News-Info-Alerts

Re: Angel of Bataan

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 17, 2003

"Last plane out:
Hamilton woman recalls wartime experience as ‘Angel of Bataan’

By KEN NEWTON - kenn@npgco.com

Dorothea Daley Engel was one of the last people to be evacuated from the Philippines before it fell to the Japanese in World War II. (IVAL LAWHON JR./St. Joseph News-Press)A country girl from Hamilton, Mo., became a war bride 61 years ago this week in a place that had been paradise.

By time she took her vows, wearing army boots, the invading Japanese made the place hell.

Dorothea Daley Engel remained in the Philippines as a newlywed another 69 days before boarding the last planeload of military nurses to escape the overrun nation. She never saw her groom again.

Wanderlust and family history took her to the South Pacific. Peacetime duty at Fort Stotsenberg hospital, about 60 miles north of Manila, boasted some idyllic qualities: leisurely work in a ward of malaria patients, servants in the housing quarters, cavalry soldiers playing polo on weekends.

Hamilton never smelled so much of gardenias. The chatter of monkeys never accompanied walks in Caldwell County.

In this exotic locale, 2nd Lt. Dot Daley fell in love with an officer in the field artillery, a Louisiana man nicknamed “Boots.” They married, but war intervened in their union.

Her personal tragedy takes its place among millions of others whose lives intersected with World War II. Still, her story of bravery under fire and mercy in the midst of chaos remains unique even in so sweeping a conflict.

History places her among fewer than 100 regarded as the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor.” A monument in the Philippines, 8,000 miles from where she lives today in her native town, remembers her just that way.

A DESIRE TO TRAVEL

Elizabeth M. Norman, author of a 1999 book about the military nurses who served on the Bataan Peninsula and the island of Corregidor, found common character traits in the group.

“They don’t take small stresses seriously nor do they suffer fools easily,” Dr. Norman said from her office at New York University. “They learned to live with loss so early in life.”

Which might explain why Mrs. Engel, sitting in a back booth at Vinee’s Pizzeria and Restaurant in Hamilton, cares little for sentimentalizing her life those six decades ago.

“I wanted to travel, and I couldn’t afford it,” she said of her decision in 1938 to join the Army Nurse Corps.

Just as succinctly, she said of her time among the falling bombs, “I don’t think about it a whole lot anymore.”

But that’s not to say she doesn’t remember.

She took her leave of Hamilton after graduation from high school there in 1934. She did her nurse’s training at old St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City. But a wider world beckoned.

Her father was a military medical officer who served statewide in both world wars. Two brothers, a sister, a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law eventually served. Her enlistment took her first to Fort Riley, Kan., then to the Red Cross First Reserve. She pressed for foreign duty, and in June 1941 shipped out for the Philippines.

“I was given three choices, and I think that was my third choice,” she recalled, then smiled. “So that’s the Army.”

But the posting suited her, the camaraderie with the other nurses, the after-duty golf outings, the officers’ club dances.

At one such dance she met a lieutenant named Emanuel Engel Jr., a college graduate from New Orleans who opted for a military career.

“It was truly love at first sight for both of us,” she wrote in an account for American magazine in 1942.

Stationed at nearby Clark Field, Boots Engel visited often, and the couple traveled to the nightclubs of Manila for dancing on the weekends.

On Dec. 7, the imperial forces of Japan changed the routine. Six or so hours after planes decimated the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, bombs started falling at Clark Field.

“Even in the Philippines, we didn’t think they would come there,” Mrs. Engel said. “We could feel the concussion. I thought it was an earthquake.”

She and the other nurses at Fort Stotsenberg went on duty and stayed there the next 48 hours, “without sleep and without food,” Mrs. Engel remembered. The 200-bed hospital got 500 patients from Clark Field almost instantly. Those occupying the beds with tropical illnesses vacated them to go fight.

“I went on duty that day and never did get back to my quarters,” she said.

After the initial attacks, nurses and patients found sleeping space in the airway under the hospital. When the nurses needed a change of uniform, the only clothing available was Air Force coveralls, usually three or four sizes too big.

After a retreat to a jungle hospital, the nurse from Hamilton drew duty in the gas gangrene ward, a place of horrible wounds and pungent infections. The relaxing pre-attack shifts at the hospital were quickly forgotten.

Dot lost 30 pounds in the ensuing months. The nurses’ diet consisted largely of rice, with some occasional meat of indeterminate origin. “Someone at a VFW meeting one day (years later) asked me if I ever met Gen. (Jonathan) Wainwright (eventual commander of the Philippines forces),” she said. “I said, ‘No, but we ate his horse.’”

Boots Engel survived the initial attack and those that followed. The couple saw each other infrequently, but they followed through on their earlier discussions to marry.

