All This Hell: U. S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese »

"Even though women were not supposed to be on the front lines, on the front lines we were. Women were not supposed to be interned either, but it happened to us. People should know what we endured. People should know what we can endure." — Lt. Col. Madeline Ullom More than one hundred U.S. Army and Navy nurses were stationed in Guam and the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, five navy nurses on Guam became the first American military women of World War II to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than seventy army nurses survived five months of combat conditions in the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor before being captured, only to endure more than three years in prison camps. When freedom came, the U.S. military ordered the nurses to sign agreements with the government not to discuss their horrific experiences. Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee have conducted numerous interviews with survivors and scoured archives for letters, diaries, and journals to uncover the heroism and sacrifices of these brave women.

Library Journal

Some of the least known but most interesting World War II narratives involve the experiences of civilian and military American women living in the South Pacific during the Japanese occupation--the subject of the present volumes. All This Hell describes the plight of 84 female nurses stationed in the South Pacific prior to the war whose lives went from idyllic to horrific when they were interned by the Japanese. Based upon both oral histories and published biographical and autobiographical accounts, the book provides a readable and gripping introduction to the topic for all readers. Its authors, veteran military medical personnel, have also written Albanian Escape, which deals with wartime nursing during World War II. Prisoners in Paradise is a broader, more analytic study. Kaminski (history, Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point) explores the wartime activities of the region's thousands of non-native civilian and military women. Going beyond a narrative of their trials, she considers how attitudes toward gender roles shifted and adapted as women struggled to survive and protect their families. Based upon an extensive list of primary and secondary sources, this book is useful not only in its coverage of this neglected period but also as a more general study of gender in wartime. While All This Hell is recommended for all public and larger academic libraries, Prisoners in Paradise is most appropriate for academic and larger public libraries.--Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ., PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\