Guerrilla Daughter

Virginia Hansen Holmes

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781612776064
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

The experiences of an American family in the Philippines during World War II

Just nine days before her seventh birthday, Virginia Hansen Holmes heard about the attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor and wondered if this was going to change her life. She lived on the Philippine Island of Mindanao with her two teenage brothers, eleven-year-old sister, mother, and father, an official with the East Mindanao Mining Company.

Guerrilla Daughter is a memoir of this family's extraordinary struggle to survive the Japanese occupation of Mindanao from the spring of 1942 until the end of the war in September 1945. The men in the family fought as guerrilla soldiers in the island's resistance movement, while Holmes, her mother, and her older sister were left to their own resources to evade the Japanese, who had been given orders to execute Americans. The Hansen women, faced with immediate death if found and suffering from hunger, disease, and barely tolerable living conditions, hid out in the Philippine jungle and remote villages to remain just ahead of the growing Japanese presence and avoid capture.

Using original documents and papers belonging to her father, as well as her own vivid recollections and the reminiscences of her siblings, Virginia Hansen Holmes presents this gripping and compelling account of extraordinary survival.

ONE

The Gathering Clouds of War

Most Americans born in the 1930s and earlier will never forget the shock and horror of December 7, 1941, that day of infamy. For Charles and Trinity Hansen and their children—Rudyard, Henry, Charlotte, and Virginia—who were living on the island of Mindanao in the southern part of the Philippines, it was already Monday, December 8; in fact, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred at approximately 2:00 A.M. Manila time. Japanese bombers would not hit Luzon until midday on the 8th. However, at 6:30 A.M., Japanese Navy dive-bombers from the aircraft carrier Ryujo off Mindanao did attack the USS Preston, a U.S. Navy seaplane tender, and two patrol bomber seaplanes (PBY) in the harbor of Davao.

We were getting ready for our weekly trip back to boarding school after a most enjoyable weekend, the highlight of which was a joint birthday party celebrating my brothers’ birthdays—Rudy’s sixteenth and Hank’s fifteenth. It was shortly after 7:00 A.M. when Dad came bounding up the steps to our house from his office at the machine shop of the East Mindanao Mining Company. He was very agitated and asked if we had been listening to the news on the radio, then announced, loudly: “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor. We’re at war!”

The implication of Dad’s words did not make much of an impression on me. I was not quite seven years old and could not fully comprehend the word “war.” However, I could sense from Dad’s demeanor that something bad must have happened. For one thing, he seemed to be scolding Mom for not monitoring the news, and I had never heard him speak to Mom in such a sharp tone of voice. True, Dad had a quick temper and I had heard him yell at my brothers when they misbehaved, but to my knowledge he had never, ever raised his voice toward Mom. I also remember that we were running late on that particular Monday morning, probably because of the birthday festivities, which had included a picnic on the beach near Placer on Saturday and a nice dinner followed by multiple servings of birthday cake on Sunday evening.

Because of that fateful morning’s events, life would not be the same for us over the next four years. We did not go to school that day and, though we did not know it then, would not do so again until late 1945.

The reality of the situation that we now found ourselves in prompts me to provide the reader with some background on the Hansen family and how fate brought us to be a part of this war experience in the southern part of the Philippines. My father, Charles Hansen, was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1890 and grew up on a nearby farm. He attended local schools and worked his way through college, studying mechanical engineering at Syracuse University. After a series of jobs in different parts of the country he ended up back in New York, where he worked as a toolmaker at the Watertown Arsenal. In the summer of 1919 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. After his basic training, he was sent to Siberia as a member of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), numbering almost ten thousand, ordered there by President Wilson in fall 1918. Wilson took this action in conjunction with the other Allied powers, with two main purposes. It sought first to save the Czech Legion, which was transiting from western Russia to Vladivostok. This legion was largely composed of prisoners of war who had been captured on the eastern front. They were making their way eastward, along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok, with the objective of repatriation back to Czechoslovakia. The AEF’s second purpose was to maintain law and order along the Trans-Siberian Railroad following the 1917 Russian Revolution. During his service in Siberia Dad joined the 27th Infantry Regiment—which was deployed to Vladivostok from Fort William McKinley, near Manila—and returned with the regiment to the Philippines in April 1920. After completing his service obligation in 1922, he joined the army’s Manila Arsenal as a foreman and instructor. During this period he received a commission as captain in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Upon arriving in Manila, Dad quickly recognized the many opportunities for Americans in the Philippines. This island nation had come under U.S. control as a result of the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Within weeks, U.S. troops were in charge of the archipelago. Initially, Congress was cool toward annexation but narrowly voted to go along with it. Even so, there was a growing number of Filipinos opposing this U.S. action. Eventually the armed actions by the U.S. Army brought the insurrection under control and the United States found itself preparing the country for nationhood.

