US Army nurse forced to be comfort women during WWII

During World War II, there were instances of sexual exploitation and coercion that affected women in various countries. However, it is important to clarify that one US Army nurse was forced to be comfort woman during this time

At least one American nurse was raped by the Japanese on Bataan at bayonet point. This subject was too sensitive to be mentioned in the U.S. press during the war and you will be hard pressed to document it. As I recall, the name, date, and circumstances are given in Pacific War P.O.W.: A Few Remaining Skeletons by Cain. Another excellent resource is The Real Tenko: Extraordinary True Stories of Women Prisoners of the Japanese by Dr. Mark Felton.

The Japanese most often just raped and executed white females and nurses on the spot, such as at Hong Kong, rather than take the trouble to ship them to the established comfort women buildings elsewhere, which came under a different Japanese command. There were Dutch white women in Java and NEI (Netherlands East Indies at the time) who were put into comfort women establishments. There are some important diaries and autobiographies from these Dutch women survivors. Some were very young teenagers at the time of their capture in 1942. Modern research estimates that at least 65 were forced into this sexual slavery by the Kempeitai, or Japanese military secret police.

The massacre of the Australian nurses at Radji Beach on the small island of Banka, south of Singapore, is an unimaginable horror. There, the Japanese Army machine-gunned 21 Australian women, nearly all of whom were nurses, who had just struggled ashore after their ship was sunk. Of the 65 nurses who had escaped from Singapore when it fell, only 24 were still alive when the war ended. There are photos of them deplaning and looking like human skeletons, barely able to walk. Though the war was over, when the Australian soldiers saw them, they started yelling at their officers: “Give us our guns!”

How about nuns? In August 1942, two Catholic priests, a Dutchman, an American and two Catholic nuns, ages twenty-five and thirty-five, were bayoneted to death by the Japanese in the village of Tsimbolo, on Guadalcanal. Since the bodies of the two nuns were found completely naked, it was concluded by investigators at the time that both had been gang-raped by the Japanese.

In January 1944, the Kempeitai arrested three female missionaries at the Santo Tomas civilian and female internment camp in Manila. These were Dr. Hawthorne Darby and Helen Wilk who had jointly run the Immanuel Cooperative Hospital in Manila before the war, and the Reverend Mary Stagg, minister at the Cosmopolitan Church in Manila. All three were executed by the Japanese on 28 August 1944. The total dead from just this one civilian camp was 466.

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