News-Info-Alerts

Re: Nurse-POW Passes

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 09, 2002

"One of most decorated women in military history laid to rest
BY LAURA KENDALL JOHNSON
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - A survivor of two wars, a prison camp and near starvation, Col. Ruby Bradley, one of the most decorated women in U.S. military history, was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday, nearly 40 years after she retired from the Army.

Bradley, a native of Spencer, W.Va., died May 28 in Hazard, Ky., at age 94 after suffering a heart attack.

Bradley was honored with a military funeral in the historic cemetery overlooking the nation's capital. The coffin was escorted to the gravesite by six white horses and the symbolic riderless horse followed, while the U.S. Army Band played traditional hymns.

A firing party of seven sounded three volleys in her honor, and the flag covering her coffin was folded and presented to a relative. Several family members and Army soldiers laid roses on the coffin, saluting as they turned to leave.

Bradley entered the Army Nurse Corps as a surgical nurse in 1934. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Bradley was 34 and serving at Camp John Hay in the Philippines. Three weeks later she was captured and in 1943 was moved to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, the Filipino capital. It was there that she and several other imprisoned nurses earned the title "Angels in Fatigues" from fellow captives.

For the next several months she used her nursing abilities to provide medical help for the prisoners and sought to meet the needs of starving children by shoving food into her pockets whenever she could, often going hungry herself. The weight she shed made room in her uniform for smuggling surgical equipment into the POW camp, which she used to assist in 230 operations and deliver 13 children during her time there.

On Feb. 3, 1945, American troops stormed the gates of the Japanese camp and liberated Bradley and her fellow prisoners, ending three years of captivity.

At just 80 pounds, Bradley returned home to West Virginia and waited five years before returning to the battlefield, in the Korean War.

Bradley served as a frontline U.S. Army nurse in evacuation hospitals in Korea. It was there that she refused to leave until she had loaded the sick and wounded onto a plane, while surrounded by 100,000 Chinese soldiers. She escaped just in time, as her ambulance exploded behind her.

"You got to get out in a hurry when you have somebody behind you with a gun," Bradley said in an interview with ``NBC Nightly News.''

After 30 years of military service, Bradley retired from the Army in 1963. She was one of the most-decorated women in U.S. military history with 34 medals and citations of bravery, including two Legion of Merit medals, two Bronze stars, two Presidential Emblems, the World War II Victory Medal and the U.N. Service Medal.

She was also the recipient of the Florence Nightingale Medal, the Red Cross' highest international honor.


© 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services"