Waking Up to War

"They've Bombed Honolulu"

Monday, December 8, 1941, just before dawn. Mary Rose "Red" Harrington was working the graveyard shift at Canacao Naval Hospital. Through the window and across the courtyard she saw lights come on in the officers quarters and heard loud voices. What, she wondered, were all those men doing up so early? And what were they yelling about? A moment later a sailor in a T-shirt burst through the doors of her ward.

They've bombed Honolulu!

Bombed Honolulu? What the hell was he talking about, Red thought.

Across Manila Bay, General Richard Sutherland woke his boss, General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander in the Pacific, to tell him that the Imperial Japanese Navy had launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Later they would learn the details: nineteen American ships, including six battle wagons, the heart of the Pacific fleet, had been scuttled, and the Japanese had destroyed more than a hundred planes; through it all, several thousand soldiers and sailors had been killed or badly wounded.

After months of rumor, inference and gross miscalculation, the inconceivable, the impossible had happened. The Japanese had left the nucleus of the U.S. Pacific fleet twisted and burning. America was at war and the military was reeling.

Juanita Redmond, an army nurse at Sternberg Hospital in Manila, was just finishing her morning paperwork. Her shift would soon be over. One of her many beaus had invited her for an afternoon of golf and she planned a little breakfast and perhaps a nap beforehand. The telephone rang; it was her friend, Rosemary Hogan of Chattanooga, Oklahoma.

The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

"Thanks for trying to keep me awake," Redmond said. "But that simply isn't funny."

"I'm not being funny," Hogan insisted. "It's true."

As the reports of American mass casualties spread through the hospital that morning, a number of nurses who had close friends stationed in Honolulu broke down and wept.

"Girls! Girls!" Josie Nesbit shouted, trying to calm her staff. "Girls, you've got to sleep today. You can't weep and wail over this, because you have to work tonight."

Some slipped off alone to their rooms while others rushed to a bank to cable money home. Two women, apparently resigned to whatever fate was going to bring, shrugged their shoulders and strolled over to the Army and Navy Club to go bowling.

At Fort Mills Hospital on the island fortress of Corregidor, Eleanor Garen and the rest of the night-shift nurses headed for the post restaurant for a cup of coffee or a glass of Coke. Their custom was to sit and relax after work, but on this particular morning they were chatty and impatient. Would war come to the Philippines? they wondered.

The news so concerned Eleanor that she took out a pencil and slip of paper and started a shopping list -- supplies she considered important in case of an emergency: Noxema face cream, tooth powder, a comb, bath towel, shampoo, Kleenex, chocolate candy and another pair of lieutenant's bars.

At Fort McKinley Hospital just outside Manila, the day-shift nurses, doctors and medical staff were issued steel helmets and gas masks. Two women coming off the night shift stuffed their helmets and masks in their golf bags and headed for the links.

None of the nurses knew it, of course, but the war was already on its way to them.

Two hundred miles north of the capital, in the cool mountain air of Baguio, Ruby Bradley, a thirty-four-year-old career army nurse on duty at Camp John Hay Hospital, was busy sterilizing the instruments she would need for her first case, a routine hysterectomy.

All at once a soldier appeared at the door and summoned her to headquarters. No surgery that morning, she was told; the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor, the high command was convinced the Philippine Islands would be next, and Baguio, the most important military and commercial center in northern Luzon, might be one of the enemy's first targets.

Bradley stood there stunned, almost unable to move. What did it mean? she asked herself. Was the hospital truly in danger? Surely the Japanese would not waste their ordnance on such an up-country post. She reported to the surgeon's office for further instruction.

Then the bombs began to fall.

The first hit so close the explosion left their ears ringing. Nurse and doctor ran to the window. Airplanes with big red circles on their wings and fuselage were coming in low, so low Bradley was sure she could see the pilots staring down at her. By instinct she glanced at her watch -- it was 8:19 A.M., December 8, 1941. Scuttlebutt was now substance; war had come to the Philippines.

A few minutes later the first casualties started to crowd the wards and hallways at John Hay Hospital. A civilian dependent named Susan Dudley and her year-old son had been out walking and were severely wounded in the attack. A Filipino passerby snatched up the wounded boy and rushed him to the receiving room. Bradley could see that the child was in bad shape; his face was blue -- clearly something was wrong with his heart -- and his kneecap seemed to be shattered. Bradley felt herself starting to flinch. She was a sturdy and experienced clinician, but even years of practice had not prepared her for something like this. Her heart raced, her stomach started to tighten.

The doctor on duty tried giving the boy oxygen, then he and Bradley took turns at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but nothing worked, and it was clear that the child was slipping away.

Leave him, the doctor ordered. The wounded were beginning to mount, he said, and they had no time to linger over a dying child.

Bradley balked. "How about a stimulant in the heart?" she said, imploring him.

The doctor thought for a moment; it was probably hopeless, he said, but if Bradley wanted to try it, she should do it herself.

The needle was six inches long; if she plunged it into the wrong place in the baby's heart she would instantly kill him. Meanwhile the boy was turning a deeper shade of blue, and the nurse, watching him wane, was growing angry and afraid. Then, looking around the room, she hit on an idea. In the medicine cabinet she spotted a bottle of whiskey and, remembering that liquor was sometimes effective as a heart stimulant, she took a piece of gauze, laced it with some sugar, soaked it in whiskey, and stuck it in the boy's mouth. At first the baby did nothing. Then, slowly, he started to suck, harder, and harder, until, at last, blue gave way to white, white to pink, pink to crying.

"Where's my baby? Where's my baby?" his mother yelled from her bloody gurney. Bomb fragments had shattered the woman's legs and she faced certain amputation.

"You hear him in there yelling?" said the nurse, bending over her. "Well, he's... he's all right now."

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