Margaret Utinsky: Hiding From the Japanese

Margaret Utinsky

"MARGARET UTINSKY PEERED out the window of her second-floor apartment. On the street below, Japanese officers questioned everyone who passed by. They were rounding up “enemy aliens”: British and American citizens. Margaret had no intention of being among them. She could afford to wait a long time; her apartment was stocked with food and medical supplies provided by personnel working at the US military bases in Manila...

Margaret, a Red Cross nurse by day and the operator of a servicemen’s canteen by night, had taken taxi-loads of those supplies, hoping to open her canteen again when the fighting was over. She wanted to be of help, especially to her husband, Jack, a civil engineer with the US military in Manila who had urged Margaret to evacuate with the other military wives when the Japanese first attacked. Margaret had refused. Later, when Manila was declared an open city and Jack was ordered to pull back to the Bataan Peninsula with the rest of the military, Margaret refused his urgent suggestion to stay at the local hotel with the other American and British civilians; she assumed—correctly—that the Japanese would round them up and force them into an internment camp. And Margaret didn’t see how she could be of any use to Jack in an internment camp.

After the Japanese searched through the first floor of the apartment building and found all the apartments vacated, they didn’t bother checking the second floor..."

Opening paragraphs of "Margaret Utinsky: The Miss U Network" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater