Elizabeth M. Norman Read Online Free PDF Page A

shatters.
    Still, Ruth, the nurse, did her job, and every evening wrote in her little book.
[Straub Diary, December 8, 1941] News that Pearl Harbor had been bombed is here today. During a meeting of nurses and doctors Colonel Carroll announced that Clark Field had been bombed and that nurses and doctors were needed badly up there.
I had to volunteer. Thought I couldn’t wait to get there. Arrived at Stotsenberg at nightfall. The hospital was bedlam—amputations, dressings, intravenouses, blood transfusions, shock, death … Worked all night, hopped over banisters and slid under the hospital during raids. It was remarkable to see the medical staff at work. One doctor, a flight surgeon, had a head injury, but during the night he got up and went to the operating room to help with the other patients.
[December 9] Reported off duty tonight and several of us crawled into a cement enclosed cubicle under a hospital ward. It was damp, and the air was putrid, but we really slept. Pure exhaustion. The girls are taking this beautifully. 9

Chapter 2
    Manila Cannot Hold
    F OR THE NEXT six days the Japanese pounded the islands. By December 14, the end of the first week of the war, the U.S. naval base at Canacao, Fort Stotsenberg-Clark Field and Fort McKinley all lay in ruins.
    Sleepy little hospitals before the war, the army and navy clinics were now packed with wounded and dying men, and the military nurses and doctors in the islands were quickly becoming experts in trauma and triage, the medicine of war.
    The enemy kept up the raids. With each drone of an airplane engine, the nurses looked skyward to see enemy bombers flying in large V formations, like the wings of a giant bird of prey.
    In a sense the men had an easier time controlling their terror and dread; at least they could shoot back. The women, however, were left to manage the damage and loss, the awful inventory that battle always leaves.
    The casualties overflowed the wards and spilled into the corridors, then into lobbies and onto the verandas. When the hospitals ran out of room and out of beds and canvas cots, they put the wounded out on the lawns and nearby tennis courts, laying them on old doors and scraps of wood and corrugated roofing.
    There was so much trauma—so many wounds, so many dismembered limbs—that at one point, the nurses came to look on their labor with a dark irony: the bloody dressings, they said, made them think of the bright poinsettias that so typified their paradise.
    With each raid the nurses were made to work harder and longer, andsoon they were so tired, so enervated by the surgeries and rounds of duty, they turned numb with fatigue. A young navy nurse, looking up from an operating table into the darkness at the fires consuming the once beautiful naval base at Canacao, told herself, “If the Japanese would just come over and drop another load, this suffering would be over, mine included.” 1
    The ranking medical officers in Manila, Colonel Wibb Cooper and Dr. Percy Carroll, annexed the Saint Scholastica Girls School, the Jai Alai Club and other places and turned them into dispensaries and aid stations, creating what they called the Manila Hospital Center, with Sternberg at the hub. 2
[Straub Diary, December 10] This A.M . the commanding officer sent me to Manila on a special ambulance detail. Took four patients. Tried again to reach Glen before I left, but no success. Left word with the chaplain to tell Glen I would be back later in the day. Left about 11:15 A.M . Caught in an air raid alarm as we reached Clark Field. The patients, driver and I hid in some tall, dry grass. Wondered if the message I left for Glen had been delivered.
Arrived at Sternberg late P.M . Air raid sounded just as we came in. Saw 77 planes overhead on way to port area which they bombed. During the raid, Colonel Carroll called me to the office: “You’re not to go back to Stotsenberg. Your fiancé has been seriously injured.” Dead? No. Thought I would lose my mind.