DAYS OF HORROR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 June 1942, Page 4

DAYS OF HORROR

NURSES ON CORREGIDOR. GRUELLING TIME IN TUNNELS. SYDNEY, June 11. Safe in Australia after experiencing the horrors of the last days of Corregidor and Batan, 13 American women, 11 Army nurses, one Navy nurse and one wife of a naval officer - are recuperating after their gruelling time in the Philippines. From December 24 until April 8. when all nurses were ordered to leave Batan for Corregidor, they had various experiences of being bombed by Japanese, nursing wounded men in improvised hospitals under trees at Batan and in tunnels on Corregidor. In Corregidor nurses lived in a lateral tunnel off one of the main corridors, and slept in three-decker beds welded together. They had to go outside to breathe fresh air or to smoke. "We had never appreciated bamboo before,” Second-Lieutenant Hortense McKay said, “but at Batan we made crutches of it, clothes baskets for dirty linen, and chairs and beds and ward decks and office furniture. In one ward our office was the sawn-off top of a bus mounted on bamboo poles. “We improvised everything, but one thing we could not get was a cigarette. We did not run out of class 1 drugs, and we always had enough bandages. Hospital No. 2 at Batan was in the open, air, and as the fighting became heavier and more were wounded and fell sick we expanded to wherever the nearest tree was. We stripped the beds of mattresses or filled mattress covers with bamboo and | leaves for our patients.”