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Healing Th Pacific, An Oral History

Sophie Georges was born in Calgary, Alberta, on January 14th, 1916. Five years after she was born, her family moved to Pennsylvania, in the United States, to live with her mother’s cousins. Her father had grown sick and passed away; Sophie’s mother had three children and nowhere else to turn. Sophie grew up in Pennsylvania, going to school and helping her aunt with chores in exchange for pocket money once a month to see the pictures. At age twenty she decided to leave her job as a store clerk, and so became a Naval nurse in September of 1936. Once Sophie had become fully qualified, she was given a placement in a naval hospital in Chelsea, MA, and in 1938 was transferred to the Annapolis Hospital. After two years, she was given the option of either going to Dietic School in order to further her degree, or to go to the Philippines with the Naval services. Without a moment’s hesitation, Sophie chose the Philippines. The thought of such a journey intrigued her, and within a month was aboard a transport ship by the name of the Chaumont.

After boarding at Norfolk, the ship traveled through the Panama Canal, stopping over at the infamous Pearl Harbor to pick up a few soldiers, most of whom were then dropped off at Midway. The Cha

Once the facility was set up, and fully operational, Sophie was chosen to go to Bataan with 24 army nurses, 25 Filipino nurses, and three other navy nurses. Once again, Sophie was assigned to the operating room. All the patients were allocated to operating tables. The operating room grew very busy; casualties got worse and worse.

umont carried onto Guam, reaching the Philippines in July 1940. Sophie had spent the entire trip fighting seasickness, but didn’t care. Everything was so different, so exotic. At this time, the war had not reached the Philippines, and the area was still more or less calm.

Sophie started work right away; she’d been assigned as a junior nurse. Work started at 8am. Lunch was at 1pm, and the nurses then received the rest of the day off. The girls could go golfing, biking, or swimming in the local town. The houseboys cleaned the nurses’ shoes for a charge of $5, and the cleaning woman did the laundry with eagerness and ease. Sophie had no way of knowing that the war had started until her roommate’s boyfriend made an urgent phone to them.

They were all five given directions to set up an emergency operating room facility. The General Hospital was overflowing with war patients, and relief was a dire necessity. The other nurses did not like the fact that Sophie had been placed in emergency very much; nurses usually were placed on dorm patrol, fixing bed sheets and taking care of bedridden patients. Sophie would much rather have been in their position than see the things she did on those operating tables. They had set up 12 tables in the room. Each table had a team of workers, and the patients were constantly rotated through.

Sophie was transferred to Corregidor on April 8th, 1942, where the front lines had collapsed. Across the water from the General Hospital, she watched as the ammunition dumps in Bataan were being lit on fire and bombed, in order to prevent the Japanese forces from utilizing them to their advantage. Sophie remembers them as looking like fireworks.

Some topics in this essay:
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