On Feb. 19, 1942, Father William Thomas Cummings pronounced them husband and wife in a hospital. Two soldiers witnessed the nuptials, which featured no veil, no flowers and no ring.

The bride and everyone else wore khaki.

After a six-hour honeymoon, the groom returned to duty at the beach defenses in Mariveles. The newlyweds, both now stationed on the Bataan Peninsula, saw each other twice a week through the end of March. For a short time, Boots was hospitalized with malaria, and she saw him more regularly.

The Allied defenses collapsed under the Japanese onslaught. On March 11, Gen. Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia. “We weren’t too fond of MacArthur, the fact that he left a couple of months before anyone else did,” Mrs. Engel recalled. “We called him ‘Dugout Doug.’”

Bataan fell to the enemy on April 8. The Army nurses threw personal effects into pillowcases and loaded themselves onto any vehicle that would move. They were headed to the port at Mariveles, then to Corregidor, the heavily fortified island that safeguarded the entrance to Manila Bay.

Shortly after a steamer set sail with the nurses aboard, a Japanese bomb destroyed the dock where they stood minutes before.

FIRST FLIGHT, LAST PLANE

For the next three weeks, Mrs. Engel and the other American nurses remained on duty in the Milanta Tunnel Hospital, an underground facility near the middle of the island. The Japanese shelled Corregidor almost nonstop, though vast amounts of concrete kept all below safe.

But no Allied reinforcements came.

On April 29, the chief nurse ordered Mrs. Engel and 19 other nurses to stand ready for evacuation. To this day, she doesn’t know why she was chosen. “Maybe the fact I was married,” she speculated.

After dark, a PT boat took the nurses out into the ocean. A Japanese holiday silenced the bombing that day.

“This PBY (an aircraft capable of water landings) came in, lights off, motor off,” she said. “We didn’t even hear it until it got there.”

Mrs. Engel and nine others climbed in. Another PBY would transport the others. Though now quite worldly, and having been in harm’s way for months, the Missouri nurse faced a dilemma.

“I had never been on a plane before,” she remembered. “I couldn’t make up my mind whether to take the airplane ride or stay and be a prisoner of war.”

She followed orders, though, and the planes evaded enemy patrols and landed for refueling on Mindanao before dawn the next day. They waited out the daylight, then continued their flight to Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory.

(The nurses on the other plane were less fortunate. Their PBY hit a reef taking off from Mindanao and required repairs. The nurses were put ashore to find shelter. On May 10, the Japanese captured the stranded group.)

In Darwin, Mrs. Engel joined her fellow nurses in warm beer, clean uniforms and meals blissfully absent rice. They flew on to Melbourne, where they stayed a week, before boarding the USS Matsonia for a cruise to San Diego. There, medical officers fed the nurses chopped liver and tomato juice to rebuild their iron counts.

On May 6, Gen. Wainwright surrendered the Philippines to the Japanese. Fifty-four of Mrs. Engel’s Army nurse colleagues were taken prisoner. They would remain captive for the next 33 months.

In July 1942, the Army sent Mrs. Engel and other nurse escapees to Washington for a ceremony organized by the American Red Cross. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt presented her with a presidential citation and three oak leaf clusters. They were the first women decorated for bravery in World War II.

Though she was back in the United States, where she would remain until shipping overseas to occupied Germany after the war, Mrs. Engel’s heart remained in the Philippines.

The Army listed her husband as missing in action on Bataan. By the autumn of her escape, the Army Nurse Corps listed Mrs. Engel as a widow. She stood convinced Boots was still alive.

As it developed, he was alive, in a Japanese prison camp. He survived captivity until late 1944.

“He was being taken to Japan on a Japanese troop ship, which was sunk by an American submarine,” Mrs. Engel said. “It wasn’t marked as a POW ship.”

This is what she learned later. At the time prisoners of war were liberated, she watched the newspapers for his name, but it never appeared. She finally accepted his death, and she never remarried.

She left the Army in 1947 and eventually returned to Hamilton, where she worked as a nurse for her brother, Dr. Frank R. Daley.

“My father had died,” she said. “It was up to me to go home and take care of my mother, so I did.”

This sense of duty, just like the earlier sense of daring, doesn’t surprise Dr. Norman, whose book “We Band of Angels” chronicled this group of nurses.

“In most ways, they were quite ordinary,” the author said. “But back in the 1940s, most women didn’t volunteer for the service. There was a streak of independence that set them apart. This spirit of adventure and independence was there.”

In the Philippines, they are remembered for their sacrifices, their starvation, their work ethic and their gallantry under enemy fire. On May 6, 2000, the nation erected a monument on Corregidor bearing the names of those nurses who served. Mrs. Engel’s name is halfway down the first column.

The honorific inscription atop the granite represents how they were thought of long ago and all these decades later: “To the Angels.”

©2003, The News-Press, St. Joseph, Missouri"