William Howard Taft was the first civilian governor of the Philippines, arriving in 1900. He launched economic and education programs that would have lasting effects on the country. Congress’s liberal import-export laws gave U.S. businesses a free hand with goods imported into the country while Philippine corporations had export trade to the United States free of tariff. As American interests flourished in the islands, the Philippines did indeed become the “Pearl of the Orient.” On the political side, the United States was gradually giving the Filipinos greater control over their future.

While U.S. rule in the Philippines was unspecific regarding the future, the U.S. Congress became increasingly interested in granting the Philippines self-rule, as demonstrated by the second Philippine Organic Act, U.S. Congress, 1916. While not fixing a date for independence, it implied that the long-range goal of the U.S. government was to grant Philippine independence when a stable government came into being. It established a framework for representative government, including a House and a Senate. However, an American governor general still wielded executive power over the country.¹ The United States granted the Philippines commonwealth status in 1935, with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The act also contained provisions for a president and a definite independence date ten years hence.²

With its vast resources in lumber and mining, and U.S. corporate interest in exploiting these for export, the Philippines was a dream come true for an engineer. Dad’s experience in working with the two U.S. military arsenals and his university training in engineering immediately qualified him for many positions in the growing and expanding Philippine economy. His specific technical skills would become invaluable to the many American entrepreneurs arriving in the Philippines during the 1920s.

Not long after his arrival in Manila, Dad met my mother, Trinity Harris, through mutual friends. Mom was the only child of William Harris, a U.S. Army Spanish-American War veteran who opted to remain in the Philippines, and Maria Aguilar, a member of one of numerous families of Spanish descent that had declined to be repatriated to Spain at the conclusion of that conflict. For the Aguilar family, the outcome of the war was quite dramatic. The American occupation of the Philippines ended 350 years of Spanish rule and drastically altered the privileged status of countless Spanish families that had prospered in that island nation for many generations. The Aguilar family did not approve of my grandmother’s marriage to an American—they still considered America “the enemy”—and this caused a rift in her relationship with her family. Sadly, both of my grandparents died when Mom was quite young, and she became the ward of her mother’s sister.

My mother had remarked to us that her independent, headstrong nature strained her relationship with her aunt and that as a consequence, she spent many years as a boarding student at a convent school in Manila run by Belgian nuns. She felt more at home in the convent than at her aunt’s house—her fellow boarders were her real family. After Saturday morning class, the girls were allowed to go home for the afternoon or the whole weekend. Parents came to pick up the young ones, but those sixteen and older were allowed to make their way home on their own. Mom preferred to spend her free time with her friends at their homes, and during one of these visits she met Dad, the friend of a friend of the family. He was immediately attracted to her, and she was flattered that this handsome man was interested in her—not yet seventeen, this was her first romance.

After a brief courtship, Mom and Dad became engaged, and on April 12, 1921, they were married in the Iglesia Cristiana Gloriosa, a Protestant church in the Pasay section of Manila. Mom was Catholic but agreed to marry in the Protestant church because the pastor did not know the Aguilar family and had no reason to question her age.

Fortunately, despite her youth, the education and training she had received from the nuns would prepare her well for the future she had chosen. As far as her aunt was concerned, however, Mom’s marriage was “history repeating itself,” and the damage to their relationship became irreparable.

