We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese (review)

Elizabeth M. Norman. We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese. New York: Random House, 1999. xv + 327 pp. Ill. $U.S. 26.95; $Can. 39.95.

More than a contribution to the history of nursing, this fine and interesting book illustrates a paradox of good storytelling. Though we know how it ends, the narrative grips us all the way through. It is about nursing, World War II, the United States in this century, including gender issues and professional relationships right up to the present--all seen through the lives of ordinary women turned heroic.

Elizabeth Norman, a professor of nursing at New York University, has also written Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam (1990). For the present book she interviewed twenty of the seventy-seven women nurses imprisoned for three years by the Japanese in the Philippines, of whom forty-eight were still living when she began in 1990. Most of these women joined the military for adventure, even romance. To them the Philippine Islands were paradise--until the war, a bolt of red from the blue, transmogrified dream to nightmare. They go down in history as the first group of American military women to experience combat and to be imprisoned by the enemy.

As defeat followed defeat, the more fortunate retreated to Australia--including General Douglas MacArthur. Hope for rescue ebbed along with supplies. Between the U.S. surrender at Corregidor in May 1942, and the surrender of Japan in August 1945, the nurses' work maintained morale for themselves while it saved many lives and limbs for their charges, the sick and wounded civilians in Santo Tomas Internment Camp (STIC), Manila. No nurses died there, nor were they raped. They simply--amazingly--worked on despite shortages of everything except sickness, death, and fear. When liberation came they were near death from starvation. Heretofore their story had been presented only piecemeal--mostly in the popular press, in a few books and articles, and distorted for propaganda in the Hollywood blockbuster of 1943, So Proudly We Hail. Norman uses this material effectively, along with diaries, letters, and military and nursing archives. Though most of its subjects did not live to see Norman's work, posterity and their reputations will benefit from it.

Despite the grimness of its topic the book gives much pleasure. This was a dignified struggle of women too human to be angels, but heroines self-created in a strange, chaotic venue. They improvised, they overcame personal setbacks, they somehow stood up to the general horror of war while mostly ignoring the pettiness, so much more shocking in leaders than in the troops. After the flush of publicity celebrating their return, these women mostly faded into the woodwork. Even psychiatrists failed to consider their vulnerabilities, while the Pentagon scrimped on medals and benefits. And too much of the publicity served the purpose of the media and the propaganda machine. "If we didn't tell the papers what they wanted to hear, they didn't listen," said one nurse, referring to instances of caring for wounded Japanese; "[the nurses] had learned a valuable lesson of war: suffering knows no uniform" (p. 223). Another nurse, one of the few who bared what Norman calls "the ugly side of sacrifice," was rebuffed: "Some people told me I was exaggerating things, that conditions could never be that bad. Others told me to simply forget what happened" (p. 226).

While the book is addressed to the general reader, health professionals and historians will find sufficient detail. There is a chronology of events and a list identifying all the nurses, a valuable bibliography, rich endnotes, an index, and two sets of photographs (one of these places Oak Knoll Hospital in San Diego, but the text...