WWII Nurse-POW Story

Ex-POW holds no grudge

Sunday, August 15, 2004
By SHARON SCHLEGEL
Staff Writer

Mildred Manning's voice becomes agitated and emotional when asked if she keeps up with the Iraq war.

"I can't stand to watch it," she says.

The 90-year-old West Trenton resident has had more than her share of war.

Some 63 years after World War II erupted around her in the Philippines, the former U.S. Army nurse and prisoner of war can vividly describe the ordeal. She agreed to talk to The Times to mark today's 59th anniversary of V-J Day, the day Japan surrendered to the Allies and the war ended.

Manning says she cut so many clothes off wounded soldiers during the war that even today, "If I use a scissors, I get a blister."

She stands tall, erect and slim, an articulate woman with a lilt in her speech that hints of her Georgia girlhood.

She is one of 13 so-called "Angels of Bataan and Corregidor" - there were 77 - still alive. The World War II nurses are celebrated for their war duty and courage as POWs in the 1999 award-winning book "We Band of Angels," by Elizabeth Norman.

Talk with her about the months she spent nursing those wounded and dying in a Bataan jungle hospital under shellfire and in a bombarded underground tunnel on the desolate island of Corregidor, and she won't stand for being called heroic.

"I had a job to do. I was a nurse."

Her name then was Mildred Dalton, the only daughter of a Jefferson, Ga., farming family. Her mother made all the family's clothes "on a rickety old sewing machine."

During the Depression, her mother once sent her on a mile-and-a-half walk to trade six eggs for a spool of thread.

At 16, she won an essay contest sponsored by a newspaper columnist. The prize was a trip to the mountains of North Carolina.

"I didn't have anything when I graduated high school. . . . There was no money at all," Manning says. But she'd kept in touch with the columnist, who offered to pay for the realization of Dalton's dream - attending nursing school. She says she later paid back every penny.

After graduation, she spent two years as head nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, then requested a move to Fort Benning with the eventual goal of traveling overseas.

The Philippines was considered a plum posting, Manning recalls, lushly tropical and exotic, particularly in an era when a woman's place was still assumed to be in the home.

She arrived in the Philippines six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"Little did I know," Manning says.-- -- -- Many people don't realize that only hours after Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, American military bases in the Philippines also were heavily bombarded.

"The morning it started I had been to a store to be measured for riding boots," Manning says. "Someone across the street yelled that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. By the time I got back to the hospital, Clark Field was being bombed, too.

"We immediately went on duty, and injured soldiers started coming in."

A week later, most of the nurses were sent to Bataan where, by January 1942, four hospitals had been set up amid constant bombing raids.

Before long, Manning was among a group of nurses who set up an open-air hospital in the jungle to escape the unrelenting pounding of the hospital buildings. But the blasts followed them there.

"We worked under the trees, but the Japanese kept on bombing," she recalls.

By April 9, the military decided to surrender Bataan, and the nurses were evacuated to Corregidor. Manning remembers the morning they were forced to say goodbye to the 8,800 wounded they had been tending.

"It was so painful to leave those very ill, injured men. It still hurts to think of it. You never get over it completely."

The tiny island of Corregidor would soon accommodate 12,000 allied war personnel.

"It was a small island, mostly rock, with a big tunnel and side tunnels cut into it. We set up a hospital inside the main part of the tunnel.

"It was dreadful, and I can't stand to be in confined places today," Manning says.

"When we first got there, it was all green outside the tunnel. When we left, months later, there wasn't even a leaf after all the bombing."

Eighty-five Army nurses worked in the Malinta Tunnel enclosure, constantly shaken by bombs, where Manning says for a time they were accompanied by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his wife and son.-- -- -- When the Americans surrendered Corregidor to the Japanese a few months later, the nurses were sent by the Japanese to the Santa Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. They would remain there as POWs for the next three years, the first American military women ever imprisoned.

Manning remembers waiting and wondering if they would be raped.

It didn't happen. They were put to work right away, ministering to the ill and wounded among the 4,000 others, all foreign nationals, also imprisoned on the island. A third of them were children.

"To get to the hospital we had to go through a gate with a guard and we had to bow to him," Manning says.

"The first two years, food was plentiful - dried fish, soup and vegetables. The people who had money were allowed to buy food from vendors at the gates.

"But by the last year, it was only a cup of rice twice a day. A lot of people didn't survive - husbands, wives, families. You watched the children become emaciated.

"We got up and worked. . . . When you got off work, you were so tired you just slept," she says.

To keep their spirits up, the nurses organized birthday parties and sometimes sang. "God knows where we got the inner strength," Manning says.

Though they were permitted to write home, none of the nurses' families ever received a letter. After the war, their unmailed correspondence was discovered packed in a Manila warehouse.

"My parents wrote to Georgia Sen. (Richard) Russell and to President Roosevelt and were told no one knew where we were. They sure must have known," she insists, the closest she comes to revealing a hint of bitterness.-- -- -- But two months after their third year of imprisonment, something changed.

"We had the feeling it was ending. We could see American planes coming over. I was on night duty in a gymnasium set up for hospital patients and all of a sudden there were these American soldiers outside.

"And the food, the food, the FOOD!" she exclaims.

The words burst out with so much gusto it is hard to believe she's describing an event some six decades behind her.

"By the end of a week they got us to another island, then put us on a plane and sent us to Hawaii for two weeks and then to San Francisco for physicals and debriefing. It was March before we got home."

A photo of Manning in uniform being kissed by her mother on arrival at the Atlanta airport ended up on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution.

Now, blown up and framed, it graces the wall of her West Trenton home, along with other war-time mementoes.

Ask Manning if she went through a difficult period of post-war transition and she laughs out loud.

"Honey, it was so wonderful coming home. . . . You were just so glad to be here and eating good food. There was no adjustment at all."

But after three months of rest and recuperation, Manning was surprised to find she was still considered part of the war effort.

"There was a system of points set up you had to achieve to be discharged, and they said I didn't have enough points."

So she and many of the other POW nurses were sent to speak at war-bond drives around the country.

"And that's where I met my husband," she says of Bruce Manning, the life partner who died in 1994.

"I was sent to speak at a plant in Marietta, Ga., and he was a reporter for The Constitution assigned to go with me."

When she finally completed her duty in November 1945, they were married. Manning quickly became mother to her husband's 3-year-old daughter March, and eventually the couple had two sons.

Today, her son Jim and his wife, Sandy, live a few blocks away - the reason Manning finally consented to move to Trenton and "away from the warm weather."

Daughter March and son William remain in Georgia with their families but traveled to Trenton with their children recently for Mildred's 90th birthday bash.

-- -- -- Even now, Manning's war experiences are always with her.

She says the war years made her "grateful for everything I have - the little things that people take so for granted, from a bar of soap to a hot bath.

"Although, when you grew up in the Depression," she adds thoughtfully, "well, we're just different people. We grew everything we ate, except salt, sugar and coffee."

As for the integration of women into the military, Manning says, "I wouldn't want to do it. But I would hate to deny women that experience if that is what they want. More power to 'em!"

Despite a broken hip last year and various ailments, she lives alone and still drives short distances.

Escorting a visitor out through the garage, she walks past her tomato-red compact car with the vanity license plate "EX-POW RN."

It's a Toyota Corolla, a Japanese car.

"I had a hard time buying it," Manning admits, "but my children convinced me. And I do forgive them, the Japanese, because all countries go to war, and they're no different from us and no worse."