The Meaning of a Date

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For most people around the world, August 6 marks the day everything changed. To hasten the end of the war in the Pacific, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

One of the first accounts I read was John Hersey’s now classic piece, published in The New Yorker in 1946. Part of the brilliance of that article was Hersey’s ability to render this catastrophic event in very personal terms. For Hersey, it was the people who mattered.

By the time “Hiroshima” appeared in the magazine, World War II had been over for a year. Survivors worldwide were in various stages of rebuilding. Part of that meant grappling with the realities of living in an atomic age. Human beings now possessed extraordinary destructive power. Every year on August 6, people commemorate Hiroshima and contemplate what led to the decision to use atomic weapons.

The end of World War II also left people grappling with personal issues. Peggy Utinsky, a nurse, spent the war years trapped in the Philippines under an enemy occupation. After the surrender of American and Filipino forces to the Japanese in the spring of 1942, Peggy had one goal: the find her husband Jack, one of the surrendered.

Now labeled an enemy alien in Japanese-occupied Manila, Peggy arranged for fake identity papers and joined a Red Cross medical mission to the Bataan peninsula. Amidst the smoldering ruins of that battle, she treated wounded and sick Filipino citizens, always asking after Jack.

When Peggy learned that the POWs had been put into Camp O’Donnell, she helped set up an underground supply network to make sure the men received the food and medicine they needed. She assumed Jack was there, but couldn’t get confirmation.

When the Japanese transferred the POWs to Cabanatuan, Peggy shifted her operation there. At the end of December 1942, one of her associates, Naomi Flores, made contact with one of the American prisoners working in the camp’s vegetable garden, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Mack. Naomi asked him to find out where Jack Utinsky was, and Mack wrote out a message for Peggy:

“Your husband died here on August 6, 1942. You will be told he died of tuberculosis. That is not true. The men say that he actually died of starvation.”

For the rest of her life, August 6 would have a special, personal heartbreaking meaning for Peggy Utinsky. Every year when she marked the anniversary of her husband’s death, the rest of the world talked about Hiroshima. For Peggy, these two events would always be linked.

In late 1942, news of Jack’s death had a profound effect on Peggy. She still had the rest of the war ahead of her. She had to figure out how to survive it. The rest of her story can be found in Angels of the Underground.

 

The Day Before

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I’ve been on vacation. I try not to work during this time, but trying isn’t quite doing. I had a book review to write and submit by August 1. It was tough, especially since that deadline competed with views like this:

Sturgeon Bay

In the midst of this tranquility, I realized today is August 5. I wonder what that day was like in 1945. By the next day, the world had changed. More on that tomorrow.

 

Remembering the Seneca Falls Convention

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This week, while lots of people are glued to the proceedings of a very different convention, my thoughts are on one that took place in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19-20, 1848.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two white women who had been involved with the abolitionist movement, planned the convention–the first of its kind to deal exclusively with women’s rights issues–on short notice and weren’t sure how many people would show up.

To guide the discussion at the convention, Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence.

She asserted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” However, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” Cady Stanton then listed these injuries and usurpations, which included the system of coverture which denied married women standing as individuals before the law, a sexual double standard, and barriers to education and jobs.

The women and men who assembled at Seneca Falls read the Declaration and debated it. One of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s central concerns, women’s voting rights, would not be achieved until 1920.

The Seneca Falls Convention was daring in its insistence on focusing on issues of gender. It couldn’t solve all of the problems women faced; it couldn’t completely grasp how race, class, and sexuality affected women’s lives. But it provided a starting point, an important step in any movement.

Celebrating the 4th of July During an Enemy Occupation

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On January 5, 1942, days after invading Japanese troops occupied the Philippine capital of Manila, Josephine Waldo and her husband Bill, a Goodyear employee, along with other Allied nationals living in the Michel Apartments, were herded into army trucks and delivered to Rizal Stadium for registration. From there, they were transferred to the campus of Santo Tomas University, which served as an internment camp for Allied nationals for the duration of the enemy occupation.

Santo Tomas

Despite their circumstances, the American prisoners of the Japanese expressed national pride by celebrating holidays, especially the 4th of July. They risked raising the ire of the Japanese guards, but couldn’t stop themselves from marking the occasion.

On July 4, 1942, Josephine Waldo wrote in her diary, “Hurrah for the Stars and Stripes! It seems rather strange to be celebrating the 4th in a concentration camp, but it takes more than that to down the good old American spirit.” To celebrate, she and Bill ate ice cream and chocolate cake with friends, listened to firecrackers going off, and admired fellow internees’ red, white, and blue outfits. The day was topped off with a lecture about Thomas Jefferson and a group sing of “America the Beautiful.”

In 1943, Claire Phillips, an American woman who evaded internment by concocting a false nationality, marked the holiday by launching “Operation Hamburger.” She and some other Manila women had been smuggling food and supplies to Allied military prisoners held at the Park Avenue School for use as forced labor.

Claire and the women of “Operation Hamburger” sliced fifty loaves of rice bread and fried up meat patties to make hamburger sandwiches. They arranged with a local shop owner to slip the hamburgers to the men as they marched past. Nothing could be more American, Claire reasoned, than eating a hamburger on the 4th of July.

On July 4, 1944, the last 4th of internment, Ethel Thomas Herold, interned with her family in Baguio, a few hours north of Luzon, noted in her diary that she “hardly noticed” the day. The war had been going badly for the Japanese, who took their frustrations out on the prisoners. Food became scarce; many of the internees would soon start to exhibit signs of starvation. No one had enough supplies for a special meal or celebration on the 4th.

Still, Ethel described how some of the internees came to her room to look at and touch an American flag that she and some of the other women had been working on. “We women have slowly and lovingly button holed every star and sewed and resewed the seams just to be holding the flag. Whatever becomes of this flag, it serves its purpose in here, by just being secretly looked at and dearly cherished.” Both Ethel and her flag survived the war.

In occupied Manila, on that same 4th of July, Gladys Savary wrote about the day in her diary: “The Glorious Fourth–and I don’t dare hang out the American flag, but I have been admiring it all day, hung up in the bathroom.”

As the wife of a French citizen, American Gladys was exempted from internment, and she spent a lot of her time finding ways to help those inside Santo Tomas. “Can’t be much of a celebration, with nearly all Americans locked up. I am sure they are happy in the camp, what with the good news in the air. I’ve had several smuggled notes from camp and while the morale is good, they are getting increasingly hungry.”

Good morale could only do so much, though. These Americans would wait another seven months for liberation.

 

 

 

The Importance of Book Reviews

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Book reviews are important. They help a book find an audience. They reach more people in more places than anything else.

Lately I’ve been reaching out individually to people I know, asking them to read Angels of the Underground and leave a review on Amazon. For anyone who hesitates to write a review because they’ve never written one before or think they aren’t qualified to do so, consider it a way to spread the word about a book you love, like, and/or find fascinating.

Here’s a handy visual that outlines how to write a review and why it’s important:

book reviewing