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Professor ELIZABETH M. NORMAN (Author, "We Band of Angels"): 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 group of American women POWs in the history of our country.

LAMB: Where's this picture from?

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

LAMB: And where did you get the idea for this book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 served in World War II, but not too many
mothers. So I had that interest. And I'm a nurse. I had done a book
about nurses who'd served in the Vietnam War and was very interested
in the contradiction, really, between nurses whose mission is to save
lives being put in a--a world of war where the mission is to kill.
The contradiction fascinated me.

LAMB: I notice your husband has something to do with all this.

Prof. NORMAN: 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.

LAMB: And where do you do nursing now, teaching?

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

LAMB: Eight years, it says in this book, that you wrote that it took
to write this. Why did it take so long?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 this in my spare time. And the other
reason, the material about these women is scattered all over the
country and in garages and basements, and I knew it would take me a
very long time to find it. And it did.

LAMB: I know you've done a lot of interviewing. Before we kind of
get the whole picture here, pick one of the nurses and talk about her.

Prof. NORMAN: I would talk about Cassie or Helen Nester, as she's
known. Cassie lives in Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, and
she really embodies, to me, what these nurses are. She is bright.
She's funny. She's the most humane person. And underneath what looks
like such an ordinary woman just is a very, very brave and courageous
woman.

LAMB: We have a picture from the book. When was this taken?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 kitchen where she lives. And...

LAMB: Who--who--who is she?

Prof. NORMAN: 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, as she called herself, but she
decided to go to nursing school because she liked working with people.
She graduated in 1938. And at that time nurses were able to join the
Red Cross, and the Red Cross was almost used as a reserve force for
the Army nurses. When things began to build up in the early 1940s,
Cassie was sent into th--she became a member of the Army Nurse Corps,
reserve status. She went to work in Massachusetts at an Army base and
really had an itch to be where there was action, wanted to get out of
Massachusetts, wanted to see the world, and she volunteered for duty
in the Philippines. And as she said to me, `I wanted to have an
adventure. I had a little bit more than I bargained for.'

LAMB: What was her adventure?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 day of the war volunteering for duty
in Clark Field in the Philippines, which was destroyed. And, again,
in the blink of an eye, she went from sort of a fun-loving, very nice
young woman into a nurse who was working in an operating room working
with trauma and damage that she never thought she'd ever see.

LAMB: When did she arrive in the Philippines?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 Harbor, but across the international
date line.

LAMB: When did they first have a bomb drop on them in the
Philippines?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. And the first bombs fell in the Philippines
about six hours after they first started to drop on Pearl Harbor, so
it was almost immediate.

LAMB: What did they do?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. And a--a soldier came to the door
and said, `Stop. There's not going to be any surgery today.' She
couldn't figure out what was going on. He said, `Go to the surgeon's
office.' She went over to meet the surgeon whom she'd worked with, and
he said, `Look, I've just been notified they've bombed Pearl Harbor.
They may bomb us at any time.' She said at that moment, they heard the
drone of the planes. They went to the window, 'cause they didn't
know, looked out, and there was a whole squad of Japanese Zer--Zeroes
coming in on the base dropping bombs.

LAMB: What happened next?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to the operating room. The first case to
come in was a little boy. He'd been out walking with his mother that
morning, just a normal Monday morning, and he was in very bad shape.
He was in shock, he was blue. And they tried to revive him any way
they could. They weren't having any success. So the surgeon turned
to her and said, `Look, we've got too many people to deal with here.
We've got to let him go.' Well, Ruby--and I understand this as a nurse
and a mother--just couldn't do it. She said, `Please, one more try.'
He said, `You do something.' So he handed her the needle, which
the--they often will inject into the heart to get it going, and the
needle is about six inches long. It's not like we'd usually get put
in our arms. She couldn't do it. But she looked over across the
operating room, and she saw a bottle of whiskey, which was sometimes
used in the old days as a stimulant. And she put the stimulant--she's
not on that page...

LAMB: That's all right. Go ahead.

Prof. NORMAN: 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 operated on him and saved his life. The
next person to come into the operating room was his mother, and she's
screaming and crying, `Where's my baby? Where's my baby?' And Ruby
went up to her and said, `Do you hear him? He's just fine.'

LAMB: Who's this lady right here?

Prof. NORMAN: That's Eleanor Garron. She's from Indiana. She was
really the intellect in the group of nurses, very well read on foreign
policy. Eleanor tended to keep her intellect quiet and her
thoughts--she was the one who knew the Japanese were going to come,
but said nothing. And the interesting thing about Eleanor is after
surrender, she kept a diary, but not of her own thoughts and feelings;
she copied poetry from the famous poets and from Aristotle, various
thoughts that captured what she felt. So it's a fascinating diary.

LAMB: Is she alive?

Prof. NORMAN: No. Eleanor died about three years ago.

LAMB: Did you talk to her?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 of mine went out and did all the
interviews for her.

