Waking Up to War

Ruth Marie Straub

Among the other volunteers at Stotsenberg was Ruth Marie Straub, a quiet, square-faced woman who had joined the army in 1936 after graduating from Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, her hometown.

Ruth was somewhat of a mystery to her comrades. They remembered her as a quiet woman who spent hours writing letters to her mother, Elsie Straub.

On a troop transport to Manila, Ruth had met Glen M. Adler, an army pilot and a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles. Across the months that followed, she and Adler, both twenty-four years old at the time, fell in love and planned to marry. Adler, convinced that war was at hand and hoping to take advantage of an army regulation that allowed officers to send their wives home, was eager to wed right away. "But I wanted to wait until he could go with me," Straub said. So they delayed. Then the bombs started falling.

Adler was stationed at Clark Field, and when word reached Manila that the field had been hit, Straub was the first to raise her hand to go. That night, she also began to keep a diary.

The document shows her to be a sentimental and, at times, fragile woman. Some people by temperament are ill-equipped for war -- they feel it too deeply -- and Ruth Straub was one of these. At one point she suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized and sedated. Often in the face of such savagery the psyche simply 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.

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