Oral History Interview with Dorothy Davis Thompson, June 13, 2006

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Dorothy Davis Thompson. Thompson was born in Shanghai and graduated high school there in 1935. In 1937, when the Japanese invaded Shanghai she was at Columbia University in New York learning nursing. Her family fled to Manila. When she graduated in 1940, she went to be with her parents in the Philippines. She got a job as a Civil Service nurse in the obstetrics ward at Sternberg Army Hospital, met her fiancee there, and was working there when the Japanese invaded Luzon. Her fiancee was soon fighting on Bataan. She received some notes from him from Cabanatuan but never saw him again. (Don Childers was killed as a POW while en route to Japan aboard a hell ship that was torpedoed by a US submarine.) Thompson then describes caring for wounded and injured in the hospital until she was captured by the Japanese and removed with her father, mother and sister to the internment camp at Santo Tomas in January, 1942. Thompson speaks about the conditions inside Santo Tomas in the early days and how the Japanese had not been prepared to provide for civilian internees. She describes her efforts to set up a clinic to treat sick and injured people. Finally, in July, 1942, Army nurses arrived from Corregidor. Before long, Thompson and her mother (with a few other people) were repatriated. They left Santo Tomas and returned to New York City. Upon arriving, Thompson received word that she had been accepted to the US Army Nurse Corps and was to report to the Surgeon Genral's office immediately. After some time for debriefing and some intervention by Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson began working at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. She worked there in the OR until orders came in November, 1944 to report to Camp Stoneman in California for deployment to the Southwest Pacific. She arrived in New Guinea only to have her ship torpedoed. She and the other nurses were stranded there until transport could be found to take them to their final destination. Eventually, she made her way to the Philippines where she was transported with other doctors and nurses to a recently liberated Santo Tomas. There she found folks she knew and her father and sister. Thompson continued working as an Army nurse in Manila until the end of the war. She evetually contracted a sever strain of viral pneumonia and was evacuated to the US. After recovering, she was returned to duty i nthe OR at Walter Reed. Soon, her request to return to Manila was granted and she returned. Soon, she was reunited with her family