#25. Abandoned on Bataan: An Army Nurse’s Last Chance

Episode 25 – Clara Bickford – Episode Outline
Story Intro
[Narrator] A 7.6 magnitude earthquake shook Bataan Peninsula around 9:30 pm on April 8, 1942. But Army nurse Lt. Clara Bickford, a 25-year-old Texas beauty with dark curls, sparkling eyes, and a captivating smile, likely didn’t notice the quake.
She would have been preoccupied with the rumbling of the Army truck she sat in and the constant explosions rattling southern Bataan.
All around Nurse Bickford and the truck, civilians, refugees, soldiers, and other vehicles clogged the southbound roads, keeping the truck carrying her and other Army nurses to a sloth-like pace. They all braved movement on the open roads, because the full darkness prevented enemy airplanes from attacking them.
Suddenly a deafening roar cut through the traffic and congestion noises, as several huge explosions sent clouds, fire and debris high into air, transforming the night sky with an orange glow.
The startled nurses exclaimed in surprise, their hearts jumping wildly.
[Nurse 1] “I think that’s the ammunition dump,”
[Narrator] one of the girls said.
[Nurse 1] “They’ll be destroying everything so nothing can fall into Japanese hands.”
[Nurse 2] “Good. We don’t need them using our weapons and ammunition against us,”
[Narrator] another nurse said. After a moment, Nurse Bickford realized something.
[Clara] “We’re not moving.”
[Narrator] It was true. Their truck was idling at a dead stop. The pedestrians and vehicles surrounding them were stopped as well. A soldier, coming the opposite way down the side of the road called out,
[Soldier] “It’s the ammunition dump. The explosion has stopped everything. Nothing’s gettin’ by here for hours.”
[Nurse 1] “But what about us?”
[Narrator] a wide-eyed nurse asked, looking around at her comrades with concern.
[Nurse 1] “How will we get to Mariveles? There’s a boat waiting to take us to Corregidor. What will happen if we don’t get there for hours?”
[Narrator] The other nurses looked at each other, but no one spoke. They didn’t have to. Each knew the consequence of missing that boat:
They’d be stranded on Bataan, waiting to be taken prisoner by the Japanese army.
Because behind them, the American lines had broken, and the Japanese army was swiftly approaching. In mere hours, the American commander on Bataan would surrender the peninsula to the Japanese.
Bataan was falling.
And the American nurses may not be able to get away in time.

This is Left Behind.

Podcast Welcome
Welcome to “Left Behind,” a podcast about the people left behind when the US surrendered The Philippines in the early days of WW2.
I’m Anastasia Harman, and I tell you the stories of WW2 servicemen and women, civilians, guerillas, and others captured by Japanese forces in The Philippines. My great-grandfather Alma Salm was one of the POWs, and his memoir inspired me to tell stories of his fellow captives.
This episode is the first of 2 episodes about the last-minute escapes from Bataan mere hours before the peninsula fell to the Japanese. Thus these individuals escaped by mere hours being forced onto the Bataan Death March.
Today we’ll focus on Army nurse Lt Clara Bickford and her fellow nurses who almost didn’t make it off Bataan.
Their story shows how the chance for escape could be just as dangerous and potentially perilous as remaining on Bataan.
Let’s jump in.

POW’s Life Story
Before the War

[Narrator] Clara Mae Bickford grew up on a farm in rural Texas.
She was born Oct 26, 1916, and raised in Tivoli, near the Gulf Coast about 65 miles/ 100 km northeast of Corpus Christi. She was the second youngest of at least 9 children born to CR and Bertha Bickford. Father CR was born in Texas to parents from Maine and Kentucky, while mother Bertha was an immigrant from Germany.
I know almost nothing about her childhood, but in 1937 – when she was almost 21 – she graduated in nursing from Santa Rosa in San Antonio, Texas (about 130 miles/210 km from her hometown of Tivoli). I’m not 100% certain what “Santa Rosa” refers to, but there is a Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio that existed in the 1930s. Perhaps there was a nursing training program associated with it.
Several of the Bataan nurses I’ve researched were from rural communities – and went to big cities and then joined the military to get away from those small towns and see more of the world. And this could have been part of Clara’s motive for attending school in San Antonio.
I had the opportunity to speak with Clara’s niece, Sally Rathbun, who told me that Clara’s parents allowed her to go to nursing school in San Antonio only because Clara had an older sister who lived there.
By April 1939, she had joined the Army Nurses Corps and was a 2nd Lt stationed at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio. She remained there until June 1941, when the US Army was sent her to The Philippines.
I don’t know for certain what she did between arrival and the start of the war, but Lt. Bickford was probably assigned to the Ft. Sternberg military hospital in Manila. There’s a family story that she had a fiancée in the Philippines prior to the war. He was, apparently, was in the Air Corps and was able to leave the islands before it fell to Japan. According to the story, he was sent to Europe where he flew missions and, tragically, died.
I haven’t been able to corroborate this story – I just don’t know enough information to begin looking for an air corps man who died in Europe during WW2. But the story is similar to Nurse Eunice Hatchitt’s husband – who left The Philippines a couple months before war broke out and served with the air crops in Europe. So maybe the men were in the same group? Who knows
BTW – you can get all the details of Nurse Hatchitt’s WW2 story in episode 15.
Anyway…Nurse Bickford was serving at Ft. Sternberg in Manila when the war started in December 1941.