LAMB: And who is this right here?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 she was a young woman. Mary, or Red as
they called her, was a real spirited young woman, met her future
husband when he was a prisoner of war in Los Banos interment camp.
And they married and lived in Virginia for 57 years. Both of them
just died within the last three months.

LAMB: Did you talk to her?

Prof. NORMAN: Yes, many times.

LAMB: And what was the reaction when you would sit and talk to
somebody and talk about something that happened in 1941, '2, '3, '4?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 know if they'd be able to.
M--Mary Nelson, Red, the person we just looked at, she was one of the
first, and within 10 minutes of talking to her, my fears were
completely put aside. This experience was so intense and just
the--the turning point in their lives, they remembered everything
about it. These women and other war veterans, I noticed, follow a
pattern when you talk to them. They'll tell you very funny stories at
first, and then they'll watch you carefully, and they'll listen to the
questions that you ask. And if they see you're interested, you
believe them and you've prepared a little bit, they'll start to open
up. And that's what happened with every one of the women that I
talked to.

LAMB: Total number of people that are in your book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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.

LAMB: Go back to the story about Baguio at--in 1941. Where was
Douglas MacArthur then?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 written books about it--there was a
delay really in letting the troops know exactly how near the Japanese
offensive might have been. So Clark Field was destroyed. Baguio was
bombed. Everything happened. And MacArthur was in his headquarters
at that time.

LAMB: When did he leave for Australia?

Prof. NORMAN: He--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 ordered him out of the
Philippines to Australia. The controversy about that is that the
troops--and the nurses were with the troops--they were fighting in the
jungles of Bataan and on Corregidor, and MacArthur left, and he left
his troops. So there's a lot of feeling about that. Some people
think, `Well, he was just obeying orders, so you can't fault him for
that.' But other people say, `Wait a minute. I mean, he left. He
took people with him. He left 77 women behind to surrender to the
Japanese.' And these were American nurses with absolutely no training.
They didn't even have uniforms to go into the field, and he left them
behind.

LAMB: How often did one of the nurses you talked to say something
negative about General MacArthur?

Prof. NORMAN: I would say about half the time. There are some
nurses who forgive him and just--just write it off to things that
happen in war, but there are other nurses who felt that, as a result
of his leadership or his lack of insight, that he really--what
he--what happened to the Americans left in the Philippines is a real
di--was a disaster.

LAMB: Did I notice in your book a little twinge of irritation when
you say he got the congressional Medal of Honor when he was in
Australia?

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

LAMB: Of what year?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 were on the death march. They were
being annihilated by the Japanese. The American nurses were in great
danger. No one knew what was going to happen to them, and here's
General MacArthur in Australia being awarded the congressional Medal
of Honor for his leadership in that campaign. And General Wainwright,
who took over from him after the--MacArthur left, someone had put him
up--nominated him for a congressional Medal of Honor, and Douglas
MacArthur wouldn't support it. And General Wainwright went in the
prison camp.

LAMB: How ma--how did 77 women become prisoners of war?

Prof. NORMAN: Well, they were able--after Bataan fell on--in early
April 1942, the nurses were sent off the Bataan Peninsula across two
miles of water to this island fortress of Corregidor, which had long
been a--an American stronghold. They were underground in this cavern
of--labyrinth of tunnels that the Americans had built. It's the sense
of people--and being war, there are papers that are lost--that they
probably would have gotten all the American women out of the
Philippines, but the Japanese blockade was too great. Our fleet was
sitting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. There just wasn't the time or
the resources to get them out. Therefore, you had these nurses on
Corregidor when the Japanese troops landed on the island, and General
Wainwright knew that if he didn't surrender the forces, who were--they
were horribly outnumbered, there was going to be a bloodbath.

LAMB: Give us an overview. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on
December 7th, 1941, and how many American troops were in the
Philippines?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. The vast majority were
Filipinos, but there were tens of thousands of American men and then
this small group of women there.

LAMB: You can see the map on the screen showing the Philippines. I'm
going to drop it down a little bit. Explain the--Manila on the right
and the Bataan Peninsula--is that part of the Philippines?

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

LAMB: And then the little island of Corregidor right below it there,
how big is that?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 were 12,000 troops on that
island the day the surrender occurred.

LAMB: What was the Bataan death march?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 tip. They were very--they turned
their guns towards Corregidor. They wanted to get the American troops
out as quickly as they could. Something, however, happened at that
point that no one has really fully described. They took the troops
from the point of the peninsula, the tip near Corregidor, and started
to march them off the peninsula, which, in itself, you could say, `All
right. That's a military strategy.'

Our American troops didn't have enough food or medicine during the
four-month battle from January to April, so they were not in good
physical shape to begin with. That's a very arduous walk along the
coast, where it says Cabadbaran and Balanga. What happened, the
Japanese were moving them so quickly, if they wouldn't--they didn't
feed them. They didn't give them water. It was tropical weather. If
a man fell by the wayside, he was most likely murdered. So why they
didn't put them on the trucks, why they didn't slow the pace down, why
they didn't feed or give them water, no one knows. But it was one of
the great atrocities of World War II.

