Nurses treated as civilians in Jap camp
Victims only of reduced rations
By Earl Richert, Scripps-Howard staff writer
WASHINGTON – An Army nurse freed in Manila after nearly three years internment said here that, as far as she knew, none of the captured nurses had been assaulted or harmed by the Japs.
The nurse, 28-year-old Lt. Phyllis Arnold of Minneapolis, was taken prisoner on Corregidor and held in the Santo Tomas prison camp in Manila until February 3, 1945, when she and 67 other Army nurses were liberated.
She said:
We were fortunate enough to be treated as civilians.
But please don’t think that the prisoners of war were treated the same. The stories told about the atrocities committed upon them are true.
Life was “not so bad as prison camps go” until the Japs cut their rations last fall.
The nurses’ rations were cut to about 800 calories a day (About 200 calories are needed daily for the average person).
The nurses lost weight steadily. Lt. Arnold dropped from her normal 125 pounds to 100.
She said the thing she noticed most in flying back from Luzon was that the farther away from the front lines one got, the more optimistic the people were about the war being over quickly.
“In the front lines,” she said, “the boys all say that the war is a long way from being over.”
Vise clamped on Japanese in North Luzon
Filipino guerrillas capture province
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