Los Angeles – Jean Kennedy Schmidt, one of the last survivors of the “Angels of Bataan,” the American military nurses who were Japanese prisoners of war for nearly three years during World War II, has died. She was 88.
Schmidt, a retired Army nurse, died Saturday at her longtime home in La Cañada Flintridge of complications related to a fall, said Susan Johnson, her daughter.
The nurses stationed in the Philippines became the first large group of U.S. women sent into combat, according to Elizabeth Norman, who documented their story in the 1999 book “We Band of Angels.”
Within hours of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed American bases in the Philippines.
Until then, few of the 99 Army and Navy nurses stationed there had served in war conditions, and they “found themselves almost overwhelmed by slaughter,” Norman wrote.
Trapped on the Bataan Peninsula, they established operational hospitals with open-air wards in the dense jungle to help care for the retreating American forces.
When Bataan fell to the Japanese in April 1942, the nurses were ordered to leave patients behind and go to Corregidor, an island in the mouth of Manila Bay.
On the island, they set up a hospital in an underground maze of tunnels and cared for the wounded despite almost nonstop shelling.
Some nurses were evacuated just before the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, but the others were taken by boat to the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila.
Despite being racked with disease and injury, the remaining 77 nurses continued to practice, treating military and civilian prisoners in the camp.
Liberated when an American tank crashed through the camp’s main gate in February 1945, all of the nurses safely returned to the U.S.
Three are believed to still be alive, according to Norman.
Imogene Kennedy Schmidt was born Oct. 13, 1918, in Philadelphia, Miss., and grew up on a farm with seven siblings. Four brothers who served in the war also came back alive.
While a POW, she met a fellow prisoner, Richard Schmidt, and married him soon after returning to the U.S. He had been captured on his way to his job with a steamship company.