LAMB: Well, how many troops walked and how--what was the distance
again?

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

LAMB: And how many made it?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 of American men who died.

LAMB: Who are these three women in this picture here?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 was a hospital literally under the jungle
trees. The woman in the middle is Captain Maude Davison. She was the
chief Army nurse in the Philippines, a rather formidable woman, as you
can see from that photograph. She was a World War I veteran. She was
58 years old when that was taken. She'd come over from Corregidor to
inspect the hospitals.

The woman to her right with the hat on is Josephine Nesbit. She was a
48-year-old second lieutenant who was the chief nurse of hospital
number two, and that's where this was taken. There were 6,000
patients in that open-air hospital. And Josie Nesbit worked with her
staff and they ran it quite well. She was beloved by the women. She
was the type of leader that possessed this mixture of toughness and
great humanity.

LAMB: Where was hospital number one?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 region. It was an ordnance--you
can see that's an old ordnance shed, where they've put hospital beds
up underneath. The Japanese actually bombed this hospital right
around Easter in 1942, dropped bombs right on it, killed many
patients, and two nurses were wounded with shrapnel.

LAMB: The tunnel.

Prof. NORMAN: Yes.

LAMB: What's--what was it called?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 were all sorts of laterals. It
really was a catacomb. And what you're looking at here is a pre-war
shot of the hospital lateral. It was deep underground. And I
was--again, I was there in January, and it's smaller in person, and
it's musty and it's dark. And the nurses said when the bombs would
fall outside, the concussion would--you'd feel it very much down
there.

LAMB: How big were the tunnels?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 over in excess of 500 feet. It was--it's
quite big. And then you had all these little laterals going off.

LAMB: What was it used for?

Prof. NORMAN: I--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 lateral. So people lived and worked
in it once the war started. Troops would go out during the day;
they'd come in at night.

LAMB: When was it built?

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

LAMB: Who built it?

Prof. NORMAN: The American engineers built it.

LAMB: And what was the reason for it?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to the airfield, so the original
intent was to blast this tunnel through Malinta Hill, put the trolley
on it so they could ferry supplies from the main base to the airfield.
And then they just started to build other--you can see in the photo
there--other laterals off the main lateral, where they stored
supplies. And in the event of an emergency, they knew they'd be safe.
It was a bomb shelter.

LAMB: There's the Malinta Tunnel right there in the middle of this.
And if we pull back, we can see what the island of Corregidor looked
like. Did they--did the--are the tunnels, by the way, open today
for--for tourists?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 about 50 feet off the main tunnel,
and they tell you a little bit what--about what went on. After we
lost the Philippines, the Japanese moved in and used Malinta Tunnel.
So it was also the scene of horrific fighting when we retook it in
1945.

LAMB: By the way, when you go back, what's on Bataan? Is there--are
there places you can go and see what happened there?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. There are shrines to Filipinos and
American forces. And, interestingly, there's Japanese shrines to
their dead, too. On top of Mt. Simat, which was some of the worst
fighting in the war, there's a huge cross and a memorial. But I
wanted to find the hospitals, and they're unmarked. You'd never find
them if you didn't know your history and you didn't have a good map
and a good map reader with you because they have changed. The
Japanese logged Bataan in the 1960s. This is hospital number two.
This whole area now has been deforested, and it's a rice paddy.

LAMB: And when was this picture taken?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 hung their clothes from vines and they
put their beds in tin cans so the ants wouldn't crawl up them. They
were camping in the most rugged sense you can imagine.

LAMB: What was their life like on Bataan or Corregidor? And did they
live outside at all in Corregidor?

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

LAMB: What wa--what kind of diseases did they get?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 developed terrible blisters, again, from the
heat and humidity. And, you know, you were not taking showers every
day. So those were pretty unique to Corregidor. On Bataan now, that
was one of the malaria--it was epidemic. And everybody had malaria
pretty much on Bataan, and they started to suffer from dengue fever,
the--all the tropical diseases you can imagine, the nurses and the
troops had.

LAMB: What happens when you get dengue fever?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. Your fever goes up to about 106. You
often hallucinate. And the aching of your bones, they said, is almost
indescribable.

LAMB: And what about malaria? What--what happens when you get that?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 most serious affects your brain
directly. And others, it just--it--it--you know, your whole body.
But because everybody had malaria on Bataan, because we didn't have
enough quinine--we were not prepared for this battle--everybody just
went to work. The nurses got up and they went to work. And one of
them said, `I learned when I was in the operating room to take one
hand that was really shaking from malaria and--and contaminate it and
steady myself and use the other hand to help the surgeon.

LAMB: How much of this is original with the people you talked to?

Prof. NORMAN: Original in the...

