When We Had Wings Read online

  Several hours later, with the evaluations complete, a Filipino porter brought the nurses coffee and warm pan de sal—slightly sweet and fluffy bread rolls, and a Filipino breakfast staple—and they had their first moment to rest since being startled from sleep before dawn. It was also the first moment to hear the extent of what had happened in Hawaii. The sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl had been catastrophic. Eight battleships had been destroyed, including the USS Arizona, which had sunk so quickly after being torpedoed that hundreds of sailors were still trapped inside. The casualties and injuries from the attack were still being counted.

  Eleanor had reached for a second pan de sal as Laura began to brief them of these details, but tears burned at her eyes and she could not eat it. As she set the roll down, she saw that all the other nurses were crying too. Hawaii was a territory just like the Philippines and full of Americans. An attack on a U.S. military installation was an attack on America. But there was little time to grieve the impact of the countless lives that had surely been lost.

  An air-raid siren wailed a mournful, soulless sound. The nurses ran as one outside.

  With shaking limbs Eleanor crawled under the hospital—which had been constructed with space between the ground and the building in case of flooding. While they waited in the muck for bombs to fall, an unexpected and bizarre calmness began to envelop Eleanor, even as the mud seeped into the bleached-white fabric of her uniform. She could see in her mind’s eye her parents in the dairy barn in the tawny light of daybreak, the barn cats following them from stall to stall as roosters outside crowed to welcome the day. Her little sister Lizzie was riding her red bicycle down the dirt path to town, pigtails flying behind her, to get the latest copy of Hollywood magazine. And there was the beloved farmhouse in springtime, its porch framed by blooming forsythia and lilac and climbing clematis. She could see long summer nights dotted with firefly light, the endless golden sky in autumn, the diamond-bright first snow, and all the people she loved back home.

  Before she could sweep it away in her mind, she saw John Olson in a blue flannel shirt, painting the rectory lemon yellow and humming a happy tune. That was the day she’d fallen in love with him. For the first time in months, she smiled when she thought of him. She closed her eyes and waited for whatever would come next.

  The minutes ticked by and there was no drone of enemy planes, no bombs, nothing at all. Within an hour the all clear sounded, and Eleanor and the other nurses climbed out, covered in mud. The calming images faded. How many times might she have to call upon them in the days ahead?

  Back inside the empty hospital, Laura dispatched two of the nurses to assist at Sternberg. As they left, Eleanor asked them to say hello to Lita and Penny if they happened to encounter them. And to tell them to stay strong and well and she’d see them on HAM Day.

  “They will know what I mean,” Eleanor said to her puzzled colleagues.

  Laura brought out dark blue dungarees and work shirts—the male sailor’s typical uniform. “Obviously our white dresses aren’t practical right now. We’re going to be wearing these.”

  One of the nurses held up a pair of dungarees. They were huge. “You could fit two of me in these!”

  “They’re one-size-fits-all, ladies. Make them fit. No complaints.”

  In the nurses’ dayroom Eleanor took off her soiled dress, put on the new “uniform,” and cinched the dungarees around her waist as best she could with her uniform belt. The nurses looked at each other and their oddly fitting new clothes and laughed for the first time that day. It felt good and wrong at the same time, and as they walked back into the hospital halls, the light moment slipped away as if falling upon the pile of now-useless white uniforms.

  Eleanor spent the rest of the day readying the emptied patient rooms and medical stores should Cavite come under attack, her thoughts wandering every few minutes. There were nurses at Pearl. She could have been one of them. How many had survived? How many of them were hurt? How many of them had to rush to tend to the terrible wounds of bombing victims? Where in the world had they found the strength to do it?

  That night she fell into her bed exhausted. The long day had been physically draining to be sure, but mentally as well. As tired as she was, though, anxiety energized her. Eleanor realized she was afraid; not of dying—she’d found a calming solace under the hospital—but that she wouldn’t be able to keep her solemn word. She’d taken an oath, pledging not only to defend the United States but to bear true faith and allegiance to her country and obey every order given her. She didn’t want to break that promise. With all her heart she did not want to.

