Jean Kennedy Schmidt, one of the last survivors of the Angels of Bataan, the American military nurses who were Japanese prisoners of war for nearly three years during World War II, has died. She was 88.
Schmidt, a retired Army nurse, died Saturday at her home in La Canada Flintridge of complications related to a fall, said Susan Johnson, her daughter.
The nurses stationed in the Philippines became the first large group of American women in combat, according to Elizabeth M. Norman, who documented their story in the 1999 book "We Band of Angels."
Within hours of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed American bases in the Philippines. Until then, few of the 99 Army and Navy nurses stationed there had served in war conditions, and they "found themselves almost overwhelmed by slaughter," Norman wrote.
Trapped on the Bataan Peninsula, they established operational hospitals with open-air wards in the dense jungle to help care for the retreating American forces.
"Our nurses' training taught us to improvise and to be innovative, and that came in very handy on Bataan," Schmidt said in "No Time for Fear," a 1996 book of remembrances by World War II nurses.
When Bataan fell to the Japanese in April 1942, the nurses "were ordered to leave our patients behind" and go to Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay, Schmidt said in the book.
On the island, they set up a hospital in an underground maze of tunnels and cared for the wounded through almost nonstop shelling.
Because some nurses were evacuated just before the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, "we always thought we'd be going also, until the Japanese came into the tunnel," Schmidt recounted in "No Time for Fear."
Before the Japanese took them prisoner, the nurses wanted to leave a record in case they were never heard from again.
They ripped a square of cloth from a bedsheet and signed it the day of their surrender, May 6, 1942.
Taken by boat to the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila, the nurses refused the tea offered "because we thought they were trying to poison us," Schmidt recalled in the book.
Despite being racked with disease and injury, the remaining 77 nurses continued to practice, treating military and civilian prisoners in the camp.
By early 1945, many of the nurses suffered from malnutrition, losing an average of 32 pounds each.
