Amid near-constant bombing, food ran short and trenches were dug around makeshift hospitals to protect staff, patients and medical supplies. All they knew about Allied strategy was that they weren’t being rescued. Researched narrative, however, is less about military campaigns than about the drama of the people on the ground, particularly those 67 nurses who became prisoners of war. “That’s how naive I was.” “Pure Grit” begins with a map featuring Luzon, the country’s largest island and the location of Manila, Bataan and a number of POW camps during World War II. “I had no idea there was going to be a war,” one later lamented. military nurses who had been stationed, quite happily, in the Philippines before Pearl Harbor. Mary Cronk Farrell’s informative, sometimes upsetting book follows a group of U.S. War is hell, whether you are the soldier fighting the enemy, the medic tending the wounded or the civilian caught in the crossfire.
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