Captain Bertha Helen Dworsky, A Soldier's Story
Captain Bertha Helen Dworsky, A Soldier's Story
Captain Bertha Helen Dworsky was born on December 31, 1910, in Lavaca, Texas. Trained as a nurse, she chose a profession grounded in care and discipline, skills that would be tested under some of the most difficult conditions of World War II.
She enlisted in the United States Army Nurse Corps and was assigned to duty in Manila in the Philippine Islands, then an American territory. When Japanese forces invaded in December 1941, and Manila fell in early 1942, American and Allied personnel were captured.
Captain Dworsky, along with 77 other U.S. Army nurses, was interned at Santo Tomas Internment Camp. For approximately 36 months, she endured imprisonment under wartime conditions marked by overcrowding, shortages of food and medicine, and uncertainty about the future. Despite their own deprivation, the Army nurses continued to care for fellow internees, preserving both physical health and morale.
The group would later become known as the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor,” a title honoring the courage and endurance of the military nurses who served during the fall of the Philippines and subsequent captivity.
In February 1945, Allied forces liberated Santo Tomas, ending nearly three years of internment.
After the war, Captain Bertha Helen Dworsky returned home. She died on February 24, 1992, and is buried in Sunnyvale, California.
Her story reminds us that service is not limited to the battlefield. Some forms of courage are measured not in attacks launched, but in endurance, in tending the sick while imprisoned, in maintaining dignity in captivity, and in surviving long years behind barbed wire without surrendering one’s duty. That, too, is patriotism.
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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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