Elizabeth MacDonald, Pearl Harbor reporter

REPORTER ELIZABETH MacDonald, on assignment in Honolulu, was in bed on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, listening to a radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Suddenly an announcer cut in. “The islands are under attack,” he said. “This is the real McCoy.” Elizabeth didn’t think it was the real anything; she was sure it was just another army maneuver. But a few minutes later, she received a call from her photographer at Scripps Howard News Service. He wasn’t sure which country was doing the bombing, Germany or Japan, but he did know that the US naval base at Pearl Harbor was under attack.

During the first half of their drive to Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth and the photographer didn’t notice anything unusual; it was a typically quiet Sunday morning. But when they got closer, Elizabeth saw something shocking. Reporting later, she described it as “a formation of black planes diving straight into the ocean off Pearl Harbor. The blue sky was punctured with anti-aircraft smoke puffs.” It was the second wave of Japanese bombers. Looking over her shoulder, Elizabeth suddenly saw “a rooftop fly into the air.”

She wrote that she now understood “that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you.”

The Japanese had targeted the battleships in Pearl Harbor and the nearby airfields, not civilians. But because the Japanese destroyed most of the US planes before they could get airborne and do battle, frantic US military personnel on the ground tried to shoot the Japanese down with anti-aircraft guns. Some of their misfired ammunition destroyed buildings, killed 68 civilians, and wounded 35.

Elizabeth was not allowed near Pearl Harbor—the US military did not want female journalists on the front lines of military action—so she focused instead on the civilian casualties in the area and the desperate attempts to save them.

“The blood-soaked drivers returned with stories of streets ripped up, houses burned, twisted shrapnel and charred bodies of children,” she wrote. In the morgue, Elizabeth saw bodies “laid on slabs in the grotesque positions in which they had died. Fear contorted their faces.”

As Elizabeth watched firefighters bring victims inside—some of them with the acronym DOA (dead on arrival) marked on their foreheads—she wrote that life had suddenly become “blood and the fear of death—and death itself. . . . In the emergency room . . . doctors calmly continued to treat the victims of this new war. Interns were taping up windows to prevent them from crashing into the emergency area as bombs fell and the dead and wounded continued to arrive.”

When Elizabeth left the emergency room and returned to Honolulu, she saw that many familiar shops had burned down. After dusk, she described “the all-night horror of attack in the dark. Sirens shrieking, sharp, crackling police reports and the tension of a city wrapped in fear.”

Excerpts from "Elizabeth MacDonald: Pearl Harbor Reporter and OSS Agent" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater

The Bataan-Corregidor nurses on their way home

US nurses, February 12, 1945, recently released from Santo Tomas internment camp

Photo credit: John Tewell

On July 2, 1942, the nurses were imprisoned in the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila, where they tried, as much as possible, to help the other prisoners as they all struggled to survive on starvation rations.

Finally, on the evening of February 3, 1945, US troops liberated Santo Tomas. They came too late for many of the prisoners, who had by then died of ailments related to undernourishment. All of the Bataan-Corregidor nurses survived.

On Sunday, February 11, 1945, American lieutenant colonel Nola Forrest told the gaunt, exhausted, but elated nurses to be ready for departure on the following morning. She also mentioned that US intelligence officials, who realized these women had never been trained for combat nursing, were eager to debrief them. “You’re the first [US military] women to have served under actual combat conditions,” she said. “Whatever tips you have on how you survived could be of great help to others.”

All the nurses would be promoted to a higher military rank, Forrest said, and would receive the Presidential Citation and a Bronze Star.

Excerpt from "Denny Williams: Nurse under Fire" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater 

The Vocal Orchestra of the Palembang Internment Camp

The Colijn sisters, Dutch East Indies, 1939.

 Left to right: Antoinette, Helen, Alette. 

(Both Antoinette and Alette sang in the vocal orchestra).

Photo credit: Song of Survival by Helen Colijn.

Then Helen saw the word ORCHESTRA scratched in large letters in the dirt. Orchestra? She knew there were no real instruments in camp. Had she generated excitement for a performance played on crude homemade instruments?

They would all soon find out. A few minutes later, 30 women, each holding a piece of paper in one hand and a stool in the other, filed out of the main kitchen to face the audience. Children sat in front, while many of the adults, including Helen, stood.

Then Margaret Dryburgh spoke. “This evening,” she said, “we are asking you to listen to something quite new, we are sure: a choir of women’s voices trying to reproduce some of the well-known music usually given by an orchestra or a pianist.” The singers, she said, would sit on their stools just like orchestra performers, in order to conserve their energy.

Then she took her place among the singers. Norah Chambers stood in front of the performers. She raised her hands. The choir began to sing, in four-part harmony, Dvorak’s “Largo” from the New World Symphony.

(Sheet music copied by Norah Chambers for the vocal orchestra.)

“The music soared in its first rich and full crescendo,” Helen wrote later. “I felt a shiver go down my back. I thought I had never heard anything so beautiful before. The music didn’t sound precisely like an orchestra either, although it was close. . . . The music sounded ethereal, totally unreal in our sordid surroundings.”

