Search Constraints
Search Results
- Description:
- In a poignant oral history interview, American Red Cross worker Ruth Wysor talks about her adventures while serving in the Philippines during World War II and in American occupied Japan after the war, including being held prisoner in a Japanese prison camp and adopting and raising a war orphan. Returning to the Philippines with General Douglas MacArthur and the American Army, Wysor says that she was separated from U.S. forces, driven into the countryside and wounded and captured by the Japanese. She describes being held in the infamous Santo Tomas Internment Camp, subsisting on a diet of rice alone and receiving no medical attention. The camp was finally liberated after three months and she says that her untreated knee wound continues to trouble her forty years later. After the war, Wysor says that she was sent to Kamakura to help set up the first Red Cross club in Japan and that her unit befriended a group of destitute missionary sisters who lived nearby and gave them food, supplies and medical care. Wysor says that the nuns also cared for orphans and that she became godmother to a little girl, cared for her when she became ill and finally applied to adopt her. With the help of General MacArthur himself, Wysor says that she was finally able to return to the United States with her new daughter and became the first single woman in the state of Ohio to be allowed to legally adopt a child. Wysor says that her adopted daughter thrived in the U.S. and has gone on to be a successful adult. Recorded at the AOA Convention held in San Antonio, TX. Wysor is interviewed by Alf Thompson and Betty Thompson.
- Date Issued:
- 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- Marguerite Noutary, the daughter of immigrant parents, talks about her childhood and her career in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, including her service in World War II. Noutary talks about joining the Army in 1940 and being sent to the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations after the start of the war. She describes her duty stations in Calcutta and Myitkyina, Burma, the dust of the Burma Road, the food, the climate, rampant malaria, flying over "The Hump" into China in a transport plane with Japanese prisoners, the start of the Chinese civil war after the Japanese surrender and treating American POWs who were survivors of the Doolittle Raid. Noutary says that she decided to join the Army Reserve after leaving the regular Army and was called-up for active duty in October 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vivian Peterson introduces and concludes the recording.
- Date Issued:
- 1990-03-03T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project