In the linen room of the naval hospital in Agana, the young Chamorro nurses knelt in their white uniforms, saying the rosary as Japanese aircraft roared overhead. Leona Jackson, one of five American Navy nurses on Guam, tried to run for cover but stopped in the doorway, taking a mental roll call of the faces before her. She ran back out across the square, and a convalescent patient picked a spent machine gun bullet off the ground not a yard from her feet. She slipped it into her uniform pocket without knowing why.
The island lay more than three thousand miles west of Hawaii, a small American possession with a small Navy hospital and a nursing school for Chamorro women. Five nurses served there under Chief Nurse Marion Olds, joined by juniors Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christensen, Virginia Fogerty, and Doris Yetter. When the attack came on the morning of December 8, 1941, Japanese aircraft flew in from Saipan. The minesweeper Penguin was caught off the harbor; with a broken arm, her captain saw he could not reach open sea, scuttled his ship, and brought his gunnery officer’s body ashore.
The first rumor reaching the hospital claimed every officer aboard had been lost. Three of the four walked in. Two nights later, the invasion force landed. Before dawn on December 10, a car swerved into the hospital grounds.
The driver was Bill Hughes, a former Marine married to a Chamorro woman named Joaquin. He had met soldiers on the road in the dark, taken them for a Marine patrol, and slowed down. They jumped onto his running boards with bayonets. He threw the car into gear, shook them off, and drove straight to the nurses with his wife cut and bleeding and her brother dead in the seat.
The firing reached the plaza outside. The island’s defenders numbered only a few hundred men with rifles and machine guns. The signal to stop came as three long blasts of an automobile horn. The American defense of Guam ended on a car horn.
When light came, Jackson stood in the doorway and watched the rising sun go up the flagpole beyond the cathedral. The place became a prison with patients in it. The occupying troops took every ward except one, and all the patients were crowded into that single room, men at one end and women at the other. The hospital corpsman slept there in shifts and still ran the kitchen and laundry for patients, prisoners, and Japanese officers alike.
On orders from the hospital commander, the five nurses tore the gold braid from their white caps, so far as anyone recorded, to keep their captors from learning they were commissioned officers of the United States Navy. What the captors believed, they said out loud. A Japanese Navy captain let himself into the nurses’ quarters one day and sat down without being asked. When he asked whether they had heard any news and they said they had not, he gave them his.
“Your Navy,” he said, “so sorry to tell you, all sunk. ” The nurse across from Jackson answered, “Too bad,” and went on crocheting without dropping a stitch. They were taken up the hill to the officers’ club to watch demonstrations of machine gunnery and flame throwing, and, according to a postwar history of the Nurse Corps, they came away unimpressed by the weapons and the captain’s news alike. For a few weeks, they kept working.
Jackson and Christensen were sent to the operating rooms the first morning with three tables full of wounded. The last patient on Jackson’s table was a young Chamorro man with machine gun bullets in his abdomen. As she fitted the blood pressure cuff, he asked if he was going to die. She told him she did not think so.
He said he did not care, because then he would not have to spend his life under the Japanese. He died. The Americans captured on Guam were shipped to Japan in January 1942. The five nurses, however, reached New York by late August, with the fifth ending up in Africa.
The surviving papers allow an explanation of how that happened, and it lies in the details of a journey that took eight months. On January 10, 1942, a final roll call was held on the ward. The corpsmen who had stood in that line were already gone. Only the five Americans stood with the Chamorro women, guards counted them one last time, and the line broke up.
The ship was the Argentina Maru, a passenger liner diverted for the job. The nurses shared a stewardess’s cabin meant for four with Ruby Helmers, the wife of a Navy chief petty officer, and her baby daughter Charlene, about six weeks old. They had carried a bassinet down from the hospital nursery, but with only four berths, four women slept in them and two took turns on the straw mat on the floor. Portholes were blacked out, and each got half an hour on deck a day.
Jackson lay down every night wondering whether a white-painted Japanese liner would make a good target for an American submarine, and whether anyone at home even knew where they were. Below, the rest of the prisoners were crammed into a cargo hold with little more than the clothes they had been captured in. Some men talked over a plan to take the ship. The senior officer, Captain George McMillan, the island’s governor, vetoed it; years later, one of the men thought it was the right call, with navy nurses and a chief’s wife and baby on the same ship.
On the fifth morning, the ship anchored off Tadotsu on Shikoku. That evening they climbed into a barge in the dark, and the women and baby were put in the wheelhouse beside a charcoal pot. Ashore, an icy gale blew snow, and the men in the hold were dressed for the tropics. The women and stretcher cases went ahead by bus to Zentsuji, an army barracks Japan intended to show the world as its model prisoner of war camp.
