I'm talking about the Army and Navy nurses who were in the Philippines when World War II began, who surrendered to the Japanese and are the largest...

That's the picture taken of the Army nurses when they were liberated from Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. They're on their way out of camp.

It grew out of two sources. My mother served in the SPARs in World War II. And I was always very interested in her time in uniform. Everybody's dads...

He did. My husband served in the Marine Corps in 1968 in Vietnam, and, therefore, I was always very interested in war because of him.

I now teach--I run the doctoral program in nursing and teach in it at New York University.

Again, there are two reasons for that. First, I had to work on it part time. I was working full time in higher education, raising children and doing...

I would talk about Cassie or Helen Nestor, as she's known. Cassie lives in Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, and she really embodies, to me,...

That was taken--I took that in the early 1990s when I first went to meet her. And she's sitting in her favorite rocking chair right by the farmhouse...

She's a daughter of Italian immigrants, grew up in Massachusetts in a town called Bridgewater, wasn't a particularly scholarly child, a bit of a tomboy,...

Her adventure was she went over there in peacetime, spent a whole five weeks in the Philippines before the bombs started to fall, and wound up the first...

She arrived in the Philippines in the very late October of 1941, and, of course, the war started there December 8th, 1941. It's the same day as Pearl...

The first bomb dropped in a place called Baguio, which is in northern Luzon, at a small Army camp. There was an Army nurse there named Ruby Bradley....

Well, Ruby Bradley was up that morning getting ready for a routine surgical case. She said she was scrubbing in the operating room for a hysterectomy....

Well, the first thing--and it's actually one of my favorite stories in the book. You know, the casualties were enormous, and she and the surgeon ran...

She put the stimulant on a piece of gauze with some sugar, stuck it in the baby's mouth, he started sucking, and he was revived by the whiskey. They...

That's Eleanor Garen. She's from Indiana. She was really the intellect in the group of nurses, very well read on foreign policy. Eleanor tended to keep...

No. Eleanor died about three years ago.

I did. A friend of mine spent a lot of time with her. I had difficulty getting out to Indiana for--there was a--for financial reasons. And a friend...

Oh, that's Red Harrington, or Mrs. Mary Nelson. She lived nearby here in Virginia. She was a Navy nurse, and she was as beautiful as a movie star when...

Yes, many times.

I was so worried when I first started these interviews, and I'm thinking, `My God, I'm asking people to recall memories from 50 years ago.' I just didn't...

Well, there are 77 prisoner of war nurses, plus 20 who got out, a little more; 99 nurses were involved in this. I spoke to 20 of them directly.

Douglas MacArthur was in Manila the day the war broke out. He was in his suite in the Manila Hotel. And for whatever reason--and other historians have...

First, he left Manila for the island of Corregidor, which is in the mouth of Manila Bay. And he was there from December until March, when the president...

I would say about half the time. There are some nurses who forgive him and just write it off to things that happen in war, but there are other nurses...

Yes. Well, think about that. The American forces under General King and Wainwright surrendered in April and May. It was the largest...

1942. It was the largest surrender of American forces ever, I mean, if you exclude the Confederacy in the Civil War. And the troops were just being--they...

Well, they were able--after Bataan fell in early April 1942, the nurses were sent off the Bataan Peninsula across two miles of water to this island...

Well, the Americans and Filipinos were grouped together. It was all an American force. And there were 72,000 troops in the American and Filipino troops....

Yes, it is. It's part of the largest island called Luzon, which is the northern Philippine island.

It's very small. It's about three miles long, and it's shaped like a tadpole. I was on it in January and was just amazed at the small size of it. There...

After General King surrendered to the Japanese on Bataan, they--Japanese wanted to capture Corregidor, which, as you could see on that map, was at the...

The distance was 65 miles. And the numbers are a little--frankly, they're kind of fuzzy 'cause records have been lost, but there were about 62,000 troops...

Again, estimates are tough. They figure about 8,000 to 10,000 died on the march. The vast majority were Filipinos, but there were many, many hundreds...

That picture was taken on Bataan during the Battle of Bataan, most likely taken in March. It's at one of the hospitals that the nurses set up, but it...

Number one was originally on the seacoast of Bataan, but it was moved inland when the Japanese started bombing, and it was in a mountain region--a mountainous...

Yes.

It was called Malinta Tunnel, and it was built in the 1930s to store things. And once the Japanese started bombing, the forces moved underground. There...

The tunnels--the main tunnel was so big, it was well over--it had a--it had a hosp--it had a tram going through it for a--a trolley. And it was well...

Well, there were--each different--the Navy had a section in it. There were men living in it. The hospital had 1,000 beds, to give you an idea of that...

It was built in--it was started in 1932--it was started in the late '20s, early '30s. And it took several years...

The American engineers built it.

