“‘Save Yourself—Leave Me!’: Japanese Women POWs’ Final Plea as U.S. Medics Carried Them Both”

They had been warned since the beginning—warned until it became scripture.

If the Americans ever take you alive, they will violate you, humiliate you, torture you, and make sure you beg for death before it comes. That was the story passed from officer to clerk, from soldier to nurse, from fear to fear—until the idea of capture didn’t feel like defeat.

It felt like a fate worse than dying.

So on Corregidor Island in February 1945, as the fortress collapsed into fire and smoke, 23 Japanese women crawled into the dark and did what they believed honor demanded.

They stopped eating.

They waited for the end.

They prepared to die.

And then the enemy arrived—not with bayonets, but with bandages.

Not with cruelty, but with morphine.

Not to punish them… but to carry them out alive.

1) The Cave That Smelled Like the End

Corregidor had been a symbol once—an American bastion in Manila Bay, the kind of place men bragged about holding and men died trying to take. By mid-February 1945 it was no symbol at all.

It was a slaughterhouse of tunnels.

Two weeks of fighting had scorched the island. Flamethrowers had blackened walls. Explosions had turned corridors into jagged traps. The air in the underground passages was thick with smoke, rot, and the metallic bite of blood.

American units pushed deeper, clearing chambers one by one, expecting the usual pattern: stubborn defenders, grenades clutched to chests, last charges into gunfire.

They expected men.

They did not expect what they heard next.

Not commands. Not the scrape of boots.

Moaning. Crying.

Human sounds, but not the kind that meant an ambush.

Corporal James Miller—22 years old, a medic from Iowa—moved with his unit into the lower chambers of the tunnel system. He’d already learned the brutal mathematics of war: pressure bandage, tourniquet, morphine, keep the wounded breathing long enough to be evacuated.

He’d held men together with his hands.

He’d listened to screams until his mind stopped reacting.

But that sound—coming from deeper in the dark—was different.

It didn’t sound like soldiers.

It sounded like something broken.

They advanced slowly. Flashlights cut narrow cones through soot-black air. Bodies lay scattered—some Japanese, some already decomposing in the heat. Debris was everywhere: collapsed timbers, shredded equipment, stones blown loose from the ceiling.

Then Miller’s beam found them.

Twenty-three women, huddled in a pocket of darkness like something the tunnel had swallowed and refused to give back.

Some wore the ruined remnants of white nursing uniforms, now gray with filth and stained with dried blood. Others wore plain dresses, torn and soiled. Their hair was matted, faces hollow, eyes wide with starvation and terror.

A few were injured—bandages soaked through, limbs twisted at wrong angles. Two lay unconscious, too weak to even flinch.

For a moment, no one moved.

American soldiers froze with rifles raised.

The women froze staring back.

Then one of the women screamed.

It wasn’t just fear. It was certainty—the certainty that the horror they’d been promised had finally arrived.

She scrambled backward, shouting in Japanese. Others joined, their voices sharp and desperate. One woman tried to stand and collapsed, her leg clearly broken. Another grabbed a jagged piece of metal as a weapon, though her hands shook so violently she could barely hold it.

Miller lowered his rifle first.

His voice came out soft, automatically, the same tone he’d used on dying Americans.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. We’re going to help you.”

They couldn’t understand his words—but they heard his tone.

And they didn’t trust it.

2) They Expected Bayonets. They Got Water.

Miller stepped forward slowly, palms visible, body low—not a conqueror, but a caretaker. He pulled out his canteen, took a drink himself to prove it wasn’t poison, then held it out.

The nearest woman stared at the water like it was a trick.

Her lips were cracked and bleeding. She wanted it—her tongue moved involuntarily—but she shook her head and whispered something that sounded like refusal.

No. No. Don’t.

Behind her, an older woman with gray threaded through her hair spoke sharply. Her posture—despite injury and exhaustion—carried authority. The others watched her as if she were a final anchor in the dark.

The older woman’s eyes stayed locked on Miller, calculating.

Survival versus honor.

Life versus what she’d been taught.

Miller set the canteen down between them and backed away.

He didn’t force it.

He didn’t bark orders.

He didn’t laugh.

He didn’t strike anyone for resisting.

That alone was confusing—dangerously confusing—because it didn’t match the world they’d been promised.

Minutes passed. Then more.

The women whispered to each other in frantic bursts.

Finally, the older woman leaned forward and took the canteen.

She drank carefully—small sips—never taking her eyes off Miller’s face.

And when she didn’t die…

When no one attacked her…

When the “monsters” did nothing at all except wait…

Something shifted in the cave.

Not trust. Not yet.

But the first hairline crack in the propaganda that had ruled their lives.

3) The Enemy Opened a Medical Bag

Once the first barrier broke, the next came fast.

