the narration with a discussion of how the popular press demonized the captors beyond their actual transgressions. This valuable account shifts the focus from World War II nurses as “angels of mercy” to POWs, and replays the rout at Bataan with women rather than men in the starring roles. End matter comprises a glossary, index, source notes, bibliography, and complete list of nurses in service in the Philippines at the time of the invasion.

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