Angels of Bataan and Corregidor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: The Road to Bataan
By the second week of the war, Manila had stopped pretending.
The order came down on Christmas Eve, delivered by a corpsman too young to shave properly, who stood in the doorway of the nurses’ quarters with a clipboard and the stunned formality of someone repeating words he didn’t fully believe himself: all hospital personnel and equipment to be evacuated to Bataan by morning. Manila would be declared an open city. The wards at Sternberg would empty into trucks, and everything that couldn’t fit in a truck would be left for the Japanese.
“Open city,” Vivian repeated, sitting on the edge of her cot with a stocking still in her hand. “What does that even mean?”
“It means MacArthur’s not going to fight for it,” Dorothy said, already folding her uniforms with the flat, economical motions that had stopped looking strange to any of them weeks ago. “It means Manila surrenders without a shot so the Japanese don’t burn it to the ground taking it. It means we’re not staying to find out how that goes.”
Helen was already gone, down at the surgical wing arguing with a supply sergeant about which crates of instruments would fit on which truck, and losing more of those arguments than she won. She came back an hour before dawn with soot on her sleeves and said nothing about it, only sat on her footlocker and smoked until the trucks were loaded.
Connie didn’t come back to the quarters at all that night. She appeared at the trucks at four in the morning, hollow-eyed, having spent the hours in between at her mother’s family’s house, and said only, “They’re staying. My uncle says someone has to be here when the Japanese arrive, and it might as well be people with nothing to hide.” She didn’t say anything else about it, then or for a long while after, and Ruth had learned by now not to ask twice.
~ ☆ ~
The road to Bataan was thirty-one miles of dust, retreating trucks, and a heat that made the air over the asphalt shimmer like something liquid. Convoys of soldiers walked alongside the nurses’ trucks in columns that stretched past sight in both directions—men who’d been garrison troops a month ago, sunburned and thirsty, carrying more gear than the retreat allowed them to keep for long.
Peg rode with a letter half-written in her lap that she never finished, because there was nowhere steady enough to rest a pen. She’d had one telephone call with her husband before the lines to Clark Field went dead for good, four sentences long, and she’d spent every hour since turning them over like stones in her pocket. He was alive. He was moving south with the rest of the ground crews. That was what four sentences could tell her, and it would have to hold.
Bea rode near the tailgate, watching the road behind them for planes, because someone had told her Japanese fighters had strafed a column near Angeles the day before, and she’d rather see one coming than not. “If they come,” she said, to nobody and everybody at once, “everybody off the truck and into the ditch. Don’t wait for an order. By the time somebody gives one it’ll be too late to use it.”
Nobody argued with her. Nobody had argued with her about much of anything since the truck accident in November, when six hours in a night ward had taught her something about triage that outranked her stripes.
They reached the peninsula by midafternoon and found not a hospital but the promise of one—tents going up in a clearing hacked out of jungle, generators that didn’t yet run, crates of supplies stacked without any order because there hadn’t been time to make one. Hospital Number One, someone called it, though it looked less like a hospital than a rumor of one, waiting for enough wounded to force it into being real.
It didn’t have to wait long.
~ ☆ ~
By January the wounded came faster than the tents could be raised to shelter them. Hospital Number One grew by the week—open-air wards under jungle canopy meant to break up the silhouette from the air, cots laid in rows that stretched further than any of them had trained to manage, until the count crept past a thousand patients and kept climbing.
Ruth learned to change a dressing by flashlight with her free hand cupped around the beam so it wouldn’t show through the canopy, learned the hush that fell over a ward in the seconds after they heard engines and before they knew whose engines they were. She learned, too, the sound Japanese dive bombers made distinct from their own planes—a whine that climbed instead of dropped—and how fast a body could move toward a slit trench once that whine started, wounded men included, some of them dragging their own IV poles because nobody had the hands to spare to help them.
The first time Hospital Number One took a direct hit, it was a supply tent, not a ward, and the only casualty was a mule. The second time, three weeks later, it was a ward, and it was not a mule.
Helen had four men on tables when the bombs came, mid-surgery, and made the decision in under two seconds that the ones already open couldn’t be moved and the ones who could walk should already be walking. She kept operating through the raid with a nurse holding a flashlight over her hands because the generator had died with the first concussion, and when it was over—four minutes, maybe five, though everyone who lived through it swore it lasted longer—two of her patients had survived surgery under an air raid and one had not, and Helen scrubbed out afterward without a word to anyone, her hands steady in a way that Ruth found more unsettling than shaking would have been.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.