WWII Hero passes away

**Warbird** · 03-10-2007, 05:00 AM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070309/...s/obit_schmidt

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. - Jean Kennedy Schmidt, one of the nurses dubbed the "Angels of Bataan" who were held prisoner in the Philippines during World War II, has died. She was 88.

Schmidt died March 3 at her home from complications of a fall, her daughter, Susan Johnson of Bemidji, Minn., said Friday.

With Schmidt's death, only three of the nurses are believed to be alive, said Elizabeth M. Norman, who wrote the 1999 book "We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan."

"She had a wonderful spirit," Norman told the Los Angeles Times. "She loved these women she was imprisoned with, and she said she knew them as well as the back of her hand."

Joining the Army after getting her nursing degree in 1941, Schmidt was one of 99 Army and Navy nurses stationed in the Philippines. After Japan attacked in 1942, they found themselves treating casualties in open-air field hospitals on the Bataan Peninsula.

When the Philippines fell, they were sent to the rocky island fortress of Corregidor, working in an underground hospital.

Some nurses were able to leave before Corregidor fell in May 1942. The other 77 were held prisoner in Manila for nearly three years. While in the camp, they continued to treat other military and civilian prisoners, sometimes eating weeds to stave off starvation.

They were freed in 1945 when a U.S. tank crashed through the gates.

"We heard a lot of rumors about the Americans coming for us but were still surprised when they did come," Schmidt recalled in Diane Burke Fessler's book "No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II." "I had begun to feel that the Americans thought we weren't worth saving, and to look at how scrawny we were, we probably weren't."

Schmidt later married a fellow prisoner, Richard Schmidt, and they settled in California, where she continued her nursing career.

"She was not at all bitter about the experiences," her daughter said. "... She simply was doing her duty."

Born Imogene Kennedy in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1918, Schmidt grew up on a farm, one of eight children. She is also survived by a son, two sisters, a brother and four grandchildren.