Angels of the Underground

Angels of the Underground
Author: Theresa Kaminski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 019992824X

When the Japanese began their brutal occupation of the Philippines in early 1942, 76,000 ill and starving Filipinos and many Americans were left to defend Bataan, Manila, and surrounding islands. During the three violent years of occupation that followed, Allied sympathizers smuggled suppliesand information to guerilla fighters and prisoner camps around the country. Theresa Kaminski's Angels of the Underground tells the story of two such members of this lesser-known resistance movement - American women known only as Miss U and High Pockets. Incredibly adept at skirting occupationauthorities to support the Allied effort, the very nature of their clandestine wartime work meant that the truth behind their dangerous activities had to be obscured as long as the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Were their identities revealed, they would be arrested, tortured, and executed.Throughout the war, Miss U and High Pockets remained hidden behind a veil of deceit and subterfuge.Angels of the Underground offers the compelling tale of two ordinary American women propelled by extraordinary circumstances into acts of heroism. Married to servicemen, Peggy Utinsky and Claire Phillips, the women behind Miss U and High Pockets, hoped that their clandestine efforts would reunitethem with their husbands. Both men died at the hands of the Japanese, but Utinsky and Phillips stayed on through the occupation, working in hospitals, moving supplies, and building their networks. Utinsky narrowly survived a month of torture at Fort Santiago, then joined John Boone's guerilla bandand became a brevet second lieutenant before returning to the Red Cross until the end of the war. Phillips barely escaped execution in 1943, and was sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp, where she remained until February 1945.Angels of the Underground illuminates the complex political dimensions of the occupied Philippines and its importance to the war effort in the Pacific. Kaminski's narrative sheds light on the Japanese-occupied city of Manila; the Bataan Death March and subsequent incarceration of American militaryprisoners in camps O'Donnell and Cabanatuan under horrific conditions; and the formation of guerrilla units in the mountains of Luzon.Angels of the Underground makes a significant contribution to the work on women's wartime experiences. Through the lens of Utinksy and Phillips, who never wavered in their belief that it was their duty as patriotic American women to aid the Allied cause, Kaminksi highlights how women have alwaysbeen active participants in war, whether or not they wear a military uniform. An impressive work of scholarship grounded in archival research and personal interviews, this is also a stunning story of courage and heroism in wartime.

MacArthur's Spies

MacArthur's Spies
Author: Peter Eisner
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0143128841

"MacArthur's Spies reads like Casablanca set in the Pacific, filled with brave and daring characters caught up in the intrigue of war—and the best part is that it's all true!" —Tom Maier, author of Masters of Sex A thrilling story of espionage, daring and deception set in the exotic landscape of occupied Manila during World War II. On January 2, 1942, Japanese troops marched into Manila unopposed by U.S. forces. Manila was a strategic port, a romantic American outpost and a jewel of a city. Tokyo saw its conquest of the Philippines as the key in its plan to control all of Asia, including Australia. Thousands of soldiers surrendered and were sent on the notorious eighty-mile Bataan Death March. But thousands of other Filipinos and Americans refused to surrender and hid in the Luzon hills above Bataan and Manila. MacArthur's Spies is the story of three of them, and how they successfully foiled the Japanese for more than two years, sabotaging Japanese efforts and preparing the way for MacArthur’s return. From a jungle hideout, Colonel John Boone, an enlisted American soldier, led an insurgent force of Filipino fighters who infiltrated Manila as workers and servants to stage demolitions and attacks. “Chick” Parsons, an American businessman, polo player, and expatriate in Manila, was also a U.S. Navy intelligence officer. He escaped in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat, and returned as MacArthur’s spymaster, coordinating the guerrilla efforts with the planned Allied invasion. And, finally, there was Claire Phillips, an itinerant American torch singer with many names and almost as many husbands. Her nightclub in Manila served as a cover for supplying food to Americans in the hills and to thousands of prisoners of war. She and the men and women who worked with her gathered information from the collaborating Filipino businessmen; the homesick, English-speaking Japanese officers; and the spies who mingled in the crowd. Readers of Alan Furst and Ben Macintyre—and anyone who loves Casablanca—will relish this true tale of heroism when it counted the most.