There's an airfield--Corregidor looks like a tadpole, and the very tip of the tadpole there was an airfield. They were having trouble getting supplies...

The main tunnel is open. And what they have there, it's rather Disneylike. It's called a sound and light show. And some of the laterals have been restored...

There's very little on Bataan. The death march route--there used to be markers every kilometer, but now there's only four for the whole 65-mile hike....

That was taken during the war. That's actually where the nurses lived. They were able to get some canvas shelter halves for some protection, but they...

No, they were inside the tunnel, so, therefore, they rarely saw night and day, so they had an underground molelike existence.

One of the problems with Corregidor, not surprisingly, is that they had a lot of respiratory ailments, breathing that air in the tunnel, and also they...

Dengue fever is called breakback fever. Your bones ache. The nurses who had it say it is probably like the worst case of the flu you could ever imagine....

High fever, shivering, sweats, really an inability to--you don't want to eat. You can't sleep. It's just very serious. There's different types. The...

Original in the...

I would say 80 percent of this is very original. First of all, no one had talked to these nurses before.

Ever. The Army Nurse Corps had done some oral history in the early 1980s, and there was some good material in that. But I was able--'cause I didn't...

That picture is the Army nurses on their way home. They've been liberated. It's 1945, probably early March. And if you look at them, you can see their...

A little--right there. Your thumb's right on her.

She was 60 years old and in very bad shape from the starvation diet they were on.

She did. She went home and was discharged--medical discharge because of her health. And she met a man who had been widowed, a man she knew as a young...

No, Maude was not the way we look at our leaders today. Maude was not a touchy-feely kind of leader. She really embodied what went on in the early part...

That is--the Navy nurse that you pointed to is Peg Nash. The Navy nurses, there were 11 of them who were prisoners of war. That was taken at Oak Knoll...

Jeannette MacDonald, the famous movie star and actress and singer. She was at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital visiting wounded sailors and Marines. When she...

Your finger was just pointed at her.

You can just--if you look at their eyes and their faces, they're very thin, they're not well, and here's this glamorous actress next to them.

I asked them that. I said, `Weren't you envious, angry? How did you feel?' And Peg Nash told me this, she said, `We were so happy to be alive, so happy...

Well, we were just--we were unprepared. We were completely unprepared for the Japanese. The Americans had a sense that, you know, we were an omnipotent...

Well, imagine you're in a jungle that's as thick and as difficult as any in the world. There's no sanitation. There's not enough food. The Japanese...

There were probably about 40 doctors on Bataan--Army physicians. And there was one Navy doctor who was there with one Navy nurse.

They were all outside. I mean, they did have--we have that one shot of a sort of a garage that was a tin roof, but that was it. There were no buildings...

They did bring supplies with them, and they did have quite enough anesthetics at first. That's a shot of one of the patient wards, and you can see they're...

They were on Bataan right from the beginning, from Christmas of 1941 until the night Bataan--they knew they were going to surrender, which was the night...

It was traumatic. The chief nurses of the two hospitals were called in by their physicians who ran them and said, `You've got 10 minutes. Tell the nurses...

Well, the patients were basically left by the Japanese in the hospitals for a short time, but then the Filipino patients were made to get up and leave,...

It was north of Bataan--there was a town called Capas, and there were two camps there, O'Donnell and Cabanatuan, and tens of thousands of men died there....

He's a journalist and a writer, and he teaches journalism at New York University.

A year and a half. I had been at another university and just went over there.

Rutgers University in New Jersey.

I graduated from college with my degree in nursing in 1973.

Rutgers in New Jersey, and have my bachelor's degree from there. I have my master's and PhD in nursing from NYU.

I have a 20-year-old. We're becoming a real NYU family. He's a junior there. He's going into his senior year. And I have a 12-year-old boy.

Well, we're deep in the middle of it now. He's in the Philippines right now doing work. We're just dividing up the work in terms of the interviews....

Well, we hope to have a first draft done a year from December.

It came from Shakespeare. I spent a long time agonizing about that. It's from "Henry V." There's a speech that the king gives prior to a battle that...

The women, they like it, because it was a term they felt given to them by the men they served with, and they loved these men. Nurses in general, the...

The nurses were in Malinta Tunnel, which we just looked at.

After the surrender, they were in Malinta Tunnel.

Oh, they started out--when they went to the Philippines, they served at many--there were several Army and Navy hospitals in the Philippines.

The war starts. All of the outsiding--outlying bases are destroyed by the Japanese. Everybody comes into Manila. They then realize they can't hold Manila....

They went to Corregidor. There was concern about these women on Bataan. They knew they were going to surrender. And remember, the rape of Nanking had...

That was when the Japanese troops entered the city of Nanking and, again, just like the death march, this crazy evil took over, and they spent systematically...

