Preface

In the early hours of December 8, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces struck the Philippines. Within days, American and Filipino troops were fighting a retreat down the Bataan Peninsula, and by the following spring, both Bataan and the fortress island of Corregidor had fallen. Among the Americans caught in that collapse were seventy-seven Army and Navy nurses, stationed at hospitals across Luzon and Manila Bay, who found themselves, almost overnight, transformed from caregivers behind the lines into prisoners of war.

They would spend nearly three years in Japanese internment, most of it at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila and later at the smaller, harder camp at Los Baños, south of the city. Through starvation rations, disease, and the daily grinding uncertainty of captivity, they did not stop nursing. They organized wards inside internment, trained civilian volunteers who had never held a hypodermic before the war, rationed medicine that never came close to meeting the need, and kept alive, by every account that survives them, far more people than the circumstances of their imprisonment should reasonably have allowed.