We Band of Angels
   Elizabeth M. Norman
  1999 Random House NY USA
   ISBN: 0375502459


This is the story of American women's search for adventure at the end of the Great Depression. Their idyllic South Pacific life changes when, on the same day Hawaii is attacked, the Philippines come under fire. The nurses' trials on bloody battlefields, flight, surrender, imprisonment, liberation & homecoming is a saga of endurance, professionalism & raw pluck.

The "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor" were the only group of American women ever captured & imprisoned by an enemy. How they came to be in military hospitals in the Pacific Ocean makes for wonderful reading. How their lives changed one sunny, calm day when the only serious thing on their minds was who they'd be dancing with under the stars that night is gripping. How their ebullience, training & grit got them through endless battlefield surgery, countless severed limbs & dying patients, remorselessly evaporation of supplies & rations & a seemingly constant sense of excess baggage in the masculine world of war, is breathtaking & passionate.

Here, at last, & not a moment too soon, Elizabeth M. Norman, has patched together the memories, the facts & the grinding, grisly details of the first ground battle of Americans in that war.

It is hard to realize that almost everyone back then thought of "the war" phony - something happening "over there" that would never touch anyone "here" & if it did it would be over in a few months. It was a common perspective, indeed to think otherwise - that the war was just beginning, that Japan & Germany would wreak global havoc for years, that the cultures waging war had terribly different values, senses of honor - was to be a worrier.

Thus it was that America was ill-prepared for the Japanese assaults on their Pacific posts; that America suffered that double punch in which dozens of happy-go-lucky, plucky nurses found themselves surrounded by thousands of men intent on killing each other.

Pictures are worth thousands of words - you study the black & white photos of the nurses' colonial digs; their group shots; their field quarters; their tunnel wards; their internment camps & their eventual release & award ceremonies & glean from their faces, clothes, surroundings a time capsule of style, courage & determination to create ordinariness out of chaos.

Time has been running out & in Elizabeth Norman's forward you get her sense of urgency to find & record the memories of this aging band of angels. Nowadays, their numbers are few, those remaining often beyond wanting to or able to recall those distant years. Dr. Norman has, however, done her homework & rekindled the valiant flame these fine women kept burning in the darkest of Pacific nights.

This is an absorbing study in womanly courage, in group strength & national persona. These are the collective memories of our grandmothers & great-aunts & their years in uniform, in tribulations we cannot begin to know when dread, hunger & unrelenting domination by an enemy was overpowering.

It is within the pages of We Band of Angels that you learn what kept them sane, kept them together, kept them strong. The keeper of the dairy, the signatures on a bedsheet to remind people they even existed, the soldiers they tended, buried & brought back to life are the living homage to these brave souls.

Elizabeth Norman has done a superb job of recreating - from interviews, diaries & momentos offered her by survivors & their relatives - this passionate, terrible time in these nurses' lives.

A must for anyone affected by the courage of women, the strength of a team & the dreadful things we can cope with when we have to.

Also by Dr. Elizabeth M. Norman: Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam
(12/19/99)

Rebecca