Inside Malinta's Lateral Tunnel: Hospital Scene
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"I had a job to do. I was a nurse." Her name is Mildred Manning, the only daughter of a Jefferson, Ga., farming family. She arrived in the Philippines 6 weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Only hours after Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec 7, 1941, American military bases in the Philippines also were heavily bombarded. "We immediately went on duty, & injured soldiers started coming in." A week later, most of the nurses were sent to Bataan where, by Jan 1942, 4 hospitals had been set up amid constant bombing raids. Before long, Manning was among a group of nurses who set up an open-air hospital in the jungle to escape the unrelenting pounding of the hospital buildings. But the blasts followed them there. By April 9, the military decided to surrender Bataan, & the nurses were evacuated to Corregidor. Manning remembers the morning they were forced to say goodbye to the 8,800 wounded they had been tending. The tiny island of Corregidor would soon accommodate 12,000 allied war personnel. "It was a small island, mostly rock, with a big tunnel & side tunnels cut into it. We set up a hospital inside the main part of the tunnel. It was dreadful, & I can't stand to be in confined places today. When we first got there, it was all green outside the tunnel. When we left, months later, there wasn't even a leaf after all the bombing," Manning says. 85 Army nurses worked in the Malinta Tunnel enclosure, constantly shaken by bombs, where Manning says for a time they were accompanied by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his wife & son. When the Americans surrendered Corregidor to the Japanese a few months later, the nurses were sent by the Japanese to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. They would remain there as POWs for the next 3 years, the first American military women ever imprisoned. ~~~Taken from http://allnurses.com/success-stories-nur sing/wwii-nurse-pow-75880.html
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