We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan

Mention Bataan to anyone familiar with the WWII Pacific battleground and the reaction is likely to be one of pain. Unspeakable misery was inflicted in what became known as the Bataan Death March. The much lesser known story but no less compelling is the story of the Band of Angels: the 100 Army and Navy nurses stationed in the Phillipines when it was attacked by the Japanese Imperial Army. This is the story of the military nurses who were surrendered by their government and taken prisoner in December 1941 until the Phillipines were liberated in 1945.These women came to military nursing service from all walks of life and all parts of the country. As professionals they each embodied a passion for nurturing and protecting others. For some, the military afforded them the opportunity for a good education, worthy occupational training, and to experience life outside the confines of their humble daily existence. Life working in a tropical military hospital had its advantages. Exotic location, regular hours, and a congenial social life. Combat duty was the farthest thing from their minds. In an instant, everything changed once the bombs started flying. War is hell, and these women were suddenly tossed in the middle of it. They were there to heal, not to fight. But in order to survive while attending to the rapidly mounting casualties they had to do both.They organized themselves into a team across the normal boundaries of Military unit command. They improvised as resources became strained. They tended to the weakest, the maimed, the injured, the suffering. They built, organized, and managed hospital units spread out on the jungle floor. They slept on bamboo cots, worked nonstop shifts, and lived by their wits. And then they were captured by (arguably surrendered by their own government to) the Japanese and sent off to prison camps. Everything gets worse!!Eventually they are liberated and not a moment too soon. By this time the nurses are somehow still upright but just barely. They carried on their nursing duties while being imprisoned, and were subjected to the same inhumane treatment as other prisoners. At the time of their liberation they were suffering from dysentery, dengue fever, and all the other gruesome physical and mental effects of starvation and isolation. They were quickly flung back into life in the US and paraded around and, being women, objectified as fragile heroes. But when the military honors and medals were passed out, despite their remarkable resiliency and heroism and service to their country, their government could barely see fit to bestow a form of military honor below what their rank or service deserved.We follow these women, who became known as The Band of Angels, through their reintegration into post-war life in the States right up until their last breath.It is a remarkable story expertly told at the hands of a careful, thoughtful, and empathetic writer. It is a story that will break your heart a few dozen times and leave you in awe of what these women accomplished, and what humans are capable of doing, good and bad. After reading this I will never ever forget the story of these amazing women, thrown together by chance to endure one of the most horrific experiences in history.

The book is obviously the product of a boatload of research and features solid wordsmithing. The topic was fascinating and, X decades after the fact, little covered and thus unique. So We Band of Angels should have been a great read, especially for this WWII junkie. While it certainly held my interest, I finished with a feeling of disappointment. My main gripe is that I didn’t really get to know the characters, and thus had little emotional investment in them. Perhaps the author might have made them more “real” if she had focused on fewer of them? Perhaps Norman’s choice of an objective reporting style (to differentiate herself from the reporters who propagandized about the nurses in the immediate aftermath of their release?) interfered with character development? At the same time, Norman had no problem straying from objectivity when deploring the fact that the military brass failed to give the nurses what she considered proper recognition, even if many of the angels did indeed receive this medal and that.The author’s focus seemed blurred at times, not least of all when selecting data meant to convey the deprivation and sacrifice experienced by the nurses. In two different portions of the book, for example, Norman, in an obvious effort to illustrate emaciation, tells us that one 5’6” nurse weighed just 118 pounds toward the end of her imprisonment. As someone standing one inch taller and weighing several pounds less for much of her perfectly healthy adult life, I was underwhelmed. Norman speculates in one of those citations that some of those 118 pounds were from the horrible edema of beri-beri, but the effect is already lost. Surely, Norman could have found a better statistic more clearly conveying the dramatic weight loss from a starvation diet. Yet she chose this statistic and mentioned it not once, but twice.The lack of focus on the nurses’ Japanese captors was also troubling. Was this an attempt to sanitize the Japanese, our current allies? We learn that the captors did not sexually assault the nurses and that the commander of the compound was indifferent to pleas for more food. There were a few mentions of the show of obeisance demanded of the prisoners. But otherwise there was no discussion of interaction between guards and prisoners, nor any focus on the women’s emotional reaction to their captors (resentment? fear? hatred? frustration? glimmers of some human connection with the enemy?) This lack sometimes makes it difficult to remember that the nurses were indeed prisoners. I doubt the women themselves ever forgot that harsh reality.I enjoyed the follow-up on the lives of several of the nurses, decades later. It was interesting to see how all those years of captivity affected their lives. It was inspiring to learn that those experiences did not prevent many of the survivors from leading productive lives, however scarred. But those chapters also felt choppy, like addenda tacked onto the end of the story, with little flow back to the original narrative. It didn’t help that one of the survivors featured in these ex post facto interviews was not mentioned in the earlier narrative, apparently because the author didn’t “discover” her until much later. As painful and labor-intensive as rewrites are, a rewrite integrating “Millie” into the main story might have produced a more sympathetic book.

What a forgotten story. Thank you to the author for bringing this back to the fore. Over one hundred nurses based in the Philippines prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Manila did their jobs during the rout of Bataan and Corregidor. After treating thousands of casualties under constant fire and explosions, they were captured and imprisoned. For almost three years, they then survived near starvation and severe living conditions in prison camps while still maintaining military discipline as they treated and comforted the sick and the dying. A few evacuated to safety in Australia but the rest lived to tell a different tale. Stateside they were touted as heroes but then quickly forgotten in the annals of history. The author did painstaking research and met with many of the surviving nurses, forming ongoing friendships with some until their death. An exciting read and addition to WWII literature. My only criticism is to question mosquitos having teeth.😲😲

This was not only gripping but also was well documented. The author used first person interviews and actual diaries to tell the story of these brave women. I have read several books about our nurses in WW2 and this is the best so far.

I cannot remember where I heard about this interesting book but I am so glad I added it to my Amazon cart. We learn about the difficulties these nurses went through in Bataan and their imprisonment afterwards. We have all heard of the deprivations of war but, in this book we see how it affected the nurses during and after the war. Clearly we did not value their efforts as much as the soldiers which gives insight into those times. You cannot read this book without coming away in awe of their accomplishments.

Excellent - so interesting to read more about the American experience in the Far East. Written in 1999, the author was able to meet the nurses she is writing about, which lends authenticity and personal interest to the book. She was therefore also able to provide us with actual photos of the nurses in the book which is a real plus. These nurses really were a band of angels and I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the Far East war - or indeed anyone interested in other peoples lives.

Excellent read, as a teacher of History it helps to learn new aspects to enrich one's teaching away from ' The Syllabus'!