  But she had not considered that a Navy nurse would see war, not even when she had gotten the assignment to Cavite. She was not a warrior. She’d only wanted to escape the pain of a broken heart and chart a new purpose for her life. She hadn’t really considered what she might be asked to do, only what she was asking her new life in the Navy Nurse Corp to do for her.

  Eleanor prayed a simple prayer as she closed her eyes against the darkness of the blackout conditions and her own fear. “Give me strength to do what I said I would do,” she whispered. “Please give me strength. And watch over Penny and Lita. Please keep them safe.”

  Eleanor awoke at first light to the news that the United States had declared war on the Empire of Japan.

  * * *

  On Wednesday the air-raid siren sounded as Eleanor was eating lunch. Several sirens had wailed since Monday’s devastating news of the attack on Pearl. She rose from her chair and took her toasted salami-and-cheese sandwich with her, as did the other nurses and commissioned staff eating in the quarters’ wardroom. It could be an hour or more before the all clear sounded.

  The mood was slightly less than urgent as they all made their way outside, past the sandbags and then under the barracks. Even though the U.S. was now at war, Eleanor had slept better the previous night than she did on Monday when everything about their situation was new. Still, she wished she’d brought her coffee, too, as she watched one of the nurses maneuvering into the crawl space with her cup, coffee sloshing onto the dirt.

  As she settled in along with corpsmen, cooks, and a few other hospital personnel, Eleanor became aware of a sound she’d not heard during the other air-raid alerts. A low and steady hum. An arrow of panic shot through her.

  Planes were overhead. Lots of them.

  One of the cooks still standing outside the crawl space dropped to his knees and scooted under the building, yelling, “They’re coming!”

  Eleanor instinctively drew her knees up to her chest, dropped her head, and covered it with her arms, the sandwich abandoned. She could hear antiaircraft guns firing from afar and the pounding of her own heart.

  No bombs fell.

  “What’s happening?” Peg asked the cook, who was now peering out from underneath the building.

  He paused before answering. “They’re . . . circling back. They’re coming back!” He slid underneath again and everyone waited. This time Eleanor kept her head up.

  But not for long.

  Bombs rained down, detonating on impact with thunderous roars. Each one seemed to fall closer to their sheltering place than the one before it. If the building took a direct hit, they would die in a flattening instant. Explosion after explosion rocked the earth, followed by a stretch of moments when the pounding ceased, only to return after the enemy planes had come back across the bay for another pass at Cavite.

  The ground under Eleanor heaved as the next rounds met their targets. Boom! Boom! Boom! She hoped the end would be quick. She hoped there would be only one intense moment of dizzying pain, as short as a blink of an eye, and then the sweet halls of heaven. She’d see Grandma Lindstrom again. How she’d missed her.

  Near Eleanor someone was whispering, “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” A hand closed over her own. Peg’s perhaps. None of them would die alone. That was a tremendous comfort. She suddenly remembered it was Eldene Paige’s twenty-eighth birthday. Eleanor looked over at her.

  “Happy birthday, Eldene,” she said softly, strangely wanting to make sure her coworker heard these words before the end came for them.

  “Thanks,” Eldene replied in a hushed tone that suggested she had needed to hear it.

  For an hour they waited for the bomb to fall that would kill them all. But it did not come. And then the booming ceased. The earth stopped quaking. The drone of aircraft faded.

  The all clear sounded and Eleanor and her nurse comrades crawled out from underneath their shelter to see what was left of Cavite.

  Acrid smoke billowed in every direction from great bulbous pillars of fire. Cavite Naval Yard had been all but obliterated. Across the bay Manila looked much the same. Torched and on fire. It made no sense to Eleanor. Manila was mostly a city of civilians.

