"There were cars filled with nurses, and I could not bear to look into their faces as we passed on that crowded road. I knew what was written on them. I had seen it in the underground hospital at Corregidor, in the open and unprotected tent hospitals on Bataan. It was not fear. I never saw a nurse afraid. It was something more dreadful than fear, because that is active. It was inevitability.
They knew that the savage juggernaut was rolling at their heels. They knew what to expect. They had seen what hate can do, when their hospitals were deliberately bombed and wounded men screamed in the last agony under the Japanese planes. They had heard stories of other women...
They were fleeing toward the water line, where there might or might not be boats to carry them to Corregidor. And there was no place for them to hide on Corregidor...
I will never forget the faces of those girls. I will never forgive the fact that American women, under the American flag, had to know that night--the last night on Bataan."
Excerpt from I Saw the Fall of the Philippines by Colonel Carlos P. Romulo, Pulitzer Prize winner and personal aide to General Douglas MacArthur.