During the War
[Narrator] “Bicky,” as Lt. Bickford’s fellow nurses called her, and 18 other nurses sailed across Manila Bay to southern Bataan during Christmas week 1942. They were coming to establish battlefield Hospital #2 ahead of the large troop withdrawal to the peninsula.
As soon as the nurses, set foot on land, Japanese aircraft attacked, forcing the women to hide in foxholes or lay flat on the ground until the raid was over. Only then did they notice that their ship, still carrying all their medical supplies, was sinking. It was an ominous start to what would be an unorthodox hospital experience.
Soon trucks arrived to take the nurses, doctors, and other medical personnel to the hospital’s yet-to-be-developed location. Bulldozers had cleared rocks and tree stumps from the site and cut roads leading into and out of the area. Above the clearings was the jungle canopy – because Hospital 2 would be completely open air. The location had been specifically chosen because it was on level ground with thick canopy overhead, to camouflage and offer the patients some protection from Japanese airplanes.
Whatever shock the nurses felt as they arrived at the site was mirrored by the soldiers setting up cots and digging a latrine for them. The soldiers watched the women get out of trucks in disbelief.
[Soldier] “What in the hell are we going to do with women here!”
[Narrator] One soldier remarked in mingled disgust and disbelief. Bicky recalled the men’s grumbling and that the nurses “really took it on the chin.” Historian Elizabeth Norman, in her book We Band of Angels about the nurses on Bataan, wrote:
[Norman] “The army had not prepared its nurses for war—provided no training in the field or in weapons or even in battlefield medicine—and during their first days on Bataan, they seemed out of place.
“That night after supper the women found a cool creek in a secluded area and stripped down for a bath. The roiling water restored them, made them feel like ‘glamor girls.’ … Later, under the mango and acacia trees hard by the Real River, they settled on their cots and fell asleep to the shrieks of birds and the soft creak of bamboo.”
[Narrator] The next day Bicky, the other nureses, the doctors, and additional medical staff got to work creating the hospital. The wards were a semi-organized sprawl of old iron beds and rickety cots under bamboo or acacia trees and numbered by small wooden signs. There were 17 total wards, and each would soon hold 200-500 patients in beds on the jungle floor. A month later, at the end of January 1942, the hospital was already overcrowded – and the soldiers had exchanged their grumblings with praises for their nurses.
Because despite the initial reservations about women on the battlefield and their lack of adequate training – the nurses on Bataan took the challenge head on.
Bicky and the nurses worked in blackout conditions at night, to avoid enemy fire. And they often found themselves wandering around with other nocturnal friends – pigs, lizards, and even carabao water buffalo. One night a nurse was smacked in the face by a snake swinging from an overhead branch. And that’s when I would have run screaming away from that jungle hospital.
The girls had to eat their mid-shift meals quickly, because monkeys and rats would steal any unattended food.
They scrounged together enough canvas to screen the nurses’ quarters from the rest of the hospital. Ever ingenious, they used jungle vines for closet rods and put metal tins full of water under their bedposts, to keep ants from climbing into bed with them.
They also screened off a portion of the Real River, where they could bathe and be women without the eyes of men on them. One tree even had a large root that created a natural water slide, which the nurses took advantage of during their down time.
But Hospital 2 was very close to the action. A hospital surgeon recalled:
[Surgeon] “It is probably the first Army hospital of such size located near installations that were constantly being bombed. When the enemy airships approached these installations, they almost invariably did so directly over the hospital. This was disconcerting for two reasons: (1) It always drew fire from our anti-aircraft guns. Fragments of shells were constantly falling in the hospital area. Fifty caliber bullets also fell in the hospital area. (2) We were never certain that an enemy bomb, by accident, might not fall in one of the wards.”
[Narrator] Thus, most of the wards had foxholes, where the patients could escape enemy raids if needed – well, those patients who were able to roll out of their beds.