LAMB: The stories. In other words, when you read this book, how much
of it did you get from other books and how much of it did you get from
people that told you their stories?

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

LAMB: Ever.

Prof. NORMAN: 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 interview them just once. I would go back
over the years and interview them again and again. So we'd really get
into detail. I think...

LAMB: Where's this picture from here?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 uniforms are not fitting them
particularly well. They were given those on their way home. And
right in the middle, there's a woman with a hat on. She's ki--a
little slouched over. That's Maude Davison, the chief nurse.

LAMB: Where is she? Right--show me.

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

LAMB: OK.

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

LAMB: Let me digress a moment, though. She did get married or--or
had a companion after this, as you have in the book.

Prof. NORMAN: 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 woman. And they married. I did
talk to his son, and he said that his father married Maude 'cause he
wanted a companion in old age and he thought she would take care of
him. And, unfortunately, Maude died--she was the first of the women
to die of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was a--in her late 60s. So what
he hoped never happened. But, apparently, they had some--a few happy
years together.

LAMB: You--you did, though, describe that she said that she
wasn't--she didn't have a lot of other friends.

Prof. NORMAN: 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 of the century. She was
tough. She didn't want to be your friend. She wanted to be your
boss.

LAMB: Who is this in this picture?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 Hospital in California, where they
were sent after their liberation.

LAMB: Who's in the middle right here?

Prof. NORMAN: Jeannette McDonald, the famous movie star and actress
and singer. She was at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital visiting wounded
sailors and Marines. When she heard the Navy nurses had just been
brought in, she stopped down to see them. And I love that photo,
because if you look at the faces of the Navy nurses, particular Peg
Nash, who had tuberculosis at the time...

LAMB: Where is she in this?

Prof. NORMAN: Sh--you--your finger was just pointed at her.

LAMB: Right here?

Prof. NORMAN: 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.

LAMB: What did they think, though, of a glamorous actress coming into
the picture after they'd lived through th--four years of you know
what?

Prof. NORMAN: I asked them that. I said, `Weren't you envious,
angry? How did you feel?' And--and Peg Nash told me this, she said,
`We were so happy to be alive, so happy to be home, it was fine.' It
never even occurred to them to be angry. At the same time, the
hospital gave them things like bags of makeup, which struck me as
being quite superficial, again, after the courage and what these women
went through, and it didn't bother them. They were just happy to be
alive and home. So what would have bothered you and I just--they blew
off.

LAMB: I starred something on Page 128 I want to read and--and just
get your reaction to it. You wrote this. This--these are your words:
`What is more, no one could have told the real story of Bataan. The
government likely would not have allowed it--the story of the filth,
the hunger, the bungling and the abandonment that took place in the
Philippines. To tell the truth would have been to re--would--to tell
the truth would have been to reveal the shameless circumstances that
led to the loss of Bataan, Corregidor in the first place, to expose
the inadequate supplies, the sloppy military planning and the rank
political decisions that led to the Bataan death march and the capture
of 72,000 Allied combat troops and 77 Army military women.' Go back
and explain more about the shameless circumstances.

Prof. NORMAN: Well, I--the--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 power. We'd won World War
I. We'd gotten out of the Depression. No one would ever attack us.
MacArthur and his strategists had a sense--they were watching the
Japanese. Certainly, they'd been in China, Manchuria long before
this, but they miscalculated. They thought the Japanese were going to
attack perhaps in April or May of 1942, not December of 1941. They
didn't have the resources there. They did not foresee the disaster at
Pearl Harbor, which would just--temporarily just annihilate our fleet.

There was just lack of insight and planning. And as a result, there
wasn't enough--the--the troops weren't trained properly. A lot of the
Reservists, the men, like Cassie, arrived in the fall with barely
enough time to get acclimated to it. They completely underestimated
the Japanese offensive there.

LAMB: How filthy was it?

Prof. NORMAN: Well, imagine you're in a--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 have control of the air and the
sea. They're flying over you at whim. And you have nowhere to go.
The Bataan Peninsula is not that big a place. It's--it's perhaps 60
miles from tip to the end of it. And I thought of it like a jam jar.
And the Japanese were at the top of the jam jar, forcing the Americans
further and further down the peninsula. They couldn't run. They had
to make do with what little food--they shot the cavalry horses and ate
them. They ate the monkeys. I mean, they had to make do with
whatever they could. And they didn't have clean laundry. That
explains the filth. You know, if you can just imagine being thrown
out in the jungle with nothing and said, `OK. Fight the enemy and
survive.'

LAMB: How many doctors were on Bataan?

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

LAMB: And at the worst of the moments when they were being bombed and
all and they're--how many tr--patients were outside at Bataan
and--under the hospitals?

