She Smiled at the Camera — While Japan Tortured the Girl on the Army Poster

She smiled at the camera when the US Navy used her photo to sell war bonds while she was scheduled for execution in a Japanese prison camp.

February 23rd, 1945.

Los Banos internment camp, the Philippines.

7:00 in the morning.

Dorothy still is holding a newborn baby.

The mother has no milk.

She hasn’t had enough food to produce milk in weeks.

The baby is getting powdered milk from the last Red Cross package the camp received months ago.

Dorothy measures it out carefully.

Every gram matters.

She has been awake since before dawn.

She is 20 years old.

She weighs 90 lb.

Outside the window of the camp hospital, Japanese guards are going through their morning exercises.

This is the routine.

Every morning, the same exercises, the same shouts, the same rhythm.

Dorothy has watched it 300 times, 1,000 times.

She stopped counting.

What she does not know, what none of the 11 American nurses in this camp know is that today is the day the Japanese have scheduled them for execution.

The order has already been given.

The guards performing their exercises outside her window are the same guards who will carry it out.

The paperwork exists.

The decision has been made at the highest level of the Japanese command in the Philippines.

When the American forces get close enough, the prisoners will be killed.

All of them.

Every man, woman, and nurse inside Los Banos.

American forces are close enough.

Today is the day.

And at that exact moment, 7:00 in the morning, Dorothy still holding a newborn baby in the camp hospital, American paratroopers begin jumping out of aircraft overhead.

This is her story.

And it begins not in a prison camp in the Philippines, but in Long Beach, California, where a young woman who wanted to be a dress designer joined the Navy instead and sailed toward the most beautiful posting in the American military.

She had no idea what was waiting for her.

In January 1940, Dorothy Still arrived in the Philippines for a 2-year assignment at Kanyao Naval Hospital near Cavete.

She was 25 years old from Long Beach, California.

She had trained as a nurse during the depression because her mother thought it was stable work.

She had not planned on the Navy.

She had applied on something close to a whim.

The Philippines was a dream assignment.

Warm weather, dances, sailors, sunsets over Manila Bay.

Her 2-year assignment was ending, and she was already thinking about requesting an extension.

Then, December 7th happened.

Dorothy still was asleep in her quarters at Kanyaka when the news came about Pearl Harbor.

Her chief nurse, Lieutenant Commander Laura Cobb, a composed, experienced woman who would prove to be one of the most important people in Dorothy’s life, gathered her 11 nurses in the darkened hallway and told them what she knew.

Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

War had been declared.

Nobody knew what happened next.

What happened next was swift and total.

On December 10th, Japanese aircraft bombed the Cavete Navyyard.

Dorothy and her colleagues worked through the night.

Sailors with burns, soldiers with shrapnel, civilians caught in the open.

They ran out of supplies and improvised.

They moved patients to the floor when beds filled.

They worked in darkness when the power failed.

Within weeks, Manila had fallen and Dorothy was transferred from hospital to hospital as the situation collapsed.

On January 6th, 1942, Japanese officers walked through the doors.

They inspected the wards.

They posted guards at every exit.

Dorothy still was now a prisoner of war.

On March 8th, 1942, she and 3,000 other internes were transferred to Sto.

Tomas internment camp.

Laura Cobb assembled her nurses and gave one instruction.

Maintain your rank, your routine, your professionalism.

You are Navy nurses.

Behave accordingly.

It was an instruction that would keep them alive for 3 years.

Back home, Dorothy’s family received a telegram, missing in action, no further details.

What the Navy did not tell her family was that Dorothy Still’s photograph was already on a recruitment poster.

Her image, her smile, her uniform.

She was in a prison camp in Manila.

Her photograph was in Los Angeles.

choice.

Life inside Stomas in 1942 was difficult but survivable.

Japanese civilian authorities ran the camp with a degree of tolerance that would not last.

Prisoners with resources could buy supplemental food from Filipino vendors outside the fence.

There was a camp committee, a basic structure of self-governance.

Laura Cobb immediately established a hospital ward in what had been a mechanical engineering building, and her 11 nurses reported for duty every single day.

4-hour shifts, uniforms improvised from whatever fabric was available, sewn by one of the nurses from discarded material to be worn on duty at all times.

This was not vanity.

This was survival psychology.

Purpose meant a reason to get up.

Laura Cobb understood this with absolute clarity and enforced it quietly without compromise.

In May 1943, a civilian doctor asked Cobb if the nurses would transfer to a new camp at Losanos, 60 km south.

The nurses were frightened.

They had built something at Stomas.

Lospanos was unknown, but they were needed.

They agreed to go.

On the morning of their departure, someone used the camp’s PA system to play anchors away.

The internees lined the paths and watched in silence.

The 12 nurses had been the anchors of Santa Tomas.