[Narrator] During those long 3 months on Bataan, Bicky experienced the steadily worsening conditions, as food, medical, and military supplies decreased and the servicemen and women became increasingly exhausted, hungry, and sick. Then, on April 4, 1942, Japanese forces – replenished with reinforcements and additional weapons – opened an all-out assault on Allied forces.
The Japanese quickly broke through American defensive lines in the peninsula’s middle. Bombers flew overhead, dropping payloads on various American military installations. Heavy artillery inflicted relentless bombing on the American and Filipino troops attempting to keep US lines intact. But the Allied fighting force on Bataan was folding fast– and everyone knew that Bataan’s fall was at hand. Surrender was eminent.
(I covered in detail the state of US forces on Bataan and of Japan’s final Bataan offensive in Episode 24.)
Four days later, on the evening of April 8, 1942, General Jonathan Wainwright ordered all the nurses to evacuate Bataan and go to the hospital on Corregidor island. Corregidor, which the servicemen affectionally referred to as “The Rock,” was an island fortress about 2 miles offshore of the southern Bataan Peninsula.
To be clear, the Army nurses were all women. The male doctors and medics would remain on the peninsula to meet whatever fate would arrive. Many of the nurses were appalled by this order, feeling it went against their Nightingale Pledge to remain with their patients.
Created in 1893, the Nightingale Pledge -- named in honor of Florence Nightingale, who is considered the founder of modern nursing -- is taken by nurses upon entering the profession and is a statement of nursing ethics and principles, similar to the Hippocratic Oath. During WW2, the pledge stated, in part, “With loyalty will I aid the physician in his work, and as a missioner of health, I will dedicate myself to devoted service for human welfare.”
So, it’s easy to see why some nurses felt leaving their doctors and patients waws a betrayal of this oath.
Some nurses – even high-ranking ones – considered disobeying Wainwright’s orders, feeling that courage demanded they remain with their patients and the doctors and medics who they had served with – and face the enemy. One nurse later said:
[Nurse] “We knew what we had to do—take care of these guys. And we were willing to do anything we had to do, to do it.”
[Narrator] But, in the end, however, all the nurses complied. A nurse recalled:
[Nurse] “By the time we received the word, took off our gloves and gowns in the middle of operations and walked down there, most of the nurses were already gone. Walking out in the middle of an operation with hundreds lined up under the trees waiting for surgery was devastating to me. This I have to live with for the rest of my life.”
[Narrator] The nurses weren’t supposed to talk to patients or tell them where they were going, but the patients, watching all the nurses hurry away knew exactly what was happening – the nurses were being evacuated and the patients would remain behind, in their hospital beds.
The evacuation order came so quickly that the nurses had only 30 minutes, at most, to prepare for evacuation. They were told to bring only what they could carry. One nurse jumped into the evacuation truck wearing her curlers, another came with wet laundry and cigarettes in a pillowcase.
[Narrator] Lt. Bickford and the other nurses left Hospital 2 in trucks, busses, and Jeeps after dark and headed south to the Mariveles harbor, where they were to board a barge to take them to Corregidor. I don’t know how many nurses left Hospital 2. Once source say 88 nurses left Hospital 2, but that number seems quite high to me, because there were 88 TOTAL American Army nurses on Bataan, split between the 2 battlefield hospitals. That high number may include Filipino nurses, who were also being transferred to Corregidor. I don’t know. But I suspect there were around 40 American nurses in the group leaving Hospital 2.
Progress toward Mariveles and the waiting barge to Corregidor was extremely slow. The women were seated in trucks and busses surrounded by refugees and retreating soldiers on foot and by vehicles and more clogging the roads southward to Mariveles.
Suddenly an explosion ripped through the night air, lighting the road and refugees in an eerie orange glow. The Army Corps of Engineers had blown up a huge ammunition dump along the southbound road. The explosions and subsequent fires stopped traffic. Nothing on wheels could move southward for hours.
Nurse Sally Blaine recalled:
[Sally Blaine] “It was a big mess. [Some troops] were retreating from the front lines [while others were marching in the opposite direction to face the enemy]. They were worn out and exhausted. Vehicles were breaking down. The noise and the confusion—it was bedlam that night.”
[Narrator] One of the nurse-carrying trucks broke down, forcing the nurses to walk. But the explosions and fires prevented them from going very far. A nurse sick with dysentery laid down next to the road, too ill to go further and not caring if she lived or died.
[Nurse] “Once in a while I’d open my eyes and see the most beautiful fireworks going up through the trees,”
[Narrator] she recalled.
After an entire night of travel, some of the Hospital 2 nurses reached Mariveles in the early morning hours. They ran to the dock, only to find it empty. A Nurse ran up to a nearby officer
[Nurse] “Hey! You! Where’s the boat that the nurses are supposed to go over on? We’re down here take the boat over to Corregidor.”
[Officer] “Oh. It came and left.”
[Narrator] the officer responded
[Nurse] “Well what are we going to do?”
[Narrator] Looking over the group of bedraggled nurses, the officer said,
[Officer] “Well, I can take you.”
[Narrator] And he took them over on a small craft.

