What a Fabulous Hero!

A survivor of two wars, a prison camp and near starvation, Colonel Ruby

Bradley, was one of the most decorated women in U.S. military history. Bradley entered the United States Army Nurse Corps as a surgical nurse in 1934. She was serving at Camp John Hay in the Philippines when she was captured by Japanese forces three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

In 1943, she was moved to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. It was there that she and several other imprisoned nurses earned the title "Angels in Fatigues" from fellow captives. For the next several months, she provided medical help to the prisoners and sought to feed starving children by shoving food into her pockets whenever she could, often going hungry herself. As she lost weight, she used the room in her uniform for smuggling surgical equipment into the prisoner-of-war camp
operations and helped to deliver 13 children.

When U.S. troops liberated the camp on February 3, 1945, Bradley weighed only 86 pounds (39 kg). She was then returned to the United States where she continued her career in the Army. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California in 1949.

Bradley served in the Korean War as Chief Nurse for the 171st Evacuation Hospital. In November 1950, during the Chinese counter-offensive, she refused to leave until she had loaded the sick and wounded onto a plane in Pyongyang while surrounded by 100,000 advancing Chinese soldiers. She was able to jump aboard the plane just as her ambulance exploded from an enemy shell. In 1951, she was named Chief Nurse for the Eighth Army, where she supervised over 500 Army nurses throughout Korea.

She was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1958 and retired from the Army in 1963.