The former Mildred Dalton thought she could explore the world through the Army Nurse Corps. Instead, she found herself a prisoner of war in 1942, and was held for 33 months, along with more than six dozen other nurses – from the Army and Navy – who were called the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor.” She is thought to be the last of the surviving Angels, family members said.
“I have never been bitter, and I have always known that if I could survive that, I could survive anything,” she said in a 2001 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mildred Dalton Manning, of Trenton, N.J., died March 8 from complications of pneumonia. She was 98. Services were held Friday at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, West Trenton, N.J. with burial at Washington Crossing National Cemetery, Newtown, Pa. Orland’s Ewing Memorial Chapel, Ewing Township, N.J., was in charge of arrangements.
Manning, who was from Jackson County, spent two years as the head surgical nurse at Grady Hospital before she joined the Corps in 1939.
“She was a trailblazer of sorts,” said her son James Manning, of Trenton, N.J. “She was very proud of having made it through nursing school.”
In 1941, while still in Georgia, Manning requested to be sent to the Philippines because she wanted to travel. She never imagined that trip would turn into a more than three-year saga that would forever change her life, her son said.
Manning had been in the Philippines six weeks when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Five months later she and the others were taken prisoner while treating wounded soldiers on the Philippine island of Corregidor. In 1945, after American tanks rammed through the gates of Santo Tomas – a university facility where the women were being held – and Manning and the others were freed, she continued to serve in the Corps, touring and promoting war bond sales. It was then she met Arthur Brewster Manning, an Atlanta newspaper man. The couple married two months after she returned home, and they eventually raised three children together. They left Atlanta in the ’50s when he took a job in Florida. She moved to New Jersey not long after her husband’s death in 1994. The couple’s youngest son, William D. Manning, died in 2006.
Mildred Manning, who was promoted to lieutenant and awarded several medals including the Bronze Star before she left the military, continued to use her nursing skills, but rarely spoke of her time in the Corps. Some feelings remained, however. For the rest of her life, Manning stayed away from large crowds and dark places, she said in 2001. She still worried she might run out of food, and she kept a large stash of staple goods.
“What she went through never sank in when I was younger,” her son William Manning said in 2001. “But now I look at what she survived as incredible.”
In addition to her son, Manning is survived by a daughter, March Price of Marietta; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
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