Angels of Mercy

Nurses in World War II were not sequestered on the hospital ships, or in facilities far from the action. In fact, they were placed directly in the thick of the fighting and, on the occasion of the American's loss of Corregidor, they ended up captured, along with their patients and were put into prisoner of war camps where they spent the remainder of the war.

Once such camp, Santo Thomaso, became a tiny sea of hope where, for years, nurses labored to stave off starvation and death by slow, torturous diseases like beri beri and malaria. Too, they suffered the physical torture and abuse of their Japanese captors.

The pictures of these nurses survive. Smiling, healthy looking women making the best of difficult conditions, smiling in the face of hardship. The same women - those who survived - were likewise pictured smiling upon their release. Older, worn, haunted, and cadaverously thin, yet smiling at their good fortune to have survived what killed not only other nurses, but civilians and other military personel.

Sisters of healing, the descendants of Florence Nightengale and Clara Barton, heroine of the Civil War battlefields, where she fought the prejudice of the time against women participating or even witnessing the brutality of that most horrible of wars. Heirs of the nurses of WWI who, unheralded and for the most forgotten, they, too, toiled on the battlefields, drove ambulances, and died. They didn't die with weapons at their side, but with implements of healing in their hands.

Never forget these women. Never forget their monstrous bravery to face the carnage of war with only a smile and a bit of bandage. Never forget that they, too, fought for their nation with all they had at their disposal. Their hearts.