Prof. NORMAN: They were all outside. I mean, they did have--we have
that one shot of th--of a sort of a garage that was a tin roof, but
that was it. There were no buildings to put patients in. And one of
the hospitals, Bataan number two--this was another thing that
happened. When they planned--in the event of a retreat, they planned
to take the troops to Bataan, but they underestimated the fact that
there'd be civilian refugees with them and that there would be
incredible casualties. This hospital wasn't planned until after the
war started. There was no place to put it. They literally bulldozed
land out of the jungle. And you can see the nurse standing where they
put a chapel. They had open latrine pits until an engineer came and
put some seats over them to deal with the flies and the dysentery. So
there were no patients un--under anything.

LAMB: What did they do about anesthetics when somebody had, you know,
the horrible injuries you described, the legs blown off, arms and
stuff like that?

Prof. NORMAN: They w--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 lo--literally looking up at
the sky. And what they would do with the anesthetics--towards the
end, there were so many casualties, so many surgeries they ran out of
the typical anesthetic and had to use ether, which goes right back to
the Civil War. That's how old that is. And you drip ether over a
gauze to put a person out. It's a very crude way to anesthetize
somebody. And there wasn't time, and the nurses would say sometimes
they had to get started prior to all the anesthetic taking place, and
that was an awful thing to have to hear.

LAMB: How long were the nurses on Bataan?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 of April 8th; April 9th was the
surrender.

LAMB: How were they told to leave?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to grab whatever they can
grab and be ready to leave.' And what was wrenching about this--and to
this day, 55 years later, they'll cry about it--they had to leave
their patients. And everybody knew what was going on. They literally
just had to take off their operating room gloves, maybe grab a shirt
off a clothesline and go. And it killed them 'cause there's nothing
worse for a nurse than having to abandon their patient.

LAMB: What happened to the patients?

Prof. NORMAN: 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, and many of them joined the death march.
These prisoners were shipped out of--off Bataan into Cabanatuan, which
was an awful, awful military prison camp.

LAMB: Where was it?

Prof. NORMAN: It was north of Bataan in--there was a town called
Capiz, and there were two camps there, O'Donnell and Cabanatuan, and
tens of thousands of men died there. You can see from the map, they
walked them off Bataan to the town of San Fernando. And from there,
they were put on trains and sent up to Camp O'Donnell and later to
Cabanatuan. I'm doing a book on the men now, 'cause I realized after
I was writing about the nurses, it was only half the story. So I'm
co-writing it with my husband, Michael Norman, and we're talking about
that.

LAMB: What does he do, by the way?

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

LAMB: And how long have you been at New York University?

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

LAMB: Which one?

Prof. NORMAN: Rutgers University in New Jersey.

LAMB: When did you become a nurse?

Prof. NORMAN: I graduated from college with my degree in nursing in
1973.

LAMB: And where'd you go to college?

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

LAMB: How old are your children?

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

LAMB: How are you and your husband going about your next book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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. He's interviewing a lot of the men; I'm
interviewing a lot of the widows and children of the men. I'll do a
lot of the archival work, and he'll do a lot of the other work, other
general library work.

LAMB: And what year is that coming out?

Prof. NORMAN: Well, we hope it's--we hope to have a first draft done
a year from December.

LAMB: The title, "We Band of Angels"?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 they're going into where he talks
about, `We band of brothers, we precious few.' And I thought it really
captured this story, 'cause this is not the story of individual women.
It's the story of a group of women. And I just thought it--it
captured it well.

LAMB: How do the nurses in the Army and the Navy like being called
angels?

Prof. NORMAN: The women, they--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 term `angels' is a--it's a tough
term, 'cause it's a term given to the profession by men, and it
implies an unworldliness about the profession when, in fact, nurses
are quite human, and they--they suffer and they do things just as well
as--or as badly as anyone else. So angels kind of--it just makes
people not quite human.

LAMB: Go back again and explain, you know, after the Japanese--after
we surrendered to the Japanese in Bataan and Corregidor, the nurses
originally were where?

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

LAMB: That's where they--that's where they went to originally when
they went to the Philippines?

Prof. NORMAN: After the surrender, they were in Malinta Tunnel.

LAMB: In Malinta Tunnel. At--so--but where'd they start out?

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

LAMB: Then when did they go to Bataan?

Prof. NORMAN: The war starts. All of the outsiding bas--outlying
bases are destroyed by the Japanese. Everybody comes into Manila.
They then realize they can't hold Manila. They're gonna send people
to Bataan and Corregidor. So then they begin to evacuate them from
Manila either to the peninsula of Bataan or to the island of
Corregidor. But a small footnote here is they left the Navy nurses
and Navy physicians behind in Manila, almost as--as an afterthought,
and they surrendered in Manila in January. So they did not go to
Bataan.

LAMB: So after Bataan, they went to Corregidor?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 happened just a few years earlier.
They did not want to have these women face the Japanese, so they put
them on the island of Corregidor. Of course, within a month we
couldn't hold out, and they surrendered on Corregidor.

LAMB: The rape of Nanking, 1937, was what?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 murdering and raping
hundred--almost 100,000 women. It was another one of the great
atrocities of World War II.

