The linen room at the naval hospital in Agana was a long, narrow storeroom with a table down the middle. On the morning of December 8, 1941, when Japanese aircraft came over from Saipan in the second wave of the attack on Guam, Chief Nurse Marion Olds and four junior Navy nurses—Leona Jackson, Lorraine Christensen, Virginia Fogerty, and Doris Yetter—found themselves separated from the hospital’s five American staff by the chaos of the raid. Leona Jackson ran for the nearest cover, and the nearest cover was the linen room. She stopped dead in the doorway.
The room was packed with Chamorro nurses, some crammed under the table, the rest kneeling on the floor in their white uniforms saying the rosary. The voices rose as the engines came overhead. Jackson stood there and took roll call in her head, counting faces before she ran back out across the square. A convalescent patient picked a machine gun bullet off the floor not a yard from her feet.
She put it in her uniform pocket without knowing why. The casualties came in through the afternoon. The minesweeper Penguin had been caught by aircraft off the harbor. Her captain, with a broken arm, saw he could not get her out to sea, scuttled her, and brought his gunnery officer’s body ashore.
The rumor that reached the hospital first said every officer aboard had been lost. Three of her four walked in. Two nights later, the invasion force landed. A little before dawn on December 10, a car swerved into the hospital grounds.
Behind the wheel was Bill Hughes, a former Marine married to a Chamorro woman named Joaquin. He had met soldiers on the road to Agana 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.
Then the firing reached the plaza outside. The island’s defenders were a few hundred men with rifles and machine guns. The signal to stop was an automobile horn sounding three long blasts. The American defense of Guam ended on a car horn.
When it was light, 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 every patient in the building went into that single ward, men at one end and women at the other. The hospital corpsman slept there, too, in shifts, and still ran the kitchen and the laundry for patients, prisoners, and Japanese officers alike.
On orders from the hospital commander, the five nurses tore the gold braid off their white caps, the idea being to keep their captors from learning that the women in the white uniforms 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 told him 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 with her crocheting without dropping a stitch. The women were also taken up the hill to the officers’ club to watch demonstrations of machine gunnery and flame throwing, and according to a history of the Nurse Corps published just after the war, they came away unimpressed by the weapons and by 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 her if he was going to die. She told him she didn’t think so.
He said he didn’t care if he did 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. By late August of 1942, four of the women were in New York, and the fifth was a married woman in Africa.
Apart from a mother and her baby, almost everyone else from that shipment stayed in Japanese camps until the autumn of 1945. The surviving papers allow an explanation of how that happened to these five in particular, and it lies in the details of a journey that took eight months. The countdown started on January 10, 1942, with a last roll call on the ward. The corpsmen who had stood in that line with them were already gone.
Just the five Americans stood in the line with the Chamorro women beside them. The guards counted them one final time and left. The ship was the Argentina Maru, a passenger liner the Japanese had 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, who was about six weeks old.
They had carried a bassinet down from the hospital nursery, but there were still only four berths, so four of the women slept in them, and two took turns on the straw mat on the floor. The portholes were blacked out. Each of them got half an hour on deck a day. Jackson said they lay down every night wondering whether a white-painted Japanese liner would make a good target for an American submarine.
Below them, the rest of the prisoners, officers, enlisted men, and civilians were crammed into a cargo hold with little more than the clothes they had been captured in. On the second day, the guards handed out trunks of winter clothing looted from the marine barracks at Sumay. Some of the men in that hold talked over a plan to take the ship. The senior officer, Captain George McMillan, the island’s governor, vetoed it.
One of the men in the hold, looking back years later, 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 down into a barge in the dark. Ashore, an icy gale was blowing snow, and the men in the hold were dressed for the tropics.
The women and the stretcher cases went ahead by bus to the camp at Zentsuji, an army barracks that Japan intended to show to the world as its model prisoner of war camp. Upstairs in one wing was a huge room with straw mats laid along the walls. A short, peppery colonel and a second lieutenant met them there. The lieutenant pointed one way, then the other, and said, “Patients, here.
Nurses, here. ” The nurses told him no. In America, they told him, 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, Jackson lay in all her clothes under five blankets and shivered until morning.
She wrote that she had never been so cold in her life. The nurses had packed needles and thread on Guam, and in Zentsuji, that turned out to be their real work. Most of the men had arrived with almost nothing, and what they had was coming apart. So the five women spent their days mending the camp’s clothes.
In the first weeks, a rumor went around the camp that the non-combatants might be exchanged, until word came that everyone would stay, and the women settled in for a long war. In March, they were told they were moving to Kobe. They didn’t want to go. Better the evil they knew than one they didn’t, was how Jackson put it.
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 in the warrant officers’ dormitory across the hall and sang to them, the old songs, led by a major with a fine voice, and finishing with Auld Lang Syne, while Jackson stood in the doorway and listened. She was crying.
She wrote that she would remember it for as long as she lived. On March 12, the five nurses were moved into the Eastern Lodge, a hotel in the foreign quarter of Kobe that had been 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. The Japan Times and Advertiser ran what it called an exclusive interview with the five American nurses and other civilians from Guam. According to the story, they had found the Zentsuji camp highly satisfactory.
Whatever the women said to the reporter has not survived anywhere else. On April 18, Jackson was sitting in the garden with some of the other internees when aircraft came over, low and unhurried. The internee beside her said in a low voice that those weren’t 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. 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 being held.
A few weeks later, word came through the Swiss consul. The five nurses, along with Ruby Helmers and Charlene, would be leaving on the exchange ship with the American diplomats and the other civilians being sent home. 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, she lay in the harbor, and the women came to believe she was anchored for the duration. On the eighth night, Jackson and Christensen had gone to bed early. Virginia Fogerty shook them awake.
We’re underway. Soon after midnight on June 25, the Asama Maru had started engines. Outside, the big white crosses painted on her sides lit up to tell submarines from both navies what she was. Somewhere on that voyage, Virginia Fogerty fell in love with an American consular officer named Frederick Mann, who had been interned in Japan himself.
The ship reached Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa on July 23, and the passengers were moved across to the Swedish liner Gripsholm. Fogerty stayed in Africa with her husband, posted to his next consulate. 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 between the two governments through neutral intermediaries for diplomats and civilians. When the nurses were moved into the Eastern Lodge in March, they went into the civilian pool, and that is 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 navy doctors captured with them were medical staff, too, and they stayed in Japanese hands until 1945. 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.
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 Guam, they cared for more than 20,000 people for two and a half years. The medicine was confiscated. 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.