Miller moved to the unconscious women. One burned with fever, skin hot to the touch. The other was so pale her pulse was barely there. Miller’s hands went to work—efficient, practiced, almost mechanical.

IV lines.

Saline.

Morphine.

Cleaning wounds.

The women gasped when the needle went in. Some leaned forward as if to stop him, convinced he was hurting her—because in the stories, the enemy’s hands only existed to harm.

The older nurse—Tanaka-san, others called her—studied the equipment.

She had been trained. She recognized what she was seeing.

And in that recognition was another crack: the Americans were using medicine. Real medicine. On them.

She nodded slowly.

Not surrender.

Not gratitude.

Just a stunned acknowledgment: This is not what we were told.

4) “SAVE YOURSELF. LEAVE ME.”

Evacuating them took hours.

Not because the Americans lacked stretchers or manpower, but because every touch triggered terror. Every lift brought cries in Japanese—pleading to be left behind.

Begging to die.

Some believed death was still the kinder option. Some feared being carried out was the beginning of a longer nightmare.

A translator arrived with the evacuation team: a Japanese American soldier who spoke formal Japanese, careful and respectful. When the women heard their own language coming from an American uniform, some burst into tears. Others stared like their eyes were lying to them.

He explained again and again:

They would be taken to a field hospital.

They would receive medical care.

They would not be harmed.

The women fired questions back at him—rapid, desperate, disbelieving.

One young woman—barely more than a girl—grabbed his sleeve.

“Please,” she said in Japanese, voice breaking. “Please. Let us die here. We know what happens to women prisoners. We know.”

The translator looked at her and didn’t have the luxury of being cold. The lie had already done its damage. He could see it in her shaking hands, in her conviction, in the way her whole body braced for violence that wasn’t coming.

“You will be treated with respect,” he said. “The Geneva Convention protects prisoners of war. The Americans follow it.”

She didn’t believe him.

Not yet.

Then they lifted another woman—one of the nurses, barely conscious. She grabbed Miller’s arm as they raised her.

Her grip was weak, but the message was iron.

In broken English, she whispered:

“Save yourself. Leave me.”

Miller heard it clearly.

He didn’t answer with a speech.

He answered with action.

He carried her anyway.

5) The Long Walk Out of the Dark

The tunnel was narrow, ruined, choked with debris. Stretchers had to be angled and twisted through passages where the walls still smelled scorched from flame.

Explosions continued on the island—echoes from other chambers where defenders still fought to the death. Every boom made the women flinch, certain it was meant for them.

When they finally emerged into the twilight outside, several women covered their faces as if sunlight itself was shameful—like the open air could witness their dishonor.

The island aboveground looked like the end of the world:

Trees stripped to stumps.

Buildings smashed into rubble.

Craters chewing up the earth.

American soldiers everywhere—moving supplies, treating wounded, calling orders.

Some stopped and stared as the stretchers passed.

The women braced for jeers.

For spitting.

For hands reaching.

For laughter.

For revenge.

But what they got was something almost worse in its strangeness:

Silence.

Curious silence. Awkward silence. The kind of silence that says, I don’t know what to do with this.

No one touched them.

No one struck them.

No one celebrated.

They were simply carried to the field hospital like patients.

Like human beings.

6) A Surgeon Looked at Them and Saw Only “Patients”

The field hospital was a cluster of tents that smelled of antiseptic, blood, and sweat. Inside, wounded Americans lay in rows—bandaged, missing limbs, staring at canvas ceilings.

The 23 women were brought to a separate area, a tent cleared for them.

The chief medical officer, a surgeon hardened by the Pacific war, took one look and didn’t see enemies.

He saw triage.

“Critical cases first,” he ordered. “Full workups. Now.”

Miller moved from woman to woman checking vitals, cleaning wounds, administering antibiotics and pain meds. Each time he approached, they flinched. Each time, he kept his hands gentle.

Three women had infections bad enough to require immediate surgery.

When the anesthesia mask came down, one of them fought it—thrashing, crying, convinced this was the moment the “truth” of capture would finally reveal itself.

Then the medication took hold.

And when she woke hours later, her wound had been cleaned, stitched, and bandaged.

She stared at the white gauze like it was evidence from another universe.

That night, the women were given cots with clean sheets.

Blankets.

Pillows.

Real pillows.

Some of them had slept on rock floors for weeks.

Now they lay on something soft, still afraid to believe softness wasn’t a trap.

7) Breakfast: Oatmeal, Coffee… and the Taste of Betrayal

Morning brought food.

Hot food.

Not the thin, desperate scraps they’d survived on.

Trays arrived: oatmeal, crackers, canned fruit, coffee, condensed milk.

The women stared at it in silence as if waiting for the punchline.

Tanaka-san lifted a spoon and examined it like it might bite her. Then she took a cautious taste.

Sweetness hit her tongue.