"One day Pinatubo asked Maria Rosa if she wanted to join the Huk. She was glad to be offered a chance to fight back against the Japanese. After joining, she was assigned to carry messages and collect food, medicine, and clothing from people sympathetic to the Huk guerrillas.
Once, while on her way to collect medicine and deliver a message, Maria Rosa saw some Japanese soldiers a long way off. She quickly ate the message. The soldiers suspected nothing and let her pass. But Maria Rosa knew she’d had a close call. Those suspected of working with the Huk were always taken to the local Japanese garrison, where they were tortured for information before being killed. So the Huk held their meetings in different neighborhoods in order to avoid detection. And as Maria Rosa went from village to village for the Huk, she was careful to never disclose her real identity: her code name was Bayang.
Maria Rosa’s work gave her a deep sense of purpose. Yet she was continually haunted by the memory of the rapes, especially when she sang the following lines of a song with her comrades:
They should be vanquished, the fascist Japanese,
The scourge of our race.
They seized our possessions and raped our women.
After singing those words, Maria Rosa would always whisper to herself, 'I am one of those women.'"
Excerpt from "Maria Rosa Henson: Rape Survivor" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
Monday, July 25, 2016
Denny Williams: The Surrender at Corregidor
A portion of the bedsheet signed by the nurses at Corregidor on May 6, 1942.
Denny Williams’s name is in the middle of the third column.
AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, Archival Repository
"IT WAS THE MORNING of May 6, 1942. In a few hours, the US Army stationed on the Philippine island of Corregidor would surrender to the army of Imperial Japan.
But the fighting men would not be the only ones involved in this surrender. Along with them were female nurses, some of them civilians but most of them official members of the US Army. None of these women had been trained in combat nursing and yet they had endured months of just that. Now they awaited their fate. They were all too aware of the horrors the Japanese army inflicted on Chinese women four and a half years earlier during the Nanking Massacre. Tomorrow they would be facing the same enemy. Were they now living their last hours? If so, would anyone ever know what they had endured during the past grueling months?
They wanted to leave proof that they had been alive before meeting the Japanese face-to-face. One of them tore a large square from a bedsheet. Another wrote the following words at the top: “Members of the Army Nurse Corps and Civilian women who were in the Malinta Tunnel when Corregidor fell.” Then 69 women signed their names. One of them was Denny Williams."
Opening paragraphs from "Denny Williams: Nurse under Fire" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
Bataan/Corregidor nurses leaving Santo Tomas prison in 1945
AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, Archival Repository
Gladys Aylward: A Price on Her Head
Gladys Aylward
"Soon 100 children were on their way with one of Gladys’s trusted friends. But before a month had passed, 100 more orphans had found their way to the mission.
One day, a Chinese general sent Gladys a message: the Japanese were approaching Yangcheng in large numbers. The Chinese army was retreating. He wanted Gladys to come with them. They would care for the children on the way.
Although Gladys was concerned for the children’s safety, she rarely feared for her own. The children left with the general and his men. Gladys remained at Yangcheng.
Two nights after their departure, a Chinese soldier knocked on her door, telling Gladys he had been sent back to once more persuade her to leave.
“Whether you leave with us nor not, you must leave. We have received certain information.”
“What information?” Gladys asked.
“The Japanese have put a price on your head.”
“You are just saying this to make me leave,” Gladys replied.
He wasn’t. The soldier pulled a paper out of his pocket, one of many, he said, that had been found posted on a nearby city wall. The paper listed three names and stated the following: “Any person giving information which will lead to the capture, alive or dead, of the above mentioned, will receive [a large sum of money] from the Japanese High Command.” One of the names listed on the poster was “Ai-weh-deh,” Gladys’s official Chinese name.
Why did this missionary have a price on her head?"
From "Gladys Aylward: All China is a Battlefield" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater
Friday, July 22, 2016
Sybil Kathigasu and the Guerrilla Fighters
Photo credit: Media Masters Publishing, Malaya
"The occupying Japanese administration forced the Malayans to abandon Western culture and replace it with Japanese. Malayans had their homes searched regularly to ensure no one still owned pictures of the British royal family, the flags of any Allied nations, or even American record albums.
The Japanese were also obsessed with persecuting Papan’s large Chinese population. They would randomly round them up and make them stand for hours—sometimes days—in the hot sun without food or water. Many collapsed, and some died.
A guerrilla movement was born out of this persecution. The Chinese guerrillas near Papan fought the Japanese occupation by assassinating Malayan collaborators who were betraying their fellow Malayans to the Japanese. Large Japanese offensives would then be launched against the guerrillas. But when collaborators continued to meet their doom from hidden assassins, everyone knew the guerrillas were, in the main, alive and well.
One day, they asked Sybil for help.
“It’s the guerillas, Mrs. K,” said Moru, a young Chinese man acquainted with her. “Some of them are sick and wounded, and need medicines. They knew you don’t like the Japs. Will you help?”
Sybil knew the Japanese penalty for helping a guerrilla was severe..."
Excerpt from "Sybil Kathigasu: 'This Was War'" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
Minnie Vautrin
Minnie Vautrin as a young woman
(www.discipleshistory.org)
"IN DECEMBER 1937, Nanking was a city in flight. Its streets were jammed with the last major flood of civilians who had the means to leave the war-torn city. Half the original population was now gone. Most of the remaining 500,000 civilians were there only because they couldn’t afford transportation or had nowhere else to go.
But there was one small group of foreigners in Nanking—Americans and Europeans—who had stayed deliberately. They were the members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, which referred to an approximate three-mile area in the city designed to be a wartime refuge for civilians. Women and children were to be housed within the safety zone at Ginling Women’s College. Its president was an American woman named Minnie Vautrin."
Opening paragraphs of Minnie Vautrin: American Hero at the Nanking Massacre from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater
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
Claire Phillips and the Tsubaki Club's Opening Night
Claire Phillips, aka Dorothy Fuentes
The guests were treated to one dazzling dance production after another. For the finale, the elegant owner appeared alone on the dance floor. Dressed in a long, glittering white evening gown, Dorothy Fuentes sang beautifully for her guests. When she was finished, the crowd jumped to their feet in a thunderous standing ovation.
When the last guests had left, Dorothy checked the overflowing cash box. She knew that the Tsubaki Club was now the most popular spot for the Japanese in Manila. Her plan would work. She wrote the following note: 'Our new show was a sell out. You can count on regular backing. Standing by for orders and assignments.'
She was about to sign it, then stopped. She couldn’t use her name; it was too risky. But what could she use as an alias? She thought for a moment about how she always stashed money in her bra. She signed the note, 'High Pockets.'"
Opening paragraphs of "Claire Phillips: Manila Agent" from Women Heroes of World War II: The Pacific Theater.
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