The last group of Hospital 2 nurses didn’t reach the Mariveles dock until the sun started to rise – which meant that Japanese planes would soon return to look for targets on Mariveles Bay.
The nurses were stranded on Bataan. And Gen. Edward King was, at that time, preparing for surrender negotiations with Japan.
The women found shelter and huddled together, attracting attention of nearby servicemen. They gave the nurses food that the Navy had left behind when they evacuated to Corregidor during the night. The women, who hadn’t eaten likely since the afternoon before, “ate like wolves,” spearing canned peaches with the ends of their toothbrushes.
The docks were silent. No boats in sight. The nurses were abandoned, left behind on Bataan – with nothing to do but wait – For a boat? For Japanese aircraft to attack? To be captured by enemy forces?

Meanwhile, across the channel separating Mariveles from Corregidor, military leaders knew the Hospital 2 nurses had missed their barge and that the women were stranded at Mariveles. Historian Louis Morton wrote:
[Mortin] “It was only through the ‘vim, vigor, and swearing’ of General Funk that a motor boat was sent from Corregidor to carry them across the North Channel.”

[Narrator] Back at Mariveles, the nurses were bravely awaiting their fate. Historian Elizabeth Norman wrote:
[Norman] “They walked to the beach and waited…waited quietly for the Japanese to march out of the jungle. Then someone heard the sound of a motorboat and they rushed to the water. Suddenly, dive bombers appeared overhead, and the boat quickly wheeled about and pulled away.”
Narrator] But the skipper, undaunted, waited for the threat to pass and again tried to approach. The planes reappeared, the boat retreated, and this cycle went on for some time until the planes, possibly tired of the game, left.
The motorboat pulled near the dock, a small wooden gang plank laid down, and the nurses scurried on board. The captain quickly reversed the engines, and they – finally – turned toward Corregidor.
But then – a Japanese plane reappeared.
The boat’s captain zigzagged the motorboat through the 2-mile channel to Corregidor Island. A bomb exploded near the boat; the erupting water splashed over the deck. The nurses slipped along the wet deck, grabbing onto each other and any other objects for support, as the zig-zagging boat pitched them from side to side.
Except for one nurse, who sat calmly filing her nails.
[Nurse 1] “What’s the matter with you?”
[Narrator] Another nurse shouted at her. The manicuring shrugged and responded:
[Nurse 2] “Well, what can we do?”
[Narrator] She later recalled
[Nurse 2] “There wasn’t anything else to do and I wasn’t going to sit there and moan.”
[Narrator] Somehow the boat survived the gauntlet and arrived unscathed at the Corregidor docks. The frazzled but grateful nurses disembarked and ran for Malinta Tunnel, where the island’s hospital was located. Miraculously, Nurse Bicky and all the other Hospital 2 nurses had survived.
Now, I don’t know for certain which group Lt. Bickford was part of. But, suffice it to say, she would have had a challenging and hazardous journey to safety.
[Narrator] Of the Hospital 2 nurses’ arrival on Corregidor, General Wainwright later wrote:
[Wainwright] “Never forget the American girls who fought on Bataan and later on Corregidor. … Their names must always be hallowed when we speak of American heroes. The memory of their coming ashore on Corregidor that early morning of April 9, dirty, disheveled, some of them wounded from the hospital bombings—and every last one of them with her chin up in the air—is a memory that can never be erased.”

[Narrator] Bicky worked in the Corregidor hospital for the next month. That hospital was located in tunnels cut into Malinta Hill, offered more protection than did the open-air Hospital 2 on Bataan. While Hospital 2 relied on dense jungle canopies for protection and camouflage, on Corregidor, hundreds of feet of rock and packed dirt separated Bicky and her patients from enemy bombs.
And that protection was needed, because Corregidor Island fortress was under constant siege by Japanese forces, which had focused their attention and ammunition on the last US stronghold near Manila. It was a horrendous month, the hospital continually busy caring for causalities of the incessant bombing and shelling. One source states
[History] “Malinta Tunnel was so well built, the hospital staff could continue to work during raids, interrupted only by the muffled thuds of bombs and shells landing above.”
[Narrator] But, like an old, worn-out song on repeat, conditions on Corregidor quickly deteriorated – with food, ammunitions, medical supplies, and other needs dwindling. The fighting men were hungry, exhausted, and sick.
And when, on May 6, 1942, Japanese ground forces landed on Corregidor, the island’s US forces quickly surrendered. I’ll get into details of the siege and surrender of Corregidor in future episodes.
1st Lt. Clara Bickford was now a Prisoner of War, along with the other Army and Navy nurses still on the island.

BTW -- A handful of nurses were able to escape Corregidor on small sea planes. And strangely, I found a San Antonio Light newspaper article informing readers that Bicky was one of the nurses who
[Newspaper] “escaped Corregidor in the last plane. . . Miss Bickford cabled her sister that she was safe in Australia.”
[Narrator] I have no idea where the newspaper got this information, because I know from official sources that Clara was captured when Corregidor fell. Her name appears on a handwritten note documenting the “Members of the Army Nurse Corps and Civilian Women who were in Malinta Tunnel when Corregidor fell.” They created it, one nurse said, because
[Nurse] “We wanted to leave a record in case we disappeared.”
(I’ve posted an image of that note on Facebook, the link is in the show description.)
So…why would the San Antonio newspaper report that Bicky had escaped? I’m not certain. Although, I wonder if the paper confused Clara Bickford with another nurse, such as Eunice Hatchitt (from episode 15), who was from a rural town near San Antonio and who did escape on one of the last planes out of Corregidor.

Lt. Bickford and the other captured nurses were treated better than the captured men. For the first 3 months, the women and the doctors remained at their hospital posts, caring for the wounded – on both sides of the enemy lines. In early July 1942, the hospital staff and patients were transported to Manila. Once there, the patients and doctors – all males – were taken to a hospital. The nurses, however, entered the Santo Tomas Civilian Internment Camp, located on the walled-in grounds of a university in Manila.
Lt. Bickford would remain at this camp for more than 2.5 years.
For the first couple of years, life for the Santo Tomas prisoners wasn’t too bad. They could order food from Manila and purchase it from Filipinos vendors outside the prison walls. The sick could go to hospital outside of camp. Government over the day-to-day running of the camp was largely in internee hands. (For some details on the early days in camp, see episode 10, about a 21-year-old American civilian named Francis Long who was imprisoned in Santo Tomas at the beginning of the war.)
The camp received a Red Cross package – the only Red Cross package ever to arrive at the camp -- in Dec 1943 (about 18 months after Bicky arrived there). The package contained tinned meats. It was the only meat the internees had for a year.
Regarding food at Santo Tomas, Bicky recalled:
[Clara] “We got a tin plate of mush for breakfast, rice at noon if we worked, and at 4 pm another plate of rice with gravy and vegetables. Some of us saved corned beef we took in with us for three years. When the American planes would come over [in late 1944 and early 1945] we would celebrate by opening a can of corned beef.”
[Narrator] She made rag dolls in camp to keep her mind occupied and traded them for corned beef. She especially recalled the coffee in camp, which was made of rice.
[Clara] “It tasted like mud, but we were glad to get it.”
[Narrator] Now, I’m not certain how coffee can be made from rice… It doesn’t really make sense to me – coffee is coffee, and without coffee, it’s not coffee. But I digress.
In December 1943, Clara’s mother Bertha Bickford received her first letter from Clara. Bicky told her mother that she was a POW in Manila and was getting along well. She requested that her mother not worry about her. (As a daughter, I understand that sentiment. As a mother, though, there’s no way I wouldn’t worry non-stop about my child in such a circumstance.)
Camp internees were required to bow to all Japanese soldiers. They even received lessons in bowing – feet together, hands at sides, bend from the waist. One of Bicky’s fellow nurses recalled:
[Nurse] “But we foxed them because the Jap privates had to return our bows. We would approach the Jap sentries in groups and each of us would bow separately, instead of in unison, so that the Japs were kept busy returning each bow.”
[Narrator] Bicky and the other nurses organized medical care for the internees, who spanned all ages – newborn to elderly – and suffered from all various illness and ailments of life and of imprisonment. There were babies born in the camp, as well as deaths from natural and other causes. The lack of food toward the end led to increase of sickness, especially among the older internees.
At some point, some military doctors were brought into the camp – or at least had some association with the camp. One of these doctors was Livingston Pope Noell, who was a flight surgeon. More on him in a bit.

