Book Description
We Band of Angels is the story of women
searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of
war.
On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck
American bases in the Far East, chief among them the
Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for
America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest
defeat and surrender of American forces. Caught up in all of
this were ninety-nine Army and Navy nurses--the first unit of
American women ever sent into the middle of a battle.
The "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor"--as the
newspapers called them--became the only group of American
women captured and imprisoned by an enemy. And the story of
their trials on a bloody battlefield, their desperate flight
to avoid capture and their ultimate surrender, imprisonment,
liberation and homecoming is a story of endurance,
professionalism and raw pluck.
Along the way, they helped build and staff hospitals in the
middle of a malaria-infested jungle on the peninsula of
Bataan. Then, short of supplies and medicine, they worked
around the clock in the operating rooms and open-air wards,
dealing with gaping wounds and gangrenous limbs, ministering
to the wounded, the sick, the dying.
A few fell in love, only to lose their men to the enemy.
Finally, on the tiny island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, the
Japanese took them prisoner. For three long years in an
internment camp--years marked by loneliness and
starvation--they kept to their mission and stuck together. In
the end, it was this loyalty, this sense of purpose,
womanhood and honor, that both challenged and saved them.
Through interviews with survivors and through unpublished
letters, diaries and journals, Elizabeth M. Norman vividly
re-creates that time, telling the story in richly drawn
portraits and in a dramatic narrative delivered in the voices
of the women who were there.
