Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Mary DeLong almost missed World War II.
A registered nurse, she was working as a dentist?s assistant in Ketchikan, Alaska, in 1944, when she decided the Army offered a better chance to work as a nurse.
So, in September of that year, she joined the Army Nurse Corps.
?President (Franklin D.) Roosevelt said that if you were a registered nurse and didn?t work a regular shift in a hospital, you could be drafted,? said DeLong, now 90 and living with her sister Dorothy Potter in the Wiley Creek retirement living community. ?I didn?t want to be drafted, so I joined.?
DeLong grew up as Mary Hollenbeck, one of five children on a farm in southwestern North Dakota, completed nursing training in 1939 at the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham, Wash.
She had gone to Washington as a nanny for two children, since jobs were scarce in North Dakota at the end of the Depression.
?I didn?t have money to pay for books or anything,? she said. ?The sisters told me I could pay it off by working at the hospital after I got my training.?
DeLong went to Ketchikan, where she worked at the Sisters of St. Joseph hospital there before taking a job with a dentist, who paid more.
But she wanted to be a nurse and the Army offered a commission to registered nurses who joined.
After completing basic training, DeLong said she was offered a choice of the Atlantic or Pacific theaters. She chose Europe, since she wanted to see London.
?There were 106 girls who went the same time as I did,? she said. ?One hundred and five went to the European Theater and I went to the Philippines.?
After stops in Australia and New Zealand, DeLong landed in the Philippines in 106-degree heat in January 1945, right after the Allies had taken Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands. She was stationed at the 133rd General Hospital on the island of Leyte, where men from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were being treated along with other casualties of war.
?We called it a hospital but it was just a bunch of tents,? she said.
The Japanese held various Philippine islands and American and Filipinos rescued from prison camps were brought in as Allied troops conquered those islands.
?They were nothing but skin and bones,? DeLong said. ?The ones we got were able to walk. I don?t know how, but they did. We kept them just a day or two – they were so anxious to get home that the ones who were able to travel we just put on an airplane.?
The Filipino prisoners were often in worse shape. Many had been severely abused by the Japanese, she said, and many died as a result of the torture they had experienced.
?You soon learn what war is all about,? DeLong said. ?One thing I learned – to listen to these young kids. They were 18- to 20-year-old cream-of-the-crop kids. Nobody could cook like their mothers!?
?To see young kids come in, with bodies so…? She paused to regain her composure. ?The blind boys especially.?
Despite the horrors of war, she said, there are pleasant memories.
She said she was struck by the courage many showed after being badly injured.
?Some would want to go back to duty with their old outfits,? she said.
And even when things were grim there was laughter.
?It didn?t matter how serious the situation was, there was always someone with a sense of humor who would come up with something to make us laugh,? she said.
She also enjoyed the camaraderie.
?In the Army you build up real close relationships – closer than family,? DeLong said. ?I just trusted anybody in uniform. I trusted everything they said and did.?
In the Philippines, DeLong said, she heard about a ?secret weapon? that would be used against Japan. She put in for duty with the occupation forces and in September of 1945, a month after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she was sent to the 28th General Hospital in Atsugi, Japan, where she stayed approximately three months.
?I took care of a lot of GI?s who had sinus infections,? she said. ?They were taken from the Philippines to Japan and the change in climate evidently affected them.?
Discharged in California, she went back to her old job in Alaska for six months, then returned to California where she worked for the Veterans Administration in Van Nuys, caring for paraplegics and quadriplegics.
After three months, she was recalled to the Army, and served in a hospital in Pasadena in the plastic surgery ward, caring for patients who had suffered burns or serious injuries and had undergone reconstructive surgery.
One of them was a man named O.D. DeLong, the sole survivor of a plane crash in St. Louis, Mo., that was taking GIs home from the service. They were married in 1949 and bought a house in North Long Beach, now Lakewood, Calif. They lived there 23 years, during which Mary DeLong worked with post-polio patients at the Rancho Los Amigos rehabilitation hospital in nearby Downey.
They moved to Sweet Home in 1972 and drove up the back way onto the top of Riggs Hill one day, where Mary DeLong looked out and said ?this is where I want to live.?
?We had three acres, a well and a view,? she said.
O.D. died in 1993 and when the Wiley Creek community was planned, she signed up to live there before ground was broken.
?It was interesting,? she said of her war experience. ?The difference between a civilian and a veteran is a veteran signs a paper that you?ll go where they tell you and do what they tell you ? all for freedom.
?That?s what we have here in the U.S. You do that to defend your country.?