Lieutenant Colonel Eunice Florence Young, A Soldier's Story
Lieutenant Colonel Eunice Florence Young, A Soldier's Story
Born on May 21, 1913, in Arkport, New York, Lieutenant Colonel Eunice Florence Young answered her calling early in life. After graduating from Arkport Central School, she traveled west to Arizona to pursue nursing, a profession she believed worthy of both discipline and dignity. In 1939, as war clouds gathered overseas, she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and was assigned to the military hospital in Manila, Philippines.
When World War II reached the Pacific, Lieutenant Young found herself serving under fire. She cared for wounded soldiers inside the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, working in darkness, under bombardment, with limited supplies and relentless pressure. When Corregidor fell in May 1942, she, along with 78 other Army and Navy nurses, was captured and imprisoned at Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.
For nearly three years, she endured harsh and deteriorating conditions as a prisoner of war. Food was scarce. Disease spreads easily. The nurses themselves grew dangerously thin. Upon liberation, Lieutenant Young weighed just 110 pounds at 5 feet 6 inches tall. Yet throughout captivity, she continued to serve. The nurses established and maintained a functioning hospital inside the camp, tending to civilians and fellow prisoners alike.
Their resistance did not always take a dramatic form. It lived in quiet defiance. Lieutenant Young kept a hidden diary despite the risk. During inspections, the nurses spaced themselves deliberately so the Japanese guards were forced to bow repeatedly, sometimes dozens of times, subtly reclaiming dignity in captivity.
After liberation on February 3, 1945, Lieutenant Young’s story was featured in The Saturday Evening Post in an article titled “Three Years Outside This World.” Alongside her fellow nurses, she became known as one of the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”—a title she humbly resisted, insisting she had done nothing heroic.
But heroism is not always loud. It can look like endurance. It can look like refusing to abandon patients. It can look like preserving humanity in a place designed to strip it away.
Lieutenant Colonel Eunice Florence Young remained in the Army after the war, continuing her nursing service until retiring in 1961. She died on January 10, 1995, and rests in Arkport Heritage Hill Cemetery in New York.
Her life stands as proof that courage often lives in consistency, and that sometimes the most powerful acts are those done quietly, day after day, in the hardest of places.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
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