Treatment of POWs at Santo Tomas worsened after the fall of Saipan in July 1944. Saipan is in the Pacific and part of the Northern Mariana Islands, about 1,500 miles west of Manila. Beginning in the late 1910s, it was a colony of Japan. But after a bloody 3-week battle, American forces captured the island in July 1944.
By the summer of 1944, the tide of the Pacific War was turning against the Japanese. Allied forces reported win after win. And on June 12, 1944, 3 days after Saipan fell, President Roosevelt addressed the nation saying:
[FDR] But today we are on the offensive all over the world -- bringing the attack to our enemies.
In the Pacific, by relentless submarine and naval attacks, and amphibious thrusts, and ever-mounting air attacks, we have deprived the Japs of the power to check the momentum of our ever-growing and ever-advancing military forces. We have reduced the Japs' (their) shipping by more than three million tons. We have overcome their original advantage in the air. We have cut off from a return to the homeland, cut off from that return, tens of thousands of beleaguered Japanese troops who now face starvation or ultimate surrender. And we have cut down their naval strength, so that for many months they have avoided all risk of encounter with our naval forces.
True, we still have a long way to go to Tokyo. But, carrying out our original strategy of eliminating our European enemy first and then turning all our strength to the Pacific, we can force the Japanese to unconditional surrender or to national suicide much more rapidly than has been thought possible.]
As US gained traction in the Pacific, and especially after Saipan fell, the Santo Tomas camp gates were locked. Food became limited to dried fish and rice. When the rice ran out, it was substituted with corn meal.
The internees felt the changes were retaliation for Saipan’s capture.
The Japanese forced internees to surrender their money, which the Japanese deposited into the Bank of Manila so it could earn interest. Bicky and the other internees could draw 50 pesos each per month for living expenses. It was woefully inadequate: A carton of cigarettes cost 75 pesos. A handful of garlic cost the equivalent of 43 US dollars.

By late 1944, American forces were re-invading The Philippines, inching ever closer to Manila and the camp where Bicky was imprisoned. Finally, on February 3, 1942, the soldiers reached Santo Tomas. Bicky recalled:
[Clara] “We heard machine gun fire about 6 pm on Feb 3 and the sound of heavier guns farther away. The nearby fire was the Filipino guerrillas fighting the Jap guards.
“Then a big tank rumbled up to the gate [around 9 pm]. By that time we were all inside the buildings—the Jap curfew was at 7 pm—but we were hanging out the windows in violation of the Jap rules.
“We didn’t know whether it was an American or a Jap tank, and there was an awful moment of uncertainty until we smelled that lovely American gasoline. We heard voices but we couldn’t tell at first whether they were American or Jap.”
[Narrator] Then someone in the tank called out,
[Soldier] “Are you Americans?”
[Internee] “Hell, yes, we are,”
[Narrator] an internee shouted in response. At that the American internees started singing “God Bless America,” and prisoners of other nationalities joined in. Clara said:
[Clara] “All I wanted to do was get down and just touch an American soldier. But everybody had the same idea and when I got down they were telling us all to get back for safety. You should have seen all those Internees in their night clothes! I never got close enough to be convinced that they were really American.”

