Waking Up to War

Helen Cassiani

Early on the morning of December 8, army nurse Helen Cassiani, "Cassie" to her friends, reported for her regular shift at the ear, nose and throat clinic at Sternberg Hospital in Manila. At twenty-four she was pretty and bright, with dark, curly hair down to her neck, a round face and an inviting smile. She had been in paradise only some six weeks, but already she was taken with the place -- the exotic trips, the spectacular landscape, the impassioned encounters. Now suddenly "public events and private lives had become inseparable," crowding out a future she had been planning for a long time.

When word of the bombings at Baguio, Stotsenberg and Clark reached Manila, the nurses at Sternberg Hospital began to wonder whether the capital would be next. And now someone came through the wards spreading word that an invasion force had been spotted; General Masaharu Homma's 14th Army was streaming toward the Philippines to launch a ground attack.

Headquarters tried to reassure everyone that Manila was safe, but the assurances sounded empty, and Cassie, a bit stunned by the turn of events and somewhat bitter that her tour in paradise was about to turn into an exercise in anxiety and distress, went about her tasks like an automaton, shifting without thinking from one little job to the next. Soon her feet began to hurt and she got a helluva headache.

At 2:00 pm the thirty-five doctors and thirty-seven nurses at Sternberg were ordered to a meeting with their commanding officer, Colonel Percy Carroll. Aides passed out gas masks and issued instructions on their use. The Japanese, the colonel explained, were known to use a variety of poison gases. Cassie, listening carefully, began to feel a little dizzy.

At that point an aide rushed into the room and summoned the colonel to a telephone. A few minutes later he returned; Cassie thought he looked pale and seemed to be struggling to maintain his self-control.

The commanding officer at Fort Stotsenberg had just called him, the colonel said. It seemed the attack there had been a disaster for the Americans, and the medical staff desperately needed more nurses, preferably women with surgical skills. The colonel said that he and Maude Davison had decided to send five army nurses from Sternberg and fifteen Filipino nurses from local hospitals north to Stotsenberg. Were there any volunteers?

The room was quiet. All at once, a nurse whose fiancé was stationed at Clark Air Field raised her hand. Then came another, and another, and one more after that. Davison waited; she needed a fifth. Who would it be? Cassie looked around the room, studying the faces of her colleagues. She wanted to go, wanted to be part of what was unfolding, this great historical convulsion. But she was afraid. Then, as if acting on its own, her hand went up, and before she had time to think, she was collecting her helmet and gas mask and heading toward a bus that would take her to war.

She was, at heart, a farm girl, and like many farm girls, she had a capacity for hard work and a curiosity about the ways of the world.

Her parents, Sarah, a diminutive woman, and Peter, well over six feet, had left their Tuscany village as newlyweds and arrived in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, with plans to build a new life. Peter Cassiani worked in a foundry at first, then saved enough money to buy a five-acre chicken farm at 54 High Street, a plot of ground surrounded by two-story houses filled with Irish immigrants. The Irish, of course, resented the newcomers -- "the wops on High Street," the neighborhood called the Cassianis -- but as Peter and Sarah began to have children, and as those four children exposed the family to the neighborhood and brought the ways of the new world into the family's house, the Italian Cassianis and their Irish neighbors made peace.

Born on January 26, 1917, Helen, or "Eleana," as her mother liked to call her, was an outgoing girl with dark brown hair, deep brown eyes and an easy laugh. As the youngest of the four, she had the benefit of her siblings' experience and the gift of their attention. Her older sister, Rose, for example, once bought Cassie a doll with money Rose earned selling soap bars door to door, and one of her brothers, Louis, a minor-league shortstop, taught her to play baseball and gave her a lifelong love of the game.

When her siblings were grown and gone, Cassie spent part of each day helping her father with the farm chores. She loved her father and flourished in his company. They built chicken coops together, repaired fences, fixed farm implements. "I learned the busy end of a hammer," she said.

Her father was not an educated man but he tried to turn his farmyard into a kind of school for his daughter. To be a farmer, he taught her, was to learn to deal with the unpredictable and unexpected. A farmer, he said, had to know how to size up a problem and quickly find a solution. She listened closely and learned well; it was a skill that would later help her survive.

Cassie found pleasure in the hauling and hard labor and often used the work as an excuse to ignore her studies. She was smart enough, curious too, but no one had ever taught her how to study, and, untutored as she was, school work was often overwhelming, and her lack of skill left her feeling embarrassed. Then one day two friends from the neighborhood sat her down in the library and showed her how to study. Soon she acquired the habit of reading -- history, science, stories. Somewhere in all those books an idea took hold of her. "I became fascinated with illness and taking care of people," she said. And after high school, with some money she had saved and a little help from her parents, she moved to Boston and entered the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital School of Nursing.

Then tragedy struck. Her father, in a freak accident, died of carbon monoxide poisoning and, concerned for her mother, she considered leaving school and returning to the farm. She wrote home often that semester, always in Italian, reassuring her mother that she would not forget the family or her roots.

After graduation Cassie joined the Red Cross. That winter, January 1941, the army, desperate for nurses, invoked a provision of the mandatory national military service law that allowed it to mobilize Red Cross professionals, and Helen Cassiani became a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant in the Army Reserves.

She was assigned to the hospital at Camp Edwards in Hyannis, Massachusetts. It was routine duty, too routine for someone so self-possessed, someone who "was out to experience as much as I could." So she put in for a transfer.

A week or so later she went home to tell her mother. She had to deliver her news cautiously, for Sarah Cassiani had just had a heart attack.

So Cassie laid it out a bit at a time. She had put in for a transfer, she said... a transfer overseas... the transfer had been approved... she would be going soon, going overseas ... overseas to the Pacific... to the Philippines... the Philippine Islands.

"You're going where?" her mother said. She looked bewildered. Why was her daughter going half a world away?

Cassie tried to reassure her. "Let's face it, Mom -- did you know what was going to happen to you when you left Italy and came to this country? Did you know what was in store for you? No, but you came."

Sarah sat in silence for a while, and Cassie was sure her mother would try to persuade her to stay, plead loneliness, perhaps, or invoke her ill health.

At length she leaned forward.

"I'll pray for you," she said.

And that was that.

In August 1941, less than four months before the first bombs fell on paradise, Sarah Cassiani kissed her daughter goodbye and bid her bon voyage. It was to be their last embrace; they would never again set eyes on each other.

Copyright © 1999 by Elizabeth Norman. All rights reserved. Converted for the Web with the permission of Simon & Schuster.