On this Memorial Day I would like to remember the nurses who served in WWII. In regaining women’s history, their contribution during WWI is frequently overlooked. Here are the statistics in this area: More than 100 military nurses were captured when Bataan and Corregidor fell to the Japanese in 1942. Sixty-six Army Nurses and eleven Navy Nurses remained in a Japanese concentration camp for 37 months, more than three years! Sixteen hundred Army Nurses and 565 WACS received combat decorations, including the Distinguished Service Medals, Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Air Medals, Legions of Merit, Commendation Medals, and Purple Hearts 

During the battle on Anzio, six Army Nurses were killed by German bombing, strafing and shelling of the tented hospital area. Four Army Nurses among the survivors were awarded Silver Stars for extraordinary courage under fire. In all, more than 200 Army Nurses lost their lives during World War II. Seventeen of those valiant women are buried in American cemeteries in foreign lands.

During WWII, 72 United States Army nurses endured the miseries of Bataan along with the troops, were surrendered to the Japanese and spent years in captivity -- without in any way impeding the war effort. Chivalry may not be dead, but it no longer has the strength, if it ever did, to incapacitate a mixed-sex military.

A great read on this topic is “We Band of Angels”. Author Elizabeth Norman, who teaches nursing at New York University, begins her story of the ''angels of Bataan and Corregidor'' in Manila just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. To these mostly very young working-class women, prewar Manila must have seemed like a perpetual prom, with frangipani-scented tropical evenings spent dancing under the stars. Then the war arrived, in the form of Japanese bombs, and the women were trucked into the jungles of Bataan, becoming the first group of American military nurses ever sent to battlefield duty. They rose to the challenge with energy and good cheer, swiftly setting up two open-air hospitals and learning to cope with snakes, giant rats, thievish monkeys and the ubiquitous flies. As the Japanese advanced, though, conditions rapidly deteriorated. The volume of the sick and wounded soon mounted beyond the capacity of the jungle hospitals. Food began to run out. Ruth Straub's diary entry for March 15, 1942, reports: ''Found worms in my oatmeal this morning. . . . I'm still losing weight and so are most of us. . . . Drugs are rapidly being used up.''

When the Allies surrendered Bataan to the Japanese -- leaving 70,000 American and Philippine troops to endure the infamous ''death march'' -- the nurses were evacuated to Corregidor, where they cared for the wounded in a dank underground hospital until Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered in May. Now prisoners of the Japanese, the nurses were transported to an internment camp back in Manila, where they remained for nearly three years.

None of the American women were raped, beaten or otherwise molested during their captivity. As it was for so many people around the war-devoured world, their immediate enemy was hunger. They came to welcome any worms that showed up in their rice gruel, ate cat meat when available and weeds fried in cold cream, and tried to prevent the camp's civilian internees from stealing human plasma from the clinic to drink. The nurses' fantasies revolved around recipes, like Edith Shacklette's dream of ''chicken la king in paddy shells (make shells or use toast baskets).''

One would like to know more about these women's interior lives and what sustained them through deprivation and terror. Part of the problem lies in the kind of sources ''We Band of Angels'' has to draw on: there were few diaries, and letters written home, like the memories of 80-year-old survivors, are bound to be a little flat. Norman's occasional attempts to sketch in her heroines' personalities are wooden; she relates, for example, that one woman's ''broad smile and self-effacing laugh . . . masked an abiding loneliness and an ego hobbled by self-doubt.'' Or it may be that the innocent enthusiasm and solidarity of the American forces in World War II simply elude us today. These are women who found the strength to make stuffed animals for children in the internment camp at Christmas, and who enjoyed, even in the darkest times, gathering to sing ''Home on the Range'' and ''You Are My Sunshine.''

The most interesting unanswered question is how the nurses experienced their transformation from a bunch of ''girls'' to full-fledged women at war. Nursing was, at the time, a highly gender-specific, strangely ritualistic profession, with its signature starched white uniforms and stiff little caps. Even in the jungle, the nurses' leadership strove ''to insure that when our troops saw a woman nurse, that nurse had to look as much a woman as circumstances would permit.'' At home, the press contributed to the image of battle-resistant feminine vanity, with a headline in The New York Times, for example, announcing, ''Nurse on Corregidor Finds It 'Not Too Bad': Letter Says Hairpin Shortage Causes Women to Cut Hair.'' But on Bataan the ludicrously impractical uniforms had already given way to oversized men's fatigues. On Corregidor, anyone who still believed in chivalry had to face the fact that the nurses had been abandoned by General MacArthur just as surely as the male troops had been.

Liberated in 1945, skeletal and in many cases sick, the nurses returned to an America that had no category and no cultural space for the concept of a female war hero. During the brief flurry of welcoming ceremonies, the press emphasized the women's shock over changed fashions, and the public seemed more interested in the question of whether they had been raped than in the hardships they had actually endured. When, years later, the Army refused to give the nurses' leader, Maj. Maude Davison, a Distinguished Service Medal, it must have seemed to many of them that their high point of recognition had come when Eleanor Roosevelt, at a Washington ceremony, addressed them as ''Lieutenant'' and so forth rather than the usual ''Miss.''

At the end of the book, Norman undercuts the power and relevance of her story by stating that ''we cannot apply the lessons of the past to the current debate about the place of women in the military.'' But what are we to learn from if not the past? Even if it is about female nurses rather than soldiers, ''We Band of Angels'' shows that men do not crumble when forced to share dangerous conditions with women. In fact, one Army surgeon later called the nurses ''the greatest morale boost present in that unhappy little area of jungle.'' If anyone suffered over the miseries endured by their comrades, it was the nurses who, years later, still agonized about the wounded men they had been forced to leave behind on Bataan.

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