  There was no time to contemplate the destruction. Laura Cobb yelled for them to run to the hospital, which had not been hit. There would be wounded coming to them, there had to be. They needed to prepare for those arrivals. Eleanor dashed past the hulks of buildings ablaze and flattened structures, her lungs filling with a chemical smoke that made her chest burn and her eyes water as she ran to the hospital. It had not been a target. She could only hope Sternberg hadn’t been either and that Penny and Lita were safe.

  When she and the rest of the nurses and corpsmen arrived, the injured were already there with more soon coming. Eleanor staggered to a stop before Peg grabbed her arm and pulled her forward. She had never seen such injuries, not even in the training manuals—shattered arms and legs bent in impossible positions or missing altogether, lacerations down to the bone, blackened flesh from horrible burns. The sounds of human anguish punctuated the air.

  Laura barked out instructions, sendi
ng some of them to see to the bleeders, some to the burn victims, and some to administer morphine to ease the suffering of those whose injuries were not life-threatening. Eleanor was given vials of the painkiller, all the while worried that she would run out of the drug before she’d seen to every injured person in the triage area. The nearby medical dispensary had been bombed, and nothing was left of it.

  One battered sailor, whose legs were twisted at unnatural angles, grabbed Eleanor’s arm as she slipped the needle into his skin.

  “Is my mother alright?” His eyes were glassy, his voice weak.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Eleanor soothed, as she taped a tiny piece of gauze over the injection site.

  “But she’s in her bedroom! How will she get downstairs? What if the stairs have been bombed?”

  The poor young man thought he was back home, wherever that was, and Eleanor couldn’t linger to help him understand. Too many others needed her attention.

  “She is fine, I promise. Rest now.”

  Eleanor went on to the next wounded man who begged to know if his bunkmate had come through. They’d been together. Where was he?

  Another begged for her to put him out of his misery.

  Another, missing an arm, was attempting to rise from his stretcher as she reached him. Blood oozed from his tourniquet as he struggled to stand.

  “You need to lie still.” Eleanor eased him back down with effort.

  “Let me go to my ship!” he shouted. “I outrank you. Let me go! That’s an order!”

  “You are wounded, sir. You are bleeding. You mustn’t move about.” She gave him the injection of morphine even as he threatened to inform her supervisor of her insubordination.

  The next wounded sailor she sped to care for had already expired when she reached him, his wounds worse than what had been visible.

  The hellish hours wore on, without electricity to sterilize the instruments or the elevator to send the most injured to surgery on the third floor. Civilians—the young, the old, men, women, children, and babies—flooded the hospital, too, and had to lay on the floor on blankets, if one could be found, because there were no available beds.

  With no way to chart the care they were giving, one of the nurses had a corpsman bring her a box of morgue tags that she and Eleanor and Peg filled out with the names of the injured and what medication had been administered. They placed the grim cards meant for the dead on the wrists of the injured living.

  As the day drew near its end, Eleanor and the others were tasked by Laura with recording the details of every person they had seen to, every injury they had dressed, every patient sent up to surgery, every injection they’d given, and every person who had died in their care. Family members back home needed to know what had become of their brave sailors. Wives needed to be made aware they were now widows. Mothers and fathers needed to know their sons had given their lives for their country.

  “Don’t think about it, just do it,” Eleanor told herself repeatedly as she bent over the paperwork. She couldn’t let herself consider that some of what she was writing would make its way to commanding officers who would then set about writing death notifications.

  While they worked, news came down from the captain. Communication from the Japanese forces had arrived. The hospital had thirty-six hours to evacuate its wounded. If it didn’t comply, it would be bombed. This news was nearly impossible to comprehend. Where were they supposed to go?

  Eleanor fell to her bed that night achingly tired but unable to sleep soundly. She had seen too much suffering, too many horrific injuries, too much sadness.

  * * *

  After a fitful night, morning arrived oppressively humid. At breakfast Eleanor and the other nurses were told to pack and be ready to leave for good in an hour. They were bound for Santa Scholastica, a Catholic girls’ college across the bay that had been transformed into a makeshift hospital. Sixty minutes later, she was on a small transport vessel loaded with the injured from Cañacao. Eleanor stood at the bow and surveyed what had been a paradise. In every direction she looked she saw smoldering ruins.

