It was a New Mexico spring day when Mrs. Howard Meyer of Albuquerque addressed a group of about 80 women from the Mother’s Service Club — just one day after U.S. military forces on the peninsula of Bataan in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese.

“We’re good soldiers,” she told the assembly. “And we’re taking it with our chins up.”

Newspaper accounts of the meeting on April 10, 1942, don’t say how the women in the room reacted. It’s likely, with some 1,800 New Mexico servicemen taking part in the battle of Bataan, that many harbored grave concerns about the fate of their husbands, sons, relatives or friends.



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