“Huu, huu.” Helen heard a new sound, “the ugly raw voice of an angry guard,” coming up behind her. Surely Norah could hear it too. But she didn’t stop directing the music.

“Huu, huu.” The angry guard, his bayonet fixed on his rifle, passed through the standing audience. Soon Helen could only see the tip of his bayonet.

The music continued. The angry voice did not. Helen craned her neck: she could no longer see the bayonet. Had the guard put down his weapon? Was he also mesmerized by the beautiful music? Apparently so. “As the Largo moved toward a great, glorious crescendo,” Helen would write later, “the guard remained as still as we for the rest of the concert."

Excerpt from "Helen Colijn: Rising Above" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater. 

Click here for more about the vocal orchestra.

Jane Kendeigh lands on Iwo Jima

Jane Kendeigh attempts to comfort wounded marine William Wyckoff. 

Iwo Jima, March 6, 1945.

Credit: US Navy Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Library & Archives

"Although the plane was high enough to be clear of the US bombardment, it was certainly visible to the Japanese snipers below. Jane knew that Japanese anti-aircraft guns on the island had already shot down US carrier planes. One of those guns might still be in action. But an anti-aircraft gun wouldn’t be necessary to take them down; a single bullet hitting the fuel tank would cause the plane to explode. So Jane and the others were relieved when the plane finally swished past the highest point on the island—Mount Suribachi—and settled in for a landing.

Jane’s destination was beside the airstrip: a small sandbagged hospital tent. The roar of guns and artillery was so loud, Jane and Silas could barely hear one another speaking as they hurried inside. There they found doctors and male medics working frantically to save lives in rough conditions. The stretcher-bearers carried wounded men out of the tent and lined them up near the waiting plane. Jane spoke comfortingly to each man, if he was conscious, and checked him as he went aboard.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant DeWitt asked the medics in the tent about the previous plane, the one he’d missed. They told him it was due in very soon; the pilot had lost his way.

This delay meant that Jane Kendeigh had suddenly become front-page news: the first navy flight nurse to land on Iwo Jima, the first navy flight nurse to step onto a World War II Pacific battlefield. Lieutenant DeWitt’s photograph of her speaking to William was transmitted to the United States, where it appeared in nearly every newspaper in the nation."

Excerpt from "Jane Kendeigh: Navy Flight Nurse" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.

Helen Colijn: Digging Graves in the Internment Camp

Helen (center) and her sisters.

The Dutch East Indies, 1939.

Credit: Song of Survival

THE JAPANESE GUARD held up two fingers. Only two graves. A few days earlier it had been eight.

Helen Colijn, a Dutch teenager, along with three other prisoners, had volunteered for grave duty. Sometimes digging graves didn’t seem as depressing as living in the filthy internment camp with all of the starving, sick, and dying women.

Helen’s view of death had changed drastically during her imprisonment. It was no longer a shock, and barely a sorrow. It occurred nearly every day. Few of the surviving prisoners still had the energy to grieve.

But Helen could do something to help: she could dig. The guards wouldn’t do it, so it was up to the prisoners. She wished the guards would at least give them better digging tools...


From "Helen Colijn: Rising Above" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater

Helen Colijn: The War is Over

"On August 24, 1945, the prisoners who were not bedridden were summoned to a spot outside the guardhouse. The camp commander told them the war was over. He didn’t tell them who had won.

The following day, the women began to receive items they’d previously been told were unavailable: food, medicine, blankets, bandages, mosquito nets, towels. Many weak prisoners continued to die, and all of them had to carry on in the squalor of the camp. But they were no longer starving. And they knew help was on the way.

On September 7, 1945, Dutch paratroopers entered the camp. They said 'they had never seen such awful conditions' [in the camps they’d been liberating] and were amazed that anyone could live like this.'"

From "Helen Colijn: Rising Above" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater

Maria Rosa Henson: "Don't be ashamed."

"Then one morning in 1992, she heard a woman on the radio discussing the topic of so-called comfort women who had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese government during the war.

Maria Rosa began to shake uncontrollably. She heard the woman on the radio discuss something called the Task Force on Filipino Comfort Women. 'Don’t be ashamed,' the woman said. 'Being a sex slave is not your fault. It is the responsibility of the Japanese Imperial Army. Stand up and fight for your rights.'

'My heart was beating very fast,' Maria wrote later of that moment. 'I asked myself whether I should expose my ordeal. What if my children and relatives found me dirty and repulsive?'

She didn’t call in, but she listened to that radio station every day. A few weeks later, she heard a similar announcement. She began to weep. At that moment, her daughter Rosario walked in. Maria Rosa finally told her the truth.

Rosario helped her get in touch with the task force. Maria Rosa was interviewed on tape, Rosario at her side. It was extremely difficult, but also a relief. 'I felt like a heavy weight had been removed from my shoulders,' she wrote later, 'as if thorns had been pulled out of my grieving heart. I felt I had recovered my long-lost strength and self-esteem.'

Maria Rosa was the first Filipina comfort woman to break her silence..."


From "Maria Rosa Henson: Rape Survivor" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater