'Someone Had to Go'

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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The bombs started falling at dawn on December 8, 1941.

Laura Mae Cobb pressed herself against the floor as explosions shook the naval hospital in Manila. At 49, she’d seen plenty in her nursing career. But nothing like this. The Cavite Navy Yard next door was burning. Black smoke filled the sky. And wounded men were already arriving faster than anyone could count. They came in cars, trucks, anything with wheels. Four and five soldiers crammed into each vehicle. Blood everywhere.

“Operating table’s full,” a doctor shouted. “Use the steps. Use the floor. Anywhere.”

Cobb had been Chief Nurse for less than a year. Now she was watching her world explode.

Laura Mae Cobb was born in Atchison, Kansas, in May 1892. She graduated from Mulvane High School in 1910, taught school for a time, entered the nursing training program at Wesley Hospital in Wichita in 1915, and graduated from that program in 1918.

She served as a nurse in the U.S. Navy from July 1918 to July 1921 (including brief service at the Canacao Naval Hospital in Manila at the end of World War I) then worked in civilian hospitals in Iowa and Michigan for three years. She rejoined the Navy in April 1924 and served in naval hospitals throughout the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. After serving for more than a decade in a naval hospital in Washington, D.C., rumors of war prompted her to request “to go overseas because someone had to go.” She was subsequently transferred to the naval hospital on Guam in April 1940, where she received a commendation for continuous duty for 48 hours during a typhoon that November.

In February 1941, Cobb was again assigned—now as Chief Nurse—to the Canacao Naval Hospital in Manila. When the Japanese attacked in December 1941, Cobb and 10 other navy nurses remained with the wounded. For weeks, they worked around the clock as American forces retreated. Manila fell. The Navy abandoned the hospital. But Laura Mae Cobb and 10 other nurses stayed behind. Someone had to care for the men too wounded to move.

On January 2, 1942, the Japanese arrived. “You are now prisoners of war,” the commander announced. Eleven women. Surrounded by enemy soldiers. Thousands of miles from home.

Before the guards could search them, she stuffed all 11 military records under her uniform. If the Japanese found those papers, her nurses could face execution as spies. The hidden documents pressed against her ribs -- a secret that could save their lives.

“Inventory all medical supplies,” the Japanese officer commanded.

Cobb stared at their precious quinine bottles. Without this medicine, malaria would kill half their patients. She had seconds to decide. “Relabel everything,” she whispered to her staff. “The quinine becomes baking soda. The morphine becomes aspirin.”

They worked through the night, switching labels, hiding their best medicines in plain sight. When the Japanese looted the pharmacy the next morning, they grabbed bottles of “worthless” baking soda and left the real quinine behind. For 37 months, the ruse worked.

Two months after the Japanese takeover, the nurses were moved to Santo Tomas University. The occupiers had turned the campus into a prison camp for over 3500 people. Cobb became superintendent of the camp hospital. Eleven nurses treating hundreds of patients with almost no supplies. They made bandages from torn sheets. Scavenged metal for surgical tools. Boiled rainwater for IV fluids.

“We don’t have medicine,” Cobb told her nurses. “But we have our hands, our hearts, and each other.”

Month after month, conditions got worse. The Japanese cut food rations. Then cut them again. By 1944, each person got 900 calories a day. Near the end, barely 300. Cobb watched her nurses grow skeletal. Their uniforms hung like sacks. But they never stopped working 12-hour shifts. Cobb saved every scrap of food for her nurses. Picked weevils out of their rice by hand. She later said, “We got so we didn’t especially mind the weevils, but the cockroaches and worms made eating tough going much of the time.”

When dysentery hit the camp, Cobb again worked without sleep for 48 hours straight. The other nurses called her their anchor. The one steady thing in hell.

By February 1945, people were dying of starvation. Cobb weighed 65 pounds. Her heart was failing. Arthritis twisted her hands. But she still made morning rounds. Still checked on every patient. Still whispered encouragement to nurses half her age.

Then, on the 23rd, they heard gunfire. “American paratroopers!” someone screamed. The rescue had come. After 37 months, freedom was bursting through the camp gates. As chaos erupted, Cobb told her nurses, “Protect the babies with all your life.” They began to evacuate newborns and wounded patients under enemy fire. Every nurse followed Cobb to safety. Not one was left behind.

All 11 Navy nurses survived. Against impossible odds, through starvation and disease and brutality, they’d all made it. Back in America, people called them heroes. The Angels of Bataan. They received medals and parades and newspaper headlines. But Laura Mae Cobb just wanted to keep nursing.

Seventy-eight American nurses became prisoners of war in World War II. Only one was a chief nurse who kept her entire team alive while continuing to heal others. Her story reminds us that real strength isn’t about fighting back -- sometimes it’s about never stopping the work that matters most.

Upon evacuation to Guam, Cobb said, “I want to return to the Philippines.” But the nurses were nevertheless returned to the United States, where Cobb was promoted to lieutenant commander and awarded the Bronze Star, a Gold Star in lieu of a second Bronze Star, the Defense of Philippines Ribbon, a Distinguished Army Unit Citation, and the Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon with two Battle Stars.

Laura Mae Cobb retired from the Navy in 1947 for health reasons and worked in a sanatorium in Los Angeles. She moved back to Wichita in 1974 and died there in September 1981 at 89.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one, Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, has just been published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.