LAMB: Were--were any American nurses ever raped by the Japanese?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to go by, nothing to
follow, so they said, `Look, we're gonna stay together as a group.'
They figured there'd be safety in numbers. And they all slept in this
one lateral, one tunnel. But one of the nurses decided she was gonna
sleep someplace else, and one night a Japanese soldier climbed over
the--the wall and tried to rape her. She escaped. But that was as
nearest as any sexual assault happened with the nurses.

LAMB: What--do you know the name of that nurse?

Prof. NORMAN: Yes. It was Mary Brown Menzies.

LAMB: Is she still alive?

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

LAMB: All right. The nurses left Bataan, went to Corregidor. How
long were they in the tunnel?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to make of them. At first, they
thought they might have been camp followers, 'cause there were no
Japanese women in the military at all. So what they did is they said,
`Look, you stay in the hospital tunnel with the physicians and you
take care of the patients.' So they left them there. They did move
all of the men but for the physician and enlisted men helping in the
hospital out and eventually moved them off into prison camps. But
they kept the nurses underground for about five weeks, and the nurses
said that was a very hard time. They were only allowed out for fresh
air one hour a day. They couldn't speak to anyone unless they were
spoken to. They had to bow. It was really the beginning of what they
saw as the humiliation of being a prisoner of war.

LAMB: And then eventually where did they move them to?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 in Manila, which the Japanese turned
into a civilian internment camp for enemy aliens in the city--English,
Dutch, French, Canadians and American--who were there--there on
business living in the city. They were rounded up and put there.
They chose to put the American nurses in that camp and, in a sense,
the Japanese saved their lives. Conditions were very bad in Santo
Tomas, but they never approached the depravity of the military camps
like Cabanatuan and Bilibid.

LAMB: What are we looking at in this photo? The--you see the--looks
like Japanese in front of the wall--is that a wall?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 and iron gates, and it was a 60-acre
site, so they could easily wall the prisoners off. But they put 6,000
people in that camp, and there wasn't enough room. It was terribly
overcrowded. What the Japanese allowed them to do is build the
shanties, and those were the shacks you saw right by the wall, where
people could at least go in during daylight hours to have some free
time.

LAMB: What's this photo right here? It says `Arriving at Santo
Tomas.'

Prof. NORMAN: 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 this campus. And what's going on here is
people standing awou--around waiting to be processed, going into camp.
You can see they're dressed for Sunday outing with hats and luggage
and, you know, again having--no one could believe that they would
actually spend three years in that prison camp.

LAMB: They--the--what I was a little confused about is the--you kept
referring to the--or some of the nurses kept referring to the fact
that they were civilians once they got inside Santo Tomas and not in
the military?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 of themselves as military. If you
notice, they would wear the same khaki uniforms when they would go to
work. By the way, they had to make those uniforms. The lack of
preparedness...

LAMB: These right here?

Prof. NORMAN: They--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 of civilians. They were no longer
taking care of Marines and soldiers.

LAMB: Where is this photo?

Prof. NORMAN: That was taken--they set up a camp hospital. That was
Peg Nash, the nurse we saw standing next to Jeannette McDonald. About
five days a Japanese soldier was following her, and she was very
nervous. She didn't know what he wanted. Well, all he wanted was to
take her picture, and that's the picture. It was published in a
Japanese newspaper. Navy intelligence picked up on it, identified
her, and notified her mother and said, `Look, your daughter's alive.'

LAMB: Now you--as you go through the book and you get to Santo Tomas
and they were three years in that prison as prisoners of war, y--I
noticed that the number of calories a day that they were able to get
kept going down. And in one--in one case, it was down as low as 500
calories a day. Explain that.

Prof. NORMAN: The first two years--1942, 1943--they had civilian
Japanese running the camps. They allowed these people to barter with
the Filipinos, Filipinos to bring goods in. So if you had money, you
could supplement your diet and be OK. 1944, the military took over
running these camps. It was a change in policy out of Tokyo. They
cut off all contact with the outside world. Food was running short,
and they just started offering less and less food to these people to
live on. And by 1944, they were down to less than 1,000 calories a
day. People were dying of starvation. The nurses themselves were
very sick with beriberi and pellagra.

LAMB: What's beriberi?

Prof. NORMAN: That's a deficiency where your bo--a protein
deficiency where--there's two types. There's a wet beriberi where
your limbs swell up enormously and you can't move. It's almost like
an elephantitis. Dry beriberi, you don't swell up, but it--you almost
can't walk. Your nerve endings are so tender, it's--it's difficult to
do anything.

LAMB: How did they stay in touch inside that prison with the outside
world?

Prof. NORMAN: 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, so there were a lot of
them--could travel between the military and civilian camps, and they
carried medicines hidden in things, money 'cause money bought things
in prison camps, so it was very valuable. The nurses hollowed out
fruit and put medicines in there. It was very ingenious what they
did.

LAMB: On the back, you have this photograph. Do you recognize any of
those?

