(bell dinging) (pensive music) - [Ariel] Hi, I am Ariel Lawhon.

- [Kristina] I'm Kristina McMorris.

- [Susan] And I'm Susan Meissner.

And this is "When We Had Wings."

(lively music) - This novel begins the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Real nurses from the United States and their Filipino counterparts were serving on military bases in Manila.

And the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they bombed Manila.

And so these women went from what was a paradise assignment to war overnight.

- We knew we wanted a World War II story but we wanted to find an event that hadn't been written about many times over.

And we wanted to find women who played a pivotal role in that event.

And I stumbled upon a documentary about military nurses who had been nicknamed the Angels of Bataan.

And I didn't know that they had such amazing roles to play, that even as prisoners of war, probably the first military female prisoners of war, that they continued to nurse people in the most terrible of conditions.

And they never lost their resolve or their resiliency.

And because they kept people's eyes trained on hope, they were seen as angels and well beyond what happened on Bataan.

It was for the entire time of everyone's imprisonment that they were seen as angels.

- One of the things I find fascinating about historical fiction in general is the whole concept of some of it's real, some of it isn't.

How did you blend fact and fiction?

- Well, that's the whole thing we do as historical authors is always trying to figure out what serves the story.

And so for us, we created three nurses that were three different types.

So US Army, US Navy, and then a Filipino nurse.

We fictionalized our characters, but they were all inspired by real nurses that did serve, that were incredible.

There're about 80 of them.

And the fact that they all survived what they went through, through the Japanese occupation, being POWs, through starvation, through every kind of jungle tropical disease that you can imagine.

And then were told by the US government not to talk about their experiences.

So really not to spotlight the fact that they had been abandoned and left behind.

- Ladies, thank you so much for being here.

This was so much fun.

- Thank for having us.

- Thank for having us.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell dinging) - [Author] Research, it's what we do.

- It's what's for dinner.

- This is our wheelhouse.

- [Author] Finding the details that make a moment in history come alive.