This Is Really War

May 15, 2019
Add navy nurses to the list of unsung heroes of WWII. Lucchesi uses her journalistic skills to reconstruct the lives of a dozen U.S. nurses who brought along party dresses in 1940, when they headed to a military hospital in the Philippines, and wound up as Japanese prisoners of war in 1942, after the Philippines fell to Japan. Quoting from oral histories, interview transcripts, and memoirs, she tells stories of human cruelty and kindness. The star of her account is nurse Dorothy Still. She recorded a 2,600-word oral history for the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and published a memoir in 1995, attesting to how she and the other nurses witnessed torture and struggled with hunger until they were rescued on February 23, 1945. All the women lost weight; one left the camp weighing just 68 pounds. Forty-percent of Americans held in Japanese POW camps died; by contrast, the mortality rate was one-percent for Americans held by the Nazis. Lucchesi's well-researched, horrifying story effectively and compassionately recounts underappreciated courage, professionalism, and resiliency.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)