Lawhon, McMorris and Meissner · 2022 · survival

A 2022 novel by three writers working as one, based on the nurses known as the Angels of Bataan. Two American military nurses and a Filipina nurse meet at the Army Navy Club in Manila in August 1941 and think they have drawn a paradise posting. Four months later they are under fire, and then they are the first female prisoners of the war.

1. 1
   Manila

   Eleanor, Penny and Lita meet at the Army Navy Club in August 1941, three women who came here to get away from their own pasts - and for four months the assignment is exactly the tropical posting the brochures promised.

2. 2
   Bataan

   After Pearl Harbor the hospitals move onto the peninsula and become open-air wards under bombing, operating with no supplies, no quinine and no prospect of relief - and the nurses stay on when the line breaks.

3. 3
   Corregidor

   The island fortress in Manila Bay, where the last of them work in the Malinta Tunnel until the surrender in May 1942 - a few flown out at the end and the rest left to be taken prisoner.

4. 4
   Santo Tomas

   The university in Manila becomes an internment camp, and the nurses go on nursing inside it for nearly three years - starvation rations, tropical disease, and a discipline they keep because the alternative is worse.

5. 5
   Los Banos

   Some are moved to a second camp south of the city, liberated in a raid in February 1945 - and the survivors come out weighing what a child weighs, having been the first women of the war taken prisoner and the last released.