Dad was also orphaned at an early age and had lost contact with relatives in Syracuse. So when they started married life, Mom and Dad literally had only each other. Their commitment to their marriage, however, helped forge a strong partnership, which held as one of its goals achieving financial stability. Ever mindful of the financial difficulties his family had experienced at the turn of the century, Dad was determined that his own family would be raised in a secure and comfortable environment.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Dad’s engineering background afforded him employment opportunities in the mining and lumber sectors, both in the field and in Manila. Life then, particularly in Manila, was busy and exciting, though touched with sadness and loss. Mom and Dad’s first baby, Alice, survived only hours after birth. Their second child, Charlie, born in 1923, died at age two of complications from diphtheria. Then three more baby boys arrived in quick succession: Edward in November 1924 and Rudyard and Henry in December 1925 and 1926, respectively. Another son, Robert, was born in 1928 but died soon after birth.

Mom matured and adapted well to her role as wife, mother, and active member of the American community. She was president of the Daughters of American Veterans and served on the high commissioner’s committee for organizing the observance of American public holidays. And in the midst of this activity, my sister Charlotte joined the family in 1930. When she was a toddler a family friend named “Pop” Henderson, who owned the Independent Shoe Shop—renowned in the Philippines for its custom-fitted leather shoes and boots—commented that Charlotte was “as sweet as peaches and cream.” From then on she was “Peach” to family and close friends. I should mention here that since my brothers were so close in age, they were referred to as “the boys.” After my arrival in December 1934, Peach and I became “the girls.”

As Peach grew older she tried hard to keep up with her brothers, but the differences in age and size made it difficult. They dubbed her “Skinny” and teased her mercilessly. Naturally she reported their behavior to Mom, who invariably gave them a stern talking-to. This resulted in taunts of “Skinny squealed! Skinny squealed!” from the boys, and the cycle would repeat itself. In time, however, Peach learned to gain acceptance without Mom’s intervention, and the boys relented and allowed her to participate in some of their activities.

The boys attended Bordner School in Manila, where they forged friendships with the children of friends and neighbors of my parents and enjoyed endless after-school and weekend activities. When Peach reached school age she attended the American Central School, smaller and located closer to our home. Attending a different school gave Peach the opportunity to make new friends and become less dependent on her brothers for companionship.

The growing Hansen family prompted my father to pursue more lucrative job opportunities, thus we moved to the southern part of the Philippines in 1937, when he accepted a managerial position with a sawmill near Iligan, Lanao. This was our introduction to the island of Mindanao, where living conditions were quite different than in metropolitan Manila. The sawmill was located in the interior, along a river. Our home was large and airy, built several feet above the ground for the dual purpose of allowing maximum ventilation and protection from rainy-season floods. Located next to the sawmill was a Moro village. The Moros (also called Mohammedans in those days) were Muslims who migrated to the southern part of the Philippines from Borneo and Malaya. They retained their religion, culture, and customs—resisting the strong wave of Christianization that took place after Spanish colonization of the islands. Peach remembers walking through the Moro village and admiring their colorful attire and shiny brass jewelry and decorative household items. The women were openly friendly, but the children hovered in the background, too shy to come forward.

The sawmill’s location made it necessary for my siblings to attend boarding school. The best school for boys in the area was the Ateneo de Cagayan, a major Jesuit school founded by Bishop James Hayes. In the early 1930s the faculty of the college was young—all under forty—and chiefly composed of American Jesuits, with some Filipino priests and seminarians. Though still rather small in 1937, it grew from a hundred boys and one building to a student body of just under a thousand and five concrete buildings by 1941. Father Edward Haggerty (the future unofficial chaplain of the guerrillas on Mindanao) was rector. Attending a Catholic all-boys school was a new experience for my brothers, but they had no trouble making the adjustment.

Also located in Cagayan was Lourdes Academy, an excellent Catholic day/ boarding school for girls. Peach was enrolled there but was not happy about being a boarder—she was not quite eight years old and, unlike her brothers, did not have any siblings to keep her company at school. She was lonely and homesick. She looked forward to brief glimpses of her brothers on Sunday mornings, when the students of both schools, in full uniform, attended High Mass at the huge cathedral. Hank and Peach recall the ritual of the Ateneo boys walking toward the cathedral in a single line and, as they passed the Lourdes campus, the girls formed a similar line and walked with them to the cathedral and settled into their designated pews—Ateneo students on the right side, Lourdes students on the left. Once a month, Mom picked up the kids and took them home to Iligan for a long weekend. On occasion Ed, Rudy, and Hank made the trip home by themselves using the local bus service, but it was a long and bumpy ride, which took the better part of a day. The bus was open on both sides with wooden benchlike seats for the passengers, while extra bundles and other cargo were lashed to the roof. Unfortunately for Peach, Mom and the nuns were in agreement that she should not be permitted to accompany the boys on these trips, so she had to content herself with monthly visits home.