After the War & Legacy
[Narrator] 1st Lt. Clara Bickford arrived home—for a 3-week leave—a month later, on March 3, 1943. She landed at the San Antonio municipal airport at 2:40 pm. Her widowed mother and siblings were there to welcome her. She was wearing a brand-new uniform, complete with stockings – the first she’d worn in 3 years. The stockings were uncomfortable to wear, Clara having gotten used to men’s trousers and other scavenged clothing while imprisoned.
She recalled that, on her way home, someone
[Clara] “gave the nurses their first …perfume in three years, and at San Francisco the quartermaster gave us all the clothes we’d ever dreamed.”
[Narrator] Bertha Bickford greeted her daughter with a kiss (which I put a picture of on Facebook). She was overjoyed to see the “baby daughter” who she hadn’t seen in 4 years, but was a bit worried about her emaciated appearance. To which, Clara informed her mother:
[Clara] “I’ve gained back 10 pounds since liberation. I’ve thanked God many times for coming back safe.”
[Narrator] As Clara described to waiting reporters some of the living conditions at the internment camp, her mother promised, on the spot, that there would be no rice on the menu that night.
Clara told reporters that after her leave she wanted
[Clara] “to go back [to the Pacific] and help our boys get this thing over. [I] want to fight on the winning side a while.”
[Narrator] I haven’t discovered where she was assigned when her leave was over, but I do know that during her leave she attended several events in her honor – including the biggest celebration her hometown of Tivoli had ever seen.
The entire county was invited to the celebration, which included a BBQ at the Hasselfield Ranch and concluded with a dance at the Tivoli School.
Clara was also a guest of honor with 2 other liberated nurses at a tea organized by the Graduate Nurses’ Association in San Antonio. One nurse, Bertha Dworsky, had met a civilian internee at Santo Tomas and married him shortly after liberation. Clara joked that while a POW, she herself was
[Clara] “Too hungry to think about romance. Bertha Dworsky must not have been as hungry as I was.”
[Narrator] But . . . I find that to be an ironic statement, since just a few weeks later, on April 21, 1945, Clara herself married a man she met while imprisoned at Santo Tomas. She and flight surgeon Livingston Pope Noell wed at the US Army’s Gardiner General hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
Clara was 28, and Pope (as he was known) was 4 days shy of his 29th birthday. They had both been liberated from Santo Tomas about 10 weeks previous.
I’m not certain what either of them were doing at the Army hospital in Chicago. One newspaper reported that they were on their way to Washington, DC. So perhaps something to do with reassignment at their leave’s end? I just don’t know.

[Narrator] Clara left the Army Nurse Corps shortly after the war’s end, and she and Pope settled in Texas. By 1950, they were parents of 3 boys – ages 3, 2, and 1 (which helps illustrate exactly why we call the post–war years the “Baby Boom”). Pope worked as a doctor of general medicine, and Clara appears to have been a homemaker.
Sally Rathbun, who is Clara’s niece thru marriage, lived near “Aunt Bicky” as a child and even lived with her aunt the summer after graduating high school. She described Aunt Bicky as an outdoorsy woman who enjoyed golf and had a deep laugh.
Pope served in the Korean War in the early 1950s, and, tragically, Clara and Pope’s time together was much too short.
On March 29, 1964, just a month away from their 19th anniversary, Pope was piloting an airplane in Veracruz, Mexico. The couple, I believe, was on vacation there. The plane he was flying crashed around 1:20 pm, and Pope died of severe burns received in the crash. He would have turned 48 a few weeks later.
I do not know if Clara was on board the plane when it crashed.

[Narrator] Clara began working as a school nurse shortly after Pope’s death. In 1967, she remarried and soon relocated to Greenwood, Mississippi, where she continued working as a school nurse.
In May 1978, 62-year-old Clara Mae Bickford Noell Bilello died in Greenwood, Mississippi. Based on her obituary, her death seems to have been sudden. But I haven’t found details about her cause of death. In lieu of flowers, her family requested
[Obit] “contributions to American Ex-Prisoners of War or the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor [organizations].”
[Narrator] She was survived by 3 sons and a daughter. Today she has at least 4 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.

Back in 1942, the nurses weren’t the only ones escaping Bataan the night of April 8-9. All US Navy personnel and a portion of the Philippine Scouts’ 26th Cavalry were also ordered to Corregidor Island.
More on that next time.
This is Left Behind.

