In recent years, I’m drawn to stories of self-sacrifice and grace under pressure (as the author whose name inspired this site defined courage), most markedly when revealed in time of war.
The military nurses whose story is now preserved for the ages in We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman is such an irresistible reading (and yes, emotional) experience, that Prof. Norman deserves almost as much praise for bringing it to life, as do the characters who inspired it.
War is generally the preserve of men (and rightly so ~ they do most of the dying): the military brass, doughboys, sailors, GI’s and airmen. Never until this book, has the unsung backstory of that phalanx of quietly efficient, industrious, caring creatures known as nurses, been so movingly told.
I tried to quantify what made We Band of Angels such an all-consuming read for me. Was it because Prof. Norman, herself a nurse, brought to the book a unique and deep understanding of the sacrifices these military women made in 1942-45, when they were unwittingly swept up (and often, away) in the tides of the Pacific war, to endure 3 harsh, bitter years as POW’s, alongside the wounded and terminal patients they were constantly expected to attend to, without any regard to their – oftentimes – own failing health and privations?
That was certainly a factor, but she’s also such a gifted writer to boot. She writes in the style of history I’m most drawn to: filled with concrete, minute details and first-person experiences that — in the hands of the right author — bring earlier ages to vivid, three-dimensional life, who at the same time keep the narrative flowing, swept along by the “big picture” of political and national forces that dwarf the individual participants.
This is the story of women who, in the years before the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thought they had found the route to a life of adventure and world travel, by joining the armed forces as nurses. As they went about their myriad tasks (assisting surgeons in the OR, checking vitals and the rest), they were also fulfilling dreams of romance, with evenings spent dancing on moonlit terraces to Swing Era music at officers’ clubs, in exotic locales such as Manila, Corregidor and Bataan. Locales which overnight became hellholes of mass death, dismemberment, destruction and starvation as the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a Japanese military overtook the Far East chain of islands and drove Gen. Douglas MacArthur (“Dugout Doug”, in the contemptuous view of many nurses and soldiers) out of the Philippines and back to Australia, during a lightning rout that left thousands of civilians, GI’s (and personnel in noncombatant roles such as doctors and nurses), at the mercy of Asian captors whose pitiless occupation and massacre of Nanking years before was still fresh in the minds of a horror-struck world.
Norman tried doggedly to track down all of the surviving nurses in the post-war decades. Some refused to discuss it (“I do not want to live in the past”); others, like Bertha Dworsky, apologized saying, “I’m 81 years old, and it’s all I can do to take care of myself” (a month later she was dead). Another one that Norman contacted by mail got a reply a week later from her husband, his late wife’s obituary enclosed.
Fortunately — fortuitously — 20 of the 48 nurses Dr. Norman had leads on, did reply and gave generously of their time, some even granting access to diaries they surreptitiously kept before and during captivity, to bring their wartime experiences even more vividly to life (and death):
[February 13, 1942] “Japs overhead about 11:30 bombing Cabcaben again. Many women and children killed, injured and burned. What will become of all of us? One soldier brought in a four-month-old Filipino baby. Both parents were killed in the bombing…I am so hungry — rice, cold salmon, tomatoes. Couldn’t eat any of it. Found a heel of bread and some jam.”