They were not. There was an attempted rape on Corregidor by a Japanese soldier after the surrender. One of the things the nurses--and they had no guideline...

Yes. It was Mary Brown Menzie.

She's alive, but she doesn't keep in touch with any of the other nurses, so I did not interview her.

They were in the tunnel till it surrendered on May 3rd. And then the Japanese, when they saw these nurses, they were shocked. They did not know what...

They got them off Corregidor. They moved them to Manila, and they put them in a university, you can see in the photo, called Santo Tomas University...

It's a wall that completely surrounded--Santo Tomas University was almost uniquely set up to be a prison camp. It was completely surrounded by wall...

Tomas. Well, the Japanese would--were rounding people up in Manila and the other Philippine islands, the enemy aliens, and they would deliver them to...

Well, the--Santo Tomas was a civilian camp. There were not supposed to be military personnel in there. But these Army and Navy nurses always thought...

They didn't even have uniforms, so they had some bolts of khaki cloth or Navy denim cloth, and they made their own uniforms. So they were taking care...

That was taken--they set up a camp hospital. That was Peg Nash, the nurse we saw standing next to Jeannette MacDonald. About five days a Japanese soldier...

The first two years--1942, 1943--they had civilian Japanese running the camps. They allowed these people to barter with the Filipinos, Filipinos to...

That's a deficiency where your--a protein deficiency where--there's two types. There's a wet beriberi where your limbs swell up enormously and you can't...

There was a very active underground that certain Filipinos were involved in and the priests. For a long time, the priests--and it's a Catholic country,...

Yes, that's Eleanor Garen, the elderly woman. She's in the back on the left-hand side very clearly holding hands. This was a group going over together....

There were three women who would not talk to me, including the woman I just mentioned who--there was an attempted rape on Corregidor. She hasn't talked...

The liberation came in February 1945. It was very dramatic. MacArthur--they were very worried about these prisoners. They were afraid the Japanese were...

Well...

The women told me that story. They clearly remembered it. They remembered--their rooms in the prison camp faced the main gate where the American tanks...

Carl Mydans had been in the Philippines when the war began. He had been on Bataan and Corregidor. He was able to get out. However, he wanted to go back....

The toughest moment for me would be watching the women cry. I didn't think you could cry over memories that were 50 to 55 years old. And that was very...

At this point--and they're, unfortunately, dying quite quickly now. The average age is about 85. There are a little more than a dozen alive in all different...

The woman with the hat is Red Harrington. We saw an earlier picture of her.

She died last June. She died just a month ago. And the husband whom she met in camp died in late April. This was taken at Arlington National Cemetery....

These women just forged paths that nobody even ever imagined women could forge--nurses. When they were liberated, they all received a Bronze Star and...

You know, they're not bitter. I expected to find that from day one--angry at the Japanese--if there's any bitterness, it was towards our unpreparedness...

Mm-hmm.

That was Mary Brown Menzie, the woman who had the attempted rape on Corregidor.

Oh, that was Ida--I'm gonna say her--I'm gonna pronounce her name incorrectly--it's such a--Haentsche. She was a German national...

...who was a member of the Army Nurse Corps in the turn of the century. At that time, you didn't have to be an American citizen to be a member of the...

I wrote one book prior to this called "Women at War," the story of 50 military nurses who served in Vietnam.

A different kind of book in that it focused on all the services in the entire war, so it had a much broader scope. And this book just focused on the...

They were just different. I can't say one was harder than the other. The Vietnam book was harder because I was thinking--I'm that generation, and I...

Hail.

Well, there's a company in Hollywood that has optioned the book and they're working on it now. It's--remains to be seen. Just don't know yet.

They did not like "So Proudly We Hail!," which many critics and scholars feel is one of the best movies about women to come out of World War II. The...

Yes, that's Eunice Hatchitt Tyler. She was one of the lucky women to be evacuated off Corregidor before surrender, so she came home, and the Army sent...

That was taken at Arlington National Cemetery. There is a nurses cemetery there, and that statue is called the Spirit of Nursing. It was dedicated originally...

The main thing I want people to take from this book is that what these women have showed us is that they were there, they didn't ask to go to war. The...

There's so much that's changed. The reliance on the reserve corps now to carry a lot of the mission in wartime, and also at that time the nurses were...

I did not, and that's a question everybody asks me. But I didn't. It's just through my parents, through my husband, Michael, I just have an abiding...

I think the military could--there are great lessons here about preparedness. There are great lessons here about the ability of troops to survive and...

No. This is the first time. There's been--snippets of the nurses' story has been told in the movies and in articles, but no one's told the whole story...

At Santo Tomas University in Manila. The nurses have been liberated from three years in prison camp, and they're on trucks getting ready to go home.

Thank you.