Rosemary Hogan Luciano

Colonel Rosemary Hogan Luciano was born 13 March 1912 in Ahpeatone, Oklahoma. She graduated valedictorian at Chattanooga High School in 1930, and won a scholarship to Scott & White Training School for Nurses in Temple, Texas. Hogan was later commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army Nurse Corps at Ft. Sill in 1936, serving there until April 1940 when she transferred to Fort Stotsenburg, 40 miles northwest of Manila in the Philippines.

After the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, Hogan and 98 other nurses cared for wounded Soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor, where on 30 March 1942 she was badly wounded during a Japanese bombing, but refused to leave her patients. On 29 April she was ordered to Australia by LTG Jonathan Wainwright with 19 other nurses. During a stop on Mindanao her plane was damaged and she was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned in Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. As a POW, she and her fellow nurses, many sick and injured themselves, cared for 4,000 mainly American and British civilians in the camp hospital until the end of the war. Known as one of the heroic “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor,” the still-wounded and half-starved Hogan was a POW for 999 days. She was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Philippine Republic Presidential Unit Citation, and the Prisoner of War Medal, among others.

After the end of WWII, Hogan inter-service transferred to the US Air Force Nurse Corps becoming one of the first four women in the Air Force to attain the rank of Colonel. In 1962 she married MAJ (Ret) Arnold Luciano and retired with disability. They lived in San Antonio, TX, where she died on 12 June 1964. Luciano is buried in the Nurses’ Section at Arlington National Cemetery.