  The mood aboard the vessel was somber. U.S. Army and Navy installations all over the Philippines had been bombed or were still being bombed. Was anything still operational with which to wage war against the enemy? Even with her limited military training, Eleanor didn’t see how the U.S. could continue to hold its positions. It seemed they were not so much at war as preparing to be occupied.

  Eleanor wondered crazily if perhaps that would be less terrible. The occupying forces, if they came, would surely allow them to continue to see to the needs of the sick and wounded and dying, wouldn’t they? Had her parents heard that Manila had been attacked? And would she be able to get word to them that she was alright? She hoped she could.

  But her worst worry she hadn’t allowed herself to fully ponder—not in the immediate hours after the attack and not now. No one had been able to tell her if Sternberg Army Hospital was still standing. Were Penny and Lita injured? Or worse? Would she get to Manila only to learn her friends had been killed?

  Eleanor set her face against the wind as the port drew nearer, refusing to entertain the notion.

  Two

  Penny

  Sternberg Hospital

  December 1941

  “Merry Christmas indeed,” Penny muttered, but no one heard her. No one cared, their long-anticipated festivities forgotten in their desperate need to evacuate.

  The Army nurses had slipped out of Manila, two dozen at a time, over the last few days. When her turn came, Penny didn’t bother trying to be silent. There was no point given that the air was split with the thunder of bombs and the walls rattled so hard she couldn’t hear her own thoughts, much less her footsteps. Toward the end of the line—her hand grasping the rucksack of the nurse in front of her—she stumbled through the halls and out into the night, wearing a combat helmet along with her uniform.

  Out the door, down the breezeway—once draped in jasmine and dotted with ferns but now bombed and gutted and broken—then into the yard and toward a row of flatbed Army trucks that idled, waiting for them. They chose at random, tossed in their packs, and sat in two rows of four in the bed of each truck.

  As usual Penny kept close to Maude Davison, and once they rolled through the entrance, she sidled closer. Still, she had to shout to be heard. “Where are we going?”

  “Away from Manila.”

  “Not a hospital? I thought we were headed to another hospital.”

  Maude shook her head, then pointed to the shadowy form of Sternberg, retreating in the distance. “We’ll have to make our own.”

  This was a possibility the nurses had never discussed. They assumed that they would be sent off to another facility like all the others. Lined with cots. Stacked with linens. All they’d known during those lazy, endless months in Manila were whitewashed walls and red-tile roofs. Until the eighth of December. Until the Japanese unleashed hell on Hawaii and then the Philippines.

  “But that means . . .”

  “Yes,” Maude said. “Our next assignment will be a battlefield.”

  I didn’t pack for a battlefield. Penny almost laughed because it was so ridiculous. Who cared how she packed? Nothing in the rucksack at her feet could save them if another one of those bombs fell out of the sky and onto the truck.

  Penny pulled her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Thought of Lita and Eleanor. Tomorrow would have been their fifth HAM Day. They’d planned to get dressed up and go dancing. Try a new cocktail. Flirt with all the handsome soldiers. But now? God only knew where her friends were.

  Things had changed so quickly. For five months she’d worked in paradise, a place so pretty it might as well have been the shine on a soap bubble. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and all hell had—literally—broken loose. Even now she could hear her mother’s critical voice ringing in her ears. “Well, what did you expect, Penny, being so stubborn and all? Why’d you have to go and be one of those career women? You should’ve just stayed home. Found yourself another husband.”

  As an only child Penny had always known she wanted a career. She didn’t like being alone and didn’t like the quiet. But her options were limited. Teaching. Secretarial work. Nursing. Those were about the only career paths open to a girl from South Texas, but all of them required taking care of other people. Nursing had seemed the most exciting, so she’d gone to college looking to become an RN, as opposed to an MRS like her high school friends. The fact that she’d met Sam along the way? Well, Penny didn’t let that stop her.