Ruby Bradley

Who was Ruby Bradley?

Colonel Ruby Bradley was one of the most decorated women in United States military history. She was a native of Spencer, West Virginia but lived in Falls Church, Virginia, for over 50 years.

Bradley entered the 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. At the camp she assisted in 230 operations and helped to deliver 13 children. When U.S. troops liberated the camp on February 3, 1945, Bradley weighed only 86 pounds.

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