Free Elizabeth M. Norman by We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan Page B

blanket of damp earth. Soon there would be a graves registration unit and a cemetery on a hill to the southeast.
    That first week of the new year, 150 military patients who had been part of the final exodus from Sternberg Hospital in the Christmas retreat arrived after a journey that took them from Manila to Corregidor by one boat, then by another to Bataan. An admitting physician looked at these travel-worn stretcher cases with a strange kind of awe; it was the first time, he said, that someone had decided to evacuate patients toward the front line instead of away from it.
    Accompanying the group were five doctors, two dentists, two supplyofficers and Josie Nesbit, the perfect choice to lead the staff of nineteen nurses at Hospital #2. Even before the shooting started, Nesbit, who had been working in an underground hospital on Corregidor, had proven herself an agile administrator and leader and had won the respect of almost every woman under her command.
    Nesbit was handed her assignment on Corregidor by Colonel Wibb Cooper, the chief medical officer in the Philippines. “Colonel,” she said, “if you want to send me out there to be in charge of a hospital, don’t you think I should be promoted?” 10 Indeed he did, and Josie Nesbit arrived in the jungle a newly minted first lieutenant.
    Privately, however, she doubted herself and worried whether, at the age of forty-seven, she had enough endurance to organize the care of thousands in a jungle hospital. “Admittedly,” she said, “I tired more quickly and much of the stamina I had in the past may have been somewhat lacking when we withdrew to the combat zone on Bataan, but … there was absolutely no time for self-pity.” 11
    J OSÉPHINE NESBIT, SECOND in command of the army nurses in the Philippines in 1941, was as resolute and uncompromising as her superior, Maude Davison, but no two women could have been more different.
    Everyone, from the most junior nurse to the most senior surgeon, called Lieutenant Nesbit “Josie.” A formidable-looking woman from Missouri, she was tall and large-framed with brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a size thirteen shoe. But her bearing hardly matched her demeanor. She had an almost maternal affinity for the women under her—“my girls,” she called them in a voice of reassurance and understanding. Indeed the Filipino nurses referred to her as “Mama Josie.”
    Born on December 23, 1894, on a farm near Butler, Missouri, Josie was the seventh of ten children. It was a hard life that took its toll. Her parents died early, and by the age of twelve, Josie was an orphan living first with a grandmother and later with a cousin in Kansas.
    She left high school at sixteen, went into nurse’s training with a sister and in early 1914 became a registered nurse. Four years later, an army recruiter traveled to Kansas City, hoping to recruit nurses to help with an influenza epidemic that was decimating the ranks of the military, and on October 1, 1918, Josie Nesbit became Reserve Army Nurse N700665.
    She was first stationed at Camp Logan Hospital near Houston, Texas, and in the years that followed she lived the life of a military nurse,a good life free from want and filled with interesting work and adventure.
    She hiked the American Rockies, worked in Hawaii, rode a camel in Egypt through the Valley of the Kings. She did two tours in the Philippines. During the first, on maternity duty, she befriended the wife of an officer, who persuaded her “to go on a 12-day hike with them from Baguio up through Ifugao country to the region of the famous rice terraces. Those RICE TERRACES were such a beautiful sight when we arrived at the top of them at sunset, that tears came to my eyes!” 12
    When she returned to the Philippines in the summer of 1941, she was named Maude Davison’s assistant. She was a well-traveled forty-six-year-old second lieutenant with twenty-two years of military service.
    On Bataan she worked herself to exhaustion, roaming