Robert J. Mrazek - The Indomitable Florence Finch: The Untold Story of a War Widow Turned Resistance Fighter and Savior of American POWs

October 16, 1944
Japanese Kempeitai Police Headquarters
Manila, Philippines

At twenty-nine, Florence Ebersole Smith knew the depths of terror as well as she knew her own familyat least those who were still alive. She had lived with fear every day for more than three years.

Two of her closest contacts in the Philippine underground had recently disappeared. She could only assume they had been taken by the Kempeitai and were being tortured to find out who had stolen the Japanese armys stocks of gasoline and diesel fuel and diverted them to the Philippine resistance. A Kempeitai officer had the unlimited power to arrest, torture, condemn without trial, or execute anyone in the Philippines. Florence hoped her friends hadnt revealed her role in the diversions.

A month earlier, the Kempeitai sent two officers to question Florence and her coworkers at the Philippine Liquid Fuel Distribution Union. Afterward, the Japanese director of the company, Kiyoshi Osawa, brought the staff together to say the Kempeitai was sure that people in the company were guilty of sabotage and stealing massive quantities of liquid fuel. The punishment for the criminals would be death.

Steer clear of trouble, Osawa warned them. The time will come when you will be glad you followed my advice.

Florence hadnt followed his advice. They came for her shortly after dawn.

1915
Charles Ebersole Plantation
Santiago, Isabela Province, Philippines

She was born Loring May Ebersole. The name Florence came after the cataclysm.

Her earliest memories were stained with melancholy, loss, and pain. The roots of the tragedy were sown more than twenty years earlier, in 1899, when Charlie Ebersole arrived in the Philippines aboard the hospital ship USS Missouri. A young American medic, Charlie volunteered at seventeen in a spirit of high adventure, after reading the thrilling newspaper accounts of Teddy Roosevelt leading his Rough Riders to glory on their charge up San Juan Hill in the first year of the Spanish-American War. With his sensitive blue eyes, gentle smile, and blond hair, Charlie looked more virginal choir boy than Rough Rider.

The war began in Cuba in 1898, when its people revolted against their Spanish rulers with the United States backing them. The fighting then spread to the Philippines, a colony Spain had ruled for nearly four hundred years.

When Charlies hospital ship arrived in Manila Bay a year later, it sailed past the wrecked warships of the Spanish fleet, which had been destroyed in the naval battle that finally ended Spanish control of the Philippines.

Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipino leading the insurrection against the Spanish, initially welcomed the Americans as liberators. But when the United States decided to make the Philippines its own possession, Aguinaldo named himself president of the First Philippine Republic and declared war once again.

In the beginning, his ragtag soldiers suffered terrible losses in traditional battles against the US Army. Aguinaldo changed to guerrilla tactics, avoiding direct conflict and making night raids and ambushes on American outposts. The idea was not to defeat the Americans but to inflict constant losses that would make them quit.

General Elwell Otis, commander of the American troops, issued secret orders to execute all enemy soldiers captured in the fighting. Publicly, he claimed that the Filipino insurgents were guilty of atrocities and that captured Americans were being buried up to their necks in ant hills.

Aguinaldo asked the International Red Cross to determine the truth. Over General Otiss objections, their representatives reported seeing burned-out villages and horribly mutilated Filipino bodies, with stomachs slit open and men decapitated.

Charlies ship reached Manila just as the war reached the height of its savagery in November 1899. Before he was assigned to a hospital, he was given two days leave to visit the city and its famous walled compound, called the Intramuros. Built by the Spanish in 1571, its Romanesque churches and narrow, cobbled streets were surrounded by twenty-five-foot-high stone walls. The natives of the city did not seem dangerous to him, nor did they appear to fear his presence. He also couldnt help but notice the beauty of some of the young Filipina women.

He could only wonder where the war was. Four days later, he found out.

The army hospital he was assigned to was overflowing with wounded American soldiers and many more were battling typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. Men were dying every day, sometimes a hundred or more each week. He quickly lost his boyhood illusions of glory and high adventure, and his noble goal of saving lives was put to a stern test.

The Philippine insurrection came to an end in 1902, after Aguinaldo was captured during an attack on his headquarters north of Manila. He reluctantly signed an oath of allegiance to the United States, and President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over.