In December 1941, Nurse Laura Cobb found herself trapped in a bombing raid in the Philippines.

She was working at an American naval base in Manila when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Declarations of war followed, and Cobb's base became an early target for Japanese bombers.

When the raid began, Cobb and the nurses under her command hid in a shelter

beneath her dormitory. Blast after blast rained down, shaking the building. Shrapnel battered

the base and scream sounded outside, a preview of the mass casualties that would soon overrun

the hospital. At last, the all-clear siren sounded.

Cobbs sprang up and sprinted across the base to the hospital, her fellow nurses a step behind.

They had people to tend to, lives to save. They had no idea that their bravery would soon land

them in a concentration camp, where they would be the ones needing medical care.

They would be beaten and starved, shot at, and threatened with death.

But through it all, Cobb never flinched,

and her heroics would soon falter into the ranks of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale

as one of the most courageous war nurses in all of history.

This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

Laura Cobb was a prim, slender woman with glasses who usually wore her hair in a tight bun.

She was born in 1892, near Wichita, Kansas. Unusually for women at the time,

her parents insisted on sending her and all of her sisters to high school. After a stint

teaching, Cobb attended nursing school and joined the Navy. She bounced around for a few years,

then ended up in the U.S. run Philippines. As chief nurse of her unit, she commanded

ten other nurses. They ranged in age from 27 to 40, and mostly hailed from heartland states,

like South Dakota and Iowa. Eventually, Cobb also hired a Filipino nurse named Basilia Torres-Steward,

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