The morning of December 8, 1941, broke with deceptive calm over Manila Bay. At Sternberg General Hospital, Lieutenant Juanita Redmond finished her night shift charting vital signs when the first air-raid sirens shattered the quiet. She ran to the windows and watched Japanese Zero fighters streak low over the city, bombs already falling on Nichols Field and Cavite Naval Yard. Within minutes the casualty ward filled with burned and bleeding soldiers. Juanita and her fellow Army Nurse Corps officers—most in their twenties—moved like automatons: starting IVs, applying tourniquets, administering morphine, all while plaster dust rained from the ceiling after each nearby explosion.

By noon the hospital resembled a battlefield triage station. Stretchers lined the corridors. The small staff of sixty nurses worked without pause, sleeves rolled up, faces streaked with soot and tears. Lieutenant Eunice Hatch, barely twenty-three, held the hand of a dying sailor and whispered, “You’re going to be all right,” even as his pulse slipped away beneath her fingers. No one cried openly; there was no time.

Orders arrived late that afternoon: evacuate non-essential personnel and prepare to move south toward Bataan. The nurses packed what medical supplies they could carry—bandages, sulfa powder, syringes—into duffel bags. Japanese troops had already landed at Lingayen Gulf and were pushing south. Manila would fall soon.

The evacuation convoy left under cover of darkness on December 24. Trucks rattled along blacked-out roads, headlights off to avoid strafing runs. Juanita rode in the lead vehicle with five other nurses. Halfway to Bataan a Japanese patrol appeared on a ridge. Machine-gun fire stitched the asphalt ahead. The driver swerved; the truck lurched into a ditch. Nurses spilled out, scrambling for cover behind rice paddies. Juanita crawled to a wounded driver, tore open his shirt, and pressed a field dressing against a sucking chest wound. Bullets kicked dirt around them. She kept pressure until two soldiers dragged the man to safety.

They reached Corregidor’s Malinta Tunnel on Christmas Day. The island fortress became their new home. Inside the damp, dimly lit laterals, nurses set up makeshift wards on army cots. Wounded arrived by barge from Bataan nightly. The nurses worked by lantern light, rationing quinine and plasma, comforting men who asked for their mothers. Lieutenant Florence MacDonald, a soft-spoken woman from Iowa, sang hymns to keep spirits up when the shelling grew unbearable.

By March 1942 the situation on Bataan deteriorated. Food ran out; malaria and dysentery swept through the ranks. Nurses from Fort McKinley and smaller stations joined those already on Corregidor. On April 9 Bataan surrendered. Japanese artillery turned its full fury on the island. Shells pounded the hospital lateral; dust and smoke choked the air. Nurses crawled between cots, shielding patients with their bodies when concrete cracked overhead.

April 29—the birthday of Emperor Hirohito—brought the heaviest barrage yet. A 240-mm howitzer shell struck near the entrance, collapsing part of the tunnel. Juanita and Eunice pulled wounded men from rubble for hours, hands bleeding, lungs burning from limestone dust. When the firing finally eased, they learned the island’s commander had raised the white flag. Corregidor had fallen.

The nurses were marched out under guard. Japanese soldiers separated them from the men. Bayonets prodded them toward waiting barges. Juanita kept count as best she could: sixty from Sternberg and McKinley, five from Corregidor’s small detachment, and word that ten others whose evacuation plane had force-landed on Lake Lanao in Mindanao would join them. Sixty-seven women in all.

They arrived at Santo Tomas Internment Camp on July 2, 1942. The former university campus had been converted into a prison for civilians and military personnel. Barbed wire crowned the walls; guard towers overlooked the courtyard. The nurses were herded into Santa Catalina Hall, given thin mats on the floor, and told they would work in the camp hospital.

Life inside Santo Tomas was a slow erosion. Breakfast was a cup of watery lugao; lunch and dinner were camote tops boiled without salt. Beriberi and pellagra appeared within months. The nurses turned one classroom into a ward, scavenging lumber for beds and mosquito netting from discarded parachutes. They treated dysentery, tropical ulcers, and malnutrition with whatever scraps of medicine the Japanese allowed. When supplies ran out, they boiled rags for bandages and used rainwater to clean wounds.

Discipline was strict. Guards patrolled constantly. One evening in October 1943 a sentry caught Lieutenant MacDonald slipping quinine tablets to a feverish child. He struck her across the face with his rifle butt; she fell but did not cry out. The other nurses formed a silent wall between her and the guard until he backed away. That night they stitched her lip with thread sterilized over a candle flame.

They kept hope alive through small acts of defiance. Juanita organized secret English classes for children born in camp. Eunice taught first aid to teenage girls so they could help when the nurses collapsed from exhaustion. At night, in whispers, they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” so softly the guards never heard.

By early 1945 rumors reached the camp: American forces were closing on Manila. Artillery could be heard in the distance. On February 3 the sound grew unmistakable. Tanks rumbled down España Street. Japanese guards grew nervous, then frantic. They ordered everyone into buildings.

At dusk American soldiers breached the main gate. Infantry from the 1st Cavalry Division poured in, shouting, “We’re here! You’re free!” Juanita ran to the entrance with the others. A young sergeant lifted her in a bear hug, tears streaming down his face. “We’ve been looking for you,” he said. “All of you.”

The nurses stood in the courtyard as the flag was raised. Sixty-seven women—gaunt, gray-haired before their time, but unbroken—watched the Stars and Stripes snap in the breeze. They had endured thirty-seven months of captivity without surrendering their dignity or their oath to heal.

In the days that followed they nursed the weakest internees, helped document war crimes, and prepared to go home. Many would carry invisible scars for life—malaria that returned every year, nightmares of shellfire, the memory of patients they could not save. Yet none regretted their choice to stay at their posts when evacuation was still possible.

The “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor” returned to the United States as heroes. They received the Bronze Star, promotions, and quiet gratitude from a nation still counting its dead. But the real medal was the knowledge that they had kept faith with every soldier they treated, every child they comforted, every comrade they refused to abandon.

In Santo Tomas, under the weight of barbed wire and hunger, sixty-seven Army nurses proved that courage is not always loud. Sometimes it is the steady hand changing a dressing at 3 a.m., the whispered encouragement in the dark, the refusal to break when everything else has shattered.

They endured. They healed. And when liberation came, they walked out with heads high—proof that even in the deepest darkness, the instinct to care for others can burn brighter than any bomb.