The word had spread and stuck.

Now they were leaving.

At Lospanos they built again.

They converted a stripped infirmary into a functioning hospital.

They grew a garden, eggplants, sweet potatoes, whatever would grow to supplement the rations.

They maintained their schedule, their uniforms, their routine.

Then late 1943 arrived and the Imperial Japanese Army took control of Los Banos from the civilian administration.

Everything changed.

The new Japanese commander, a supply officer described in survivor accounts as deliberately cruel, cut the food supply to near nothing.

The daily ration dropped to levels that physicians now classify as starvation level nutrition.

The camp garden became critical.

Dorothy and the other nurses ate whatever they could find.

They boiled the weeds that grew between the barracks.

They ate duck eggs when they could obtain them.

By early 1945, Dorothy still weighed less than 90 lb.

She had entered captivity weighing30.

She still reported for duty every morning.

This is the choice at the center of this story.

Not a single dramatic moment, a choice made every single day for 3 years.

Get up.

Put on the uniform.

Walk to the hospital.

Treat the patients who are sicker than you are.

Come back.

Sleep.

Get up again.

Laura Cobb made that choice.

Dorothy still made that choice.

All 11 of them made it every morning for 1,095 mornings.

Back home, Dorothy Still’s story was being told without her permission, and without anything resembling the truth.

A recruitment drive, a war bond campaign, her photograph in a Navy uniform, smiling.

Young woman serves her country.

She weighed 90 lb.

She was eating weeds.

Her photograph was on a poster.

The Navy knew where she was.

They simply found the poster more useful.

By February 1945, the American reconquest of the Philippines was advancing rapidly.

General MacArthur had returned.

American forces were closing on Manila.

And inside Japanese military command in the Philippines, a decision had been made.

When the Americans get close enough, the prisoners will be executed.

Los Banos was close enough.

The date was set February 23rd, 1945.

Consequence February 23rd, 1945.

700 a.

m.

Dorothy still is in the camp hospital holding a newborn baby, trying to feed her with the last of the powdered milk.

Outside, the Japanese guards are doing their morning exercises.

She looks up and notices smoke signals rising above the camp perimeter.

Then she sees the aircraft.

Then she sees the paratroopers jumping.

The 11th Airborne had planned this raid for weeks.

Filipino guerillas had provided exact intelligence, guard positions, schedules, the morning exercise window, the moment when maximum guards would be fixed, exposed, predictable.

Paratroopers landed.

Theers hit the guard posts from outside simultaneously.

Amtraks crashed through the fence.

Dorothy Still watched American soldiers jump out of the lead Amtrak.

She later described them as the most beautiful sight she had ever seen in her life.

They were healthy.

They were strong.

After 3 years of watching everyone around her shrink and fade, these men looked like a different species.

She held the baby and watched them come and could not speak.

The raid lasted approximately 15 minutes.

Every Japanese guard at Laspanos was killed.

Every one of the more than 2,000 internes was evacuated.

All 11 Navy nurses walked out alive.

They were put on transport aircraft and flown to Lee, then home.

Dorothy Still arrived in the United States in the spring of 1945.

She was met with a reception appropriate to a returning hero, a ceremony, photographs, a bronze star, a prisoner of war medal.

An admiral shook her hand and thanked her for her service.

Then the Navy assigned her to promote war bonds.

The same campaign that had been using her image for 3 years now had the actual person.

She tooured.

She smiled for photographs.

She sold bonds.

She did not speak about Lospanos.

She had nightmares.

She startled at sounds.

She couldn’t eat normal amounts.

3 years of starvation had altered something fundamental.

When she sought help, a Navy psychiatrist told her, and this is documented, that nurses could not experience post-traumatic stress the way soldiers did.

She was a nurse.

She was supposed to have moved on.

She left the Navy in 1947 when she married.

She built a civilian life.

She worked as a nurse and eventually as a hospital supervisor.

She had three children.

She did not talk about the Philippines for decades.

In 1995, Dorothy Still Dana published her memoir.

She called it, “What a way to spend a war.

” The long quiet record of everything.

The Philippines before the war, the Japanese invasion, 3 years inside Stomas and Los Banos, the liberation and the struggle to rebuild a life that no one around her fully understood.

Most Americans never read it.

Most Americans never heard her name.

Dorothy Still Dana died on June 16th, 2001 at 86.

She was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Her photograph, the one in the Navy uniform, the one with the smile, the one they put on the poster while she was eating weeds in a prison camp, is in the archives.

You can look it up.

You can see her face.

She looks young and unafraid.

She had no idea what was coming.

And she survived it anyway.

1,095 mornings of getting up, putting on the uniform, walking to the hospital, doing the work.

The poster got it right by accident.

She really was exactly what they said she was.

They just had no idea what it cost her.