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When American retreated from Manila where Ethel was stationed, she was sent to a hastily organized field hospital on the Bataan Peninsula. Here's part of a letter she wrote her family back in Washington State in February when the hospital was overwhelmed with patients and Americans had begun to ration food for soldiers, nurses and paitents alike.

Hello folks,

Just a line to let you know everything's OK. Two meals a day but we usually manage to get a few snacks between meals. The two things I miss are good coffee and rolls (that’s in the line of food). [This is] just like a camping trip—dirt, bugs and everything else that goes with it. Do my own washing and still manage to get a bath every day. 

Love, Ethel

After surviving the battles of Bataan and Corregidor and three years in prison camp, Ethel never talked much about her wartime experience.  She would say the men captured after the surrender of Bataan suffered far more than she did and there was little more to say.

American Army Nurses bathing in a creek behind burlap privacy screen. 

Photo courtesy Getty Images. 

Nurse Sally Blaine from Bible Grove, Missouri, tended patients in Army Hospital #1 on Bataan. In an interview later in life, she described what she remembered.

During bombing raids… I’d get in a tent. It didn’t offer any protection, but I didn’t want patients to see me being afraid. How can you show fear in front of your patients? That causes hysteria. I saw a ward become hysterical."

Sally caught malaria, but continued to supervise her ward from a cot. 

The last day [before the surrender] I admitted 200 patients and put them on the ground. When I say admitted, I mean a sheet of paper with his name on it. They didn’t get blankets because we didn’t’ have any. 

Ward at Hospital #1, Bataan Peninsula, Philippines, March, 1942.

All American women serving on Bataan evacuated to nearby Corregidor Island the night before the army surrendered. But things were bleak on the island, too, where nurses worked in an underground hospital tunnel. 

As the Japanese barrage of bombs worsened and another surrender seemed inevitable, the army tried to evacuate the American nurses on a submarine and pontoon planes. There was only room for some thirty of the women, and Sally Blaine, one of the sickest, suffering continuing bouts of malaria, was chosen to go.

Lieutenant Sally Blaine after the war.

She was on her way home, rescued mere days before the surrender of Corregidor, and capture of the remaining 54 army nurses. The two small planes carrying 20 nurses landed on Mindanao Island for refueling, last stop before Australia. One plane took off again, but Sally's seaplane was damaged on take-off, stranding the passengers on an island Japanese forces invaded that very morning. 

Within weeks, Sally and the other nurses were seized and eventually sent to the prison camp in Manila where they joined their comrades from Corregidor. ​​​​​​Three long years later, Santo Tomas Prison Camp was liberated by US forces and all the nurses survived to come home. 

I wrote Pure Grit because I wished that I had learned about these nurses when I was a girl growing up. They're incredible role models. 

Not that I won't be working! One project I hope to complete is contacting sources of all the photographs published in Pure Grit to see about renewing permissions. If all goes well, Abrams may issue a reprint edition of the book. 

Right now, the only copies are available in my closet! Which I'm happy to sell as long as they last Let me know if you'd like to purchase a copy.

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