Although Dad was Protestant, the Hansen children had all been baptized Catholic. For some reason, however, the boys had not yet received the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion. Most of the schools in Manila were Catholic institutions, with religious instruction as part of the curriculum; Bordner, a private secular school, did not offer any religious education. Now that the boys were attending a Jesuit school, however, immediate attention was given to the matter of their religious education. Peach was also receiving instruction at school, and in 1938 all four of my siblings received their First Holy Communion in St. Augustine Church.

Hank recalled very vividly an incident at Ateneo that brought him to the attention of Father Haggerty. All boarding students had assigned duties; some served at the early morning Mass; others worked in the school’s dining hall. Hank was to bring fresh eggs from the chicken house to the kitchen each morning. One of the college brothers had a pet baboon that he kept in a wire cage in the chicken house. Actually, it was a mean-tempered beast that was friendly to its master but had no tolerance for the young students that invaded its territory. Every morning when Hank entered the enclosure, the animal jumped up and down, shaking its cage and making all sorts of grunting noises. This daily performance began to wear on Hank’s nerves, so one morning he decided to get back at it. Seeing a stick on the floor, he picked it up and went over to the cage, ran the stick along the bars of the cage and then poked the baboon. Suddenly, it grabbed the stick and retaliated. Hank realized that since the stick was in the cage he would be blamed for disturbing the animal. He thrust some fruit, which he’d found in the enclosure, into the cage to distract the baboon. While it was busy, Hank opened the cage door and reached for the stick. Just then the baboon whirled around and grabbed Hank’s arm and pulled him into the cage and gave his arms and body major bites, scratches, and abrasions. Hank’s injuries were so serious that he was in the hospital for almost two weeks. When he returned to the college he was summoned to Father Haggerty’s office for a tongue-lashing that he never forgot.

My father loved the lumber business, but he and Mom soon realized that the school arrangement was less than ideal. They were particularly concerned about Peach’s situation, and they decided that a change was necessary. (Mom’s own memories of her lonely years in boarding school may have influenced them.) In late 1938 my father accepted a position as plant superintendent with the East Mindanao Mining Company, a gold-mining enterprise expanding its operations. At this juncture the company employed approximately eight hundred personnel. The mine was located near Tinabingan, south of the port of Surigao on the northeastern tip of Mindanao.³ By this time, the Hansen boys were almost fourteen, thirteen, and twelve; Peach was eight; and I was almost four. One important advantage of the new job location was its proximity to Surigao and San Nicolas School, a large Catholic institution run by Dutch Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.⁴

Dad went on ahead to Surigao to start his new job and supervise the renovation of a home for us at the mine site, and we stayed in a hotel in Cagayan until the end of the school year. My earliest memories are connected to this hotel, set back from a well-traveled, dusty road. Typical of the roads of that era, it was built up higher than the surrounding terrain, with a ditch on either side. To reach the front entrance to the hotel, one had to cross a footbridge over the ditch, then follow a path through the front garden to a set of five or six steps that led up to a large open porch. This lounge area was furnished with rattan sofas with loose cushions and square tables with woven white rattan chairs. Beyond was the lobby, at the end of which were steps that led down to the rear garden, and the bedroom wing extended from the lobby. Every evening two young men in white uniforms sprayed the whole area with insecticide to keep away mosquitoes and other pests. There was no escaping the strong smell as they pumped away on hand-held repellent guns. Although the bedrooms were also sprayed—the odor still lingered at bedtime—each bed had a white mosquito net attached to the bedposts that had to be tucked in tightly under the mattress to keep any pesky survivors at bay. A mosquito could slip in through the tiniest opening; the following morning it would be found clinging to the net, engorged with blood and too logy to fly. We had to resist the urge to squash the pest because that invariably resulted in an ugly red stain on the net or the bed sheet—best to have...