Prof. NORMAN: Yes, that's Eleanor Garron, the elderly woman. She's
in the back on the left-hand side with--holding--very clearly holding
hands. This was a group going over together. On the lower right is
Jeannie Kennedy. She's holding a little doll. She was a woman that I
spent time with. And all of these women were captured and prisoners
of war. And you can see, they went to the Philippines like they were
going to paradise, dressed in their little sunsuits.

LAMB: Anybody in this research project for you refuse to talk to you?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 to anybody. Two of the women were
very nice when I called them up, and they said, `It's just too
painful. We just don't want to talk about it. Use whatever you have
of mine, any photos, anything you can find, but I can't talk about
it.'

LAMB: When did the liberation come? And what is this picture right
here?

Prof. NORMAN: That was--the liberation came in February 1945. It
was very dramatic. The--MacArthur--they were very worried about these
prisoners. They were afraid the Japanese were gonna have a mass
execution. There was the 1st Cavalry spearheaded through enemy
territory into this camp. One night, they just crashed down the
gates. The next morning, the prisoners found this American flag--were
given it, and they hung it and they played "God Bless America."

LAMB: Well, at that moment--I wanted to ask you, because
there--there's a point where you get there where somebody breaks out
and--and s--`And then from somewhere in the back of the throng and
circling the tanks, a lone voice started to sing "God Bless America."'

Prof. NORMAN: Well...

LAMB: How did you find that out?

Prof. NORMAN: They--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 came through. And there was
nothing in their lives anymore, so they used to like to watch the
sunsets for a little bit of beauty. Well, that night they were
ordered inside, and they heard this terrible crash and they smelled
something strange, which turned out to be gasoline. The tanks crashed
down the iron gate, pulled right up in front of their dormitory.
People were afraid to come out. And then a soldier jumps out and
says, `Hello, folks.' At that point, they swarm out of their rooms,
surround the troops and then somebody starts to sing "God Bless
America." They were moved by the American flags on the tanks. They'd
been so isolated and so alone for so many years, it was just wonderful
to see.

LAMB: What was the story of Carl Middance from Life magazine?

Prof. NORMAN: Carl Middance had been in the Philippines when the war
began. He had been on Bataan, taken s--and Corregidor. He was able
to get out. However, he wanted to go back. He had many friends in
that camp, and he went in with the troops and took some of those
wonderful photographs. He said in the captions of the photographs
that that liberation was probably the most moving thing he'd ever seen
as a war correspondent. The people were living skeletons, and they
were just so glad that they survived.

LAMB: What was the toughest moment for you as you were interviewing
these women?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 difficult for me to watch, because their
sense of loss--and they lost a lot in the war. They lost their youth,
many, many friends, their physical health, in some cases their
emotional health, and they would cry about it. And that--just as a
human being, that was hard to watch.

LAMB: How many of them are still alive?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 states of health.

LAMB: Now who is--who are the two women in this picture?

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

LAMB: And she--she dead--she's dead.

Prof. NORMAN: 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. They had a reunion in 1992. And the
women went there to pay tribute to the women who had died and are
buried there. Ruby Bradley, the other woman, was the woman in Baguio
who stuck the whiskey in the baby's mouth. She is--served in Korea,
was the chief nurse for the 8th Army. And when she retired in the
early 1960s, she was and is the most decorated woman in the history of
our country.

LAMB: What's the story of the medals and the S--Distinguished Service
Medal and all that?

Prof. NORMAN: These women just forged paths that nobody even ever
imagined women could forge--nurses. When they were liberated, they
were--all received a Bronze Star and the appropriate medals for the
Pacific theater campaign. The two head nurses, Maude Davison and
Laura Cobb, who led the Navy nurses, the men they served with put them
up for higher medals. They felt that their leadership, through the
battles of Bataan and Corregidor, and then in the prison camps was
exemplary.

Every nurse survived the prison camp, and these are in camps where
hundreds of people died. So they did something right. They put them
up for the medals, but both women were denied. And in Maude Davison's
case, there was a particularly pointed memo from someone on the
decorations board that basically said, `Look, you were a nurse. I'm
sure you did a good job, but you were never in a position of
leadership, so you don't deserve the Distinguished Service Medal.'
They did give her the Legion of Merit, which is a much le--which is a
lesser laurel.

LAMB: How often did you find them bitter?

Prof. NORMAN: You know, they're not bitter. I expected to find that
from day one--angry at the Japanese, ang--if there's any bitterness,
it's--was towards our unpreparedness for the offensive. They don't
regret what they went through. They feel that they learned a lot as
human beings. They're not a bitter group, which is surprising.

LAMB: And go back to when they were in Santo Tomas. You say 6,000
people lived in this prison?

Prof. NORMAN: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Who is Mrs. Menzie?

Prof. NORMAN: That was Mary Brown Menzie, the at--woman who had the
attempted rape on Corregidor.

