American heros!-----The Angels of Bataan: The World War II Nurses Who Survived Three Years in a Japanese Prison Camp | A Mighty Girl

The Angels of Bataan: The World War II Nurses Who Survived Three Years in a Japanese Prison Camp | A Mighty Girl
"...Bataan fell in April of 1942, and it was obvious that Corregidor would not hold much longer.
Knowing that there was not enough time to evacuate all of her nurses, Captain Maude C. Davison, the chief nurse of the Philippine department, joined Colonel Wibb Cooper, the ranking medical officer, in creating a list of twenty nurses who would receive priority for evacuation.
Her nurses later noted that, although Davison insisted that the selections were random, she had sent home all of the women who were ill, injured, or otherwise unlikely to be able to withstand lengthy captivity.
When the Allies surrendered the Philippines to the Japanese army, Davison led the remaining 66 nurses to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, one of the notoriously harsh prison camps run by the Japanese military.
There, they joined 11 Navy nurses who, under the command of Lt. Laura M. Cobb, had stayed in Manila while it fell to support the patients who could not be moved. 
In the camp, the nurses agreed that they would continue to provide medical care to their fellow prisoners.
...By January 1945, with Japanese losses mounting, the situation in the camp was dire.
The nurses had resorted to eating weeds, roots, flowers, and slugs; patients in their care regularly died of malnutrition.
With prisoners' rations down to "only one cup of rice twice a day," Manning observed that it "was the year we starved to death."
By the time the camp was liberated on February 3, 1945, the nurses had lost an average of 30% of their bodyweight.
..."There were 77 American women who became POWs and there were 77 who walked out in 1945," says Norman.
"This is unprecedented, particularly for women who had no formal survival training."..."
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