Outro
Thanks for listening! You can find pictures, maps, and sources about Clara Bickford’s story on the Left Behind Facebook page and website; the links are in the show description. If you’d like to know more about the nurses serving on Bataan, I suggest the book We Band of Angels, by Elizabeth Norman.
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow Left Behind where ever you listen to podcasts, so that you’ll get notifications when new episodes drop.
Left Behind is researched, written, and produced by me, Anastasia Harman.
- Voice overs by Tyler Harman
- Special thanks to Sally Rathbon for her help and information regarding Clara Bickford.
- Dramatizations are based on historical research, although some creative liberty is taken with dialogue.
I’ll be back next time with the unthinkable sinking of the last US ship remaining in The Philippines.

Sources
Clara M. Bickford entry, “U.S., World War II Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, Utah, 2010, original data: National Archives and Records Administration, World War II Prisoners of the Japanese File, 2007 Update, 1941-1945. ARC ID: 212383, World War II Prisoners of the Japanese Data Files, 4/2005 - 10/2007, ARC ID: 731002, Records of the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, Collection ADBC, ARC: 718969, National Archives at College Park. College Park, Maryland, accessed 24 July 2023.
Clara M Bickford entry, “U.S., World War II American and Allied Prisoners of War, 1941-1946,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, UT, 2005, original data: World War II Prisoners of War Data File [Archival Database], Records of World War II Prisoners of War, 1942-1947, Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Record Group 389, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Md., accessed 24 July 2023.
Livingston Pope Noell entry, 1 April 1964, Veracruz, Mexico, “U.S., Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835-1974,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, Utah, 2010, original data: Reports of the Deaths of American Citizens, compiled 01/1835-12/1974. Publication A1 5166. NAID: 613857. Record Group 59. National Archives at College Park, Maryland, accessed 24 July 2023.
Clara Bilello entry, “U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, Utah, 2014, original data: Social Security Administration, Social Security Death Index, Master File, Social Security Administration, accessed 24 July 2023.
CR Bickford family, Precinct 5, Refugio, Texas, “1930 US Federal Census Records,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, UT, 2002, original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930, T626, 2,667 rolls, accessed 24 July 2023.
“S.A. Nurses among those on Bataan,” Ancestry.com - San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 27 may 1942, page B1, accessed 24 July 2023.
Sally Rathbun phone conversation with Anastasia Harman, 28 March 2023, notes taken by and inpsoession of Anastasia Harman.
Clara May Bickford entry, April 1939, page 84 & 202, “U.S., Select Military Registers, 1862-1985,”database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, UT, 2013, original data: United States Military Registers, 1902–1985, Salem, Oregon: Oregon State Library, accessed 24 July 2023.
Clara May Bickford entry, April 1940, page 194, “U.S., Select Military Registers, 1862-1985,”database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, UT, 2013, original data: United States Military Registers, 1902–1985, Salem, Oregon: Oregon State Library, accessed 24 July 2023.
Clara May Bickford, Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, Bexar, Texas, “1940 United States Federal Census,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, Utah, 2012, Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940, T627, 4,643 roll, accessed 24 July 2023.
Clara May Bickford entry, April 1941, page 164, “U.S., Select Military Registers, 1862-1985,”database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, UT, 2013, original data: United States Military Registers, 1902–1985, Salem, Oregon: Oregon State Library, accessed 24 July 2023.
“S.A. Nurses among those on Bataan,” Ancestry.com - San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 27 may 1942, page B1, accessed 24 July 2023; “Tivoli Girl Is Prisoner in Japan,” Victoria Advocate, Victoria, Texas, 22 Dec 1943, page 1, online at Newspapers.com, accessed 23 July 2024.
Elizabeth Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan (New York: Random House, 1999), page 41
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Gen Wainwright, quoted in Elizabeth Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan (New York: Random House, 1999), page 92.
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Chicago Beach Hotel - Wikipedia
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Livingston P Noell family, Kingsville, Kleberg, Texas, ”1950 United States Federal Census,” database online, Ancestry.com, Lehi, Utah, 2022, original data: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules for the 1950 Census, 1950 – 1950, Washington, DC: National Archives, Washington, DC., Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, Record Group 29, accessed 24 July 2023.
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Clara Mae Noell and Lloyd C Biello, 15 July 1967, Cameron County, Texas, “Texas, U.S., Select County Marriage Records, 1837-1965,” database online: Ancestry.com, Provo, Utah, 2014, original data: Cameron County, Texas. Marriage records. Cameron County Clerk's Office, Brownsville, Texas, accessed 24 July 2023.
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