LAMB: Well, the--but the story about--who was the woman then--maybe
I've got the wrong name--that used to come in the limousine?

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

LAMB: Oh, yeah.

Prof. NORMAN: ...who--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 nurse corps. She served in the
Philippines, married a very wealthy businessman and left the service.
But she was friends with the older nurses who were in the nurse corps.
Because she was a German national, she was not thrown into the camp,
and she had a lot of money. When she realized her friends are in
there, she started to send them money, clothes and food. She was
their fairy godmother. She would come once a week in a limousine with
a parasol, and she'd have her servants bring the nurses things, very
much a lifesaver. But the younger nurses would laugh at her 'cause
she had a big picture hat and a parasol, and here they are in a prison
camp, and--and Ida was every much a--a lady.

G-2 investigated Ida after the war. They wanted to know--they thought
she might have been a collaborator, but they were never able to prove
anything. And she wanted to get to the States. They wouldn't let
her, and she died in Manila, one of the many, many unsung heroines of
the war.

LAMB: How many other books have you written?

Prof. NORMAN: I've wri--I wrote one book prior to this called "Women
at War," the story of 50 military nurses who served in Vietnam.

LAMB: Same kind of book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 one band of women, one group of nurses.

LAMB: Which book was harder on you?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 was thinking about my husband,
Michael, and all the people I knew who served there. So that had a
real personal level for me. "We Band of Angels" was difficult because
I was fighting the clock. These women were old and dying, and I
wanted to get to them. And there was the stress of, `Could I maintain
or achieve the rapport you need to achieve?' which, fortunately, I
did. They were both hard.

LAMB: You--you write up movies in here in the way people thought and
the nurses thought about the movie "So Proudly We..."

Prof. NORMAN: Hail.

LAMB: "...Hail!" Before I ask you about that movie, is there a movie
out of your book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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.

LAMB: What did the women who served over there in the prisons,
American women, think of the movies of the time?

Prof. NORMAN: They did not like "So Proudly We Hail!," which many
critics and scholars feel o--is one of the best movies about women to
come out of World War II. The problem with it is--and Hollywood is
fiction, it's not documentary, and these movies tend to focus on the
women and their romances and their love lives. And, sure, these women
had boyfriends and husbands, but they were a--a strong group in
themselves, and that tends to be minimized. In "So Proudly We Hail!,"
there was one scene, Veronica Lake drops a grenade down her bra and
blows herself up and a bunch of Japanese, and the nurses particularly
dislike that scene.

LAMB: Is this the woman that cooperated with the movie right here?

Prof. NORMAN: Yes, that's Eunice Hatchet Tyler. She was one of the
lucky women to be evacuated off Corregidor before surrender, so she
came home, and the Army sent her to Hollywood to help the
scriptwriters put that together. She was very unhappy with the film
because she knew that it had fictionalized and, in a sense,
trivialized what the nurses had done. But the nurses themselves
blamed Eunice, and she suffered for a long time for that, when, in
fact, she had nothing.

LAMB: Where is this picture?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 for the nurses who served in the
Spanish American War. I took that photo, and after their reunion in
1992, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of their surrender, we
went out there. And the nurses walked up the hill. They played
"Taps" and then just spontaneously saluted. That's Cassie, Helen
Nester, whom I spoke about earlier. She's standing at the grave of
Rosemary Hogan, who died in the 1960s, or Red, they called her.
Rosemary was a dear friend of Helen's. They roomed together on Bataan
and in prison camp. And Cassie did--never saw her after the war. So
she was paying tribute at her gravesite.

LAMB: What do you want people to take from this book?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 war came to them. And they served well.
They stayed at their post, and they did their jobs as well as any man.
That--that photo was taken in the first reunion. It took 40 years to
get them together as a group, and that was taken in 1983 at a VA
reunion. These women showed us that the idea of courage and bravery
is certainly genderless, and they tell us that women alone can survive
in the worst of worst circumstances.

LAMB: What's different for women today in the military who are in the
nurse corps than it was back in World War II?

Prof. NORMAN: There's so much that's changed. The reliance on the
reserve corps now as--to--to carry a lot of the mission in wartime,
and also at that time the nurses were all female. And at this point,
the military nurse corps are about a quarter male nurses, and that
certainly changes things.

LAMB: Did you ever serve in the military?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 interest in it.

LAMB: And what do you think the military can learn from reading this?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 fight with very little. And also,
one of the things is when these people come out of these
experiences--and we are better now than we used to be--to help these
people readjust to civilian life and to freedom.

LAMB: Has anything like this ever been done?

Prof. NORMAN: 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 and no one's ever told the story about
what happened to them after the war.

LAMB: Our guest has been Elizabeth Norman. This is the book. It's
called "We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses
Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese." And that photo again on the cover
was taken where?

Prof. NORMAN: 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.

LAMB: Thank you very much.

Prof. NORMAN: Thank you.

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We Band of Angels:; The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese