At 1:45pm on Saturday, February 24, 1945, a military plane touched down at Hamilton Air Field in Novato carrying home a group of Army and Navy nurses who had been some of America’s first women POWs. These 68 nurses would be called the “Angels of Bataan” for their medical service on the front lines of the Philippines in the Pacific theater of World War II. They had endured three years as prisoners of the Japanese in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, formerly a university campus, in Manila. The women were transferred to Presidio’s Letterman Hospital for debriefing and physical check-ups over the next few weeks and then quietly reintegrated into their former lives.
Their stories have rarely been featured in the pages of military history. But two books by female authors have drawn attention to their experience, All This Hell: U.S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese (2000) by Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee and We Band of Angels: The untold story of American nurses trapped on Bataan by the Japanese (1999) by Elizabeth Norman. Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee attribute the long silence to specific instructions the women were given: “…POW army nurses were discouraged from talking about their combat and POW experiences even to their families. At redistribution centers and in reorientation programs, the POW experience was presented to these women as a stigma and they were told that it was time for them to become ‘ladies’ again” (Page ix).
How did we first learn of the Angels of Bataan? Tucked away deep in a file cabinet at the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library is a collection of news clippings of local WWII servicemembers. Curious, I flipped through each envelope of clippings to see how many women had been included in the collection. That is when I came across the story of Lt. Magdalena Eckmann Hewlett. The headline of a clipping from the Petaluma Argus-Courier of February 23, 1945, read “One of Bataan Angels, Known Here, Arrives Home Safely.” A second clipping identified Magdalena as the niece of Fred Eckman of Petaluma and the cousin of Staff Sgt. Donald Eckmann and Ensign Lewis Eckmann of Petaluma, and Edna Mae Baldwin of Santa Rosa.
Over the next several months, I pieced together the details of this woman’s life as it was revealed in various records. Born in 1910 in Contra Costa County, Magdalena, the oldest of six siblings, grew up in the central California towns of Pine Grove and Jackson, according to census records. She graduated from nursing school at Merritt Memorial Hospital in Oakland and completed a post-graduate program in obstetrics from the DeLee Hospital in Chicago. She worked as a nurse for several years on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and was called to active duty, at age 30, from Palo Alto on 1 March 1941. As an Army Corps nurse, she was assigned to Ft. Mills on the Philippine island of Corregidor, the unit responsible for the harbor defense of Manila and Subic Bays. She was taken prisoner following the surrender in the Battle of Corregidor, where the nurses were treating the wounded in a makeshift underground hospital in the Malinta Tunnel. There were 3,000 prisoners held in Santo Tomas, including civilians. The nurses all kept a working schedule during their three years in the camp, where food and supplies were scarce.
After the war, she married Thomas H. Hewlett, himself an Army doctor who was captured in the Philippines and imprisoned in Japan. They later divorced and Magdalena continued her career in Louisville, Kentucky, as director of nurses in the obstetrics department of the new Jewish Hospital. In 1972, she moved to Sonoma to work as a nursing superintendent at Sonoma Valley Hospital. She died the following year and was buried at Mt. Vernon Memorial Park in Fair Oaks.
The discovery and telling of her story is our way to pay tribute to the life and service of America’s women veterans. My great hope is that this blog post could reach Magdalena’s relatives so that her personal story could be told in all the ways that records cannot capture.
Thank you to Moria Gardner and Barbara MacFarland, our volunteers from the Sonoma County Genealogical Society, for their help in gathering and verifying evidential records to piece together the story of 2nd Lt. Magdalena Hewlett. A big thank-you to Ray Owen who went to the County Clerk-Recorder’s office to obtain a death certificate as well as advised me on various avenues to continue the research on Magdalena. And a warm thanks to Lori Berdak Miller of Redbird Research for digging up Magdalena’s military records.