In a huge room with straw mats along the walls, a short, peppery colonel and a second lieutenant met them. The lieutenant pointed one way, then the other. “Patients, here. ” “Nurses, here.
” The nurses told him no. In America, they said, a nursing officer was never quartered in the same room as her patients, and there were plenty of corpsmen among the prisoners who could sleep there instead. When the colonel waved them across the room and they refused a second time, he yelled, “Yes,” turned on his heel, and walked out. The lieutenant, unable to keep up with the argument, took them to another dormitory.
In Jackson’s words, “We had our privacy. ” That night she lay in all her clothes under five blankets and shivered until morning. Their real work at Zentsuji turned out to be mending the camp’s clothes, since most men had arrived with almost nothing. A rumor went around that the non-combatants might be exchanged, until word came that everyone would stay.
In March, they were told they were moving to Kobe. They did not want to go. One of the officers, a man she called George, told her she was on her way home. She doubted it.
On the last night, a crowd of officers and men gathered across the hall and sang to them, the old songs, finishing with Auld Lang Syne, while Jackson stood in the doorway and listened, crying. She wrote that she would remember it for as long as she lived. On March 12, the five nurses moved into the Eastern Lodge, a hotel in the foreign quarter of Kobe turned into an internment camp. Ruby Helmers and her baby were already there.
On paper, the building was still in the hands of its Indian manager, and the internees were in the custody of the Kobe police. The nurses had stopped being prisoners of the army and become civilian internees of the police. Japan put them to work for its newspapers at once, running an “exclusive interview” claiming they had found Zentsuji highly satisfactory, a piece reprinted by the occupation press in Manila. On April 18, Jackson was sitting in the garden with other internees when aircraft came over, low and unhurried.
The internee beside her said in a low voice those were not Japanese planes. Jackson agreed. They were American, she said, and she knew a few men in both the army and the navy reckless enough to fly that low over Japan. There was a dull thump of bombs in the distance, and the aircraft went off across the bay toward Osaka.
It was the Doolittle Raid. The raid’s plan sent a single bomber against Kobe, and nothing in her account settles exactly what she saw, but what she saw was enough. Four months after the captain’s speech in the sitting room, the American Navy had carried army bombers within sight of the city where she was held. A few weeks later, word came through the Swiss consul.
The five nurses, along with Ruby Helmers and Charlene, would leave on the exchange ship with the American diplomats and other civilians. In June, they were taken to Yokohama and put aboard the Asama Maru. Ambassador Joseph Grew and his embassy staff were aboard as well. Then the ship stayed where it was for a week, and the women came to believe it was anchored for the duration.
On the eighth night, Virginia Fogerty shook Jackson and Christensen awake: they were underway. Soon after midnight on June 25, the Asama Maru had started engines, her big white crosses lit up to tell submarines from both navies what she was. Somewhere on that voyage, Fogerty fell in love with an American consular officer named Frederick Mann, interned in Japan himself. The ship reached Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa on July 23, and the passengers moved across to the Swedish liner Gripsholm.
Fogerty stayed in Africa with her husband. Four of the nurses sailed on and reached New York on August 25, 1942. The answer to why these five came home lies in the move to Kobe. Zentsuji was an army camp for prisoners of war, and prisoners of war were never part of the 1942 exchange.
That exchange was arranged for diplomats and civilians through neutral intermediaries. By moving the nurses into the Eastern Lodge in March, they entered the civilian pool, the one route the surviving papers show by which their names could reach the exchange list. Ruby Helmers and her baby, the only other people from Guam to go home, had gone to Kobe in January. Why Japan made that move is another question.
The Geneva Convention on the wounded and sick, which Japan had ratified, said captured medical staff should be sent home, but the navy doctors captured with them stayed in Japanese hands until 1945. If a Japanese officer ever wrote down why five women were sent to Kobe while the doctors were kept back, his paper has not turned up in the published files. Being women may have counted for more than being nurses, and on that, the papers are silent. The men who sang to them in the warrant officers’ dormitory were still in Japan more than three years later.
Others had no such route. In July 1942, a few weeks after the Asama Maru sailed, six Australian army nursing sisters captured at Rabaul came ashore at Yokohama and spent the rest of the war at a yacht club and later at Totsuka, with no exchange ship coming for any of them. On Guam, the Chamorro women who had prayed under the linen room table stayed in the hospital the Japanese had taken over. With the one Chamorro doctor on the island, they cared for more than twenty thousand people for two and a half years.
The medicine was confiscated, and at times the nurses smuggled what they could back out of the hospital stores. No official account of their work under the occupation is known to have survived.
