A portion of the bedsheet signed by the nurses at Corregidor on May 6, 1942.
Denny Williams’s name is in the middle of the third column.
AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, Archival Repository
"IT WAS THE MORNING of May 6, 1942. In a few hours, the US Army stationed on the Philippine island of Corregidor would surrender to the army of Imperial Japan.
But the fighting men would not be the only ones involved in this surrender. Along with them were female nurses, some of them civilians but most of them official members of the US Army. None of these women had been trained in combat nursing and yet they had endured months of just that. Now they awaited their fate. They were all too aware of the horrors the Japanese army inflicted on Chinese women four and a half years earlier during the Nanking Massacre. Tomorrow they would be facing the same enemy. Were they now living their last hours? If so, would anyone ever know what they had endured during the past grueling months?
They wanted to leave proof that they had been alive before meeting the Japanese face-to-face. One of them tore a large square from a bedsheet. Another wrote the following words at the top: “Members of the Army Nurse Corps and Civilian women who were in the Malinta Tunnel when Corregidor fell.” Then 69 women signed their names. One of them was Denny Williams."
Opening paragraphs from "Denny Williams: Nurse under Fire" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
Bataan/Corregidor nurses leaving Santo Tomas prison in 1945
AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, Archival Repository