Imagining Manila

Imagining Manila
Author: Tom Sykes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755602889

The city of Manila is uniquely significant to Philippine, Southeast Asian and world history. It played a key role in the rise of Western colonial mercantilism in Asia, the extinction of the Spanish Empire and the ascendancy of the USA to global imperial hegemony, amongst other events. This book examines British and American writing on the city, situating these representations within scholarship on empire, orientalism and US, Asian and European political history. Through analysis of novels, memoirs, travelogues and journalism written about Manila by Westerners since the early eighteenth century, Tom Sykes builds a picture of Western attitudes towards the city and the wider Philippines, and the mechanics by which these came to dominate the discourse. This study uncovers to what extent Western literary tropes and representational models have informed understandings of the Philippines, in the West and elsewhere, and the types of counter-narrative which have emerged in the Philippines in response to them.

Escape to Manila

Escape to Manila
Author: Frank Ephraim
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252091116

A harrowing account of Jewish refugees in the Philippines With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s more than a thousand European Jews sought refuge in the Philippines, joining the small Jewish population of Manila. When the Japanese invaded the islands in 1941, the peaceful existence of the barely settled Jews filled with the kinds of uncertainties and oppression they thought they had left behind. In this book Frank Ephraim, who fled to Manila with his parents, gathers the testimonies of thirty-six refugees, who describe the difficult journey to Manila, the lives they built there upon their arrival, and the events surrounding the Japanese invasion. Combining these accounts with historical and archival records, Manila newspapers, and U.S. government documents, Ephraim constructs a detailed account of this little-known chapter of world history.

The Liberation of Manila

The Liberation of Manila
Author: John A. Del Gallego
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476635978

During the early months of World War II, Winston Churchill maneuvered to get the U.S. involved in the war to save his country from German invasion. Roosevelt, scheming to lure Hitler into a casus belli, ensnared Japan instead, resulting in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War that followed. When the doomed U.S. garrison in the Philippines soon capitulated to the Japanese, the atrocities inflicted on the Filipino and American units that surrendered were portents for the inhabitants of Manila. The history chronicles the 1945 recapture of Manila largely from the perspective of the civilian population, which suffered horrific brutality from the Japanese, followed by destruction and heavy loss of life during the American assault. Individual stories are included of citizens caught in the crossfire between the tenacious Japanese defenders and American troops determined to seize the capital city while minimizing their own casualties, regardless of the cost in civilian lives. More than 175 photographs document the events described.

Women Heroes of World War II—the Pacific Theater

Women Heroes of World War II—the Pacific Theater
Author: Kathryn J. Atwood
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 161373171X

A Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People 2017 Glamorous American singer Claire Phillips opened a nightclub in manila, using the earnings to secretly feed starving American POWs. She also began working as a spy, chatting up Japanese military men and passing their secrets along to local guerrilla resistance fighters. Australian Army nurse Vivian Bullwinkel, stationed in Singapore, then shipwrecked in the the Dutch East Indies, became the sole survivor of a horrible massacre by Japanese soliders. She hid for days, tending to a seriously wounded British soldier while wounded herself. Humanitarian Elizabeth Choy lived the rest of her life hating war, though not her tormentors, after enduring six months of starvation and torture by the Japanese military police. In these pages, readers will meet these and other courageous women and girls who risked their lives through their involvement in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. Fifteen suspense-filled stories unfold across China, Japan, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, providing an inspiring reminder of womens' and girls' refusal to sit on the sidelines around the world and throughout history. These women—whose stories span 1932 to 1945, the last year of the war—served in dangerous roles as spies, medics, journalists, resisters, and saboteurs. Seven of them were captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, enduring brutal conditions. Author Kathryn J. Atwood provides appropriate context and framing for teens 14 and up to grapple with these harsh realities of war. Discussion questions and a guide for further study assist readers and educators in learning about this important and often neglected period of history.

A Spy Among Us

A Spy Among Us
Author: Dorothy Fleming
Publisher: Brandylane Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 188391180X

Major Jake (Mac) McCord, a brilliant intelligence officer commissioned by the United States Army in 1941 to capture a serial killer who has been terrorizing the small archipelago. Mac soon discovers that the killer is in fact the notorious Nazi Spy Boris Meissner, who holds a deeprooted grudge against Mac.

Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence

Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence
Author: Nigel West
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2007-11-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0810864215

In the years immediately following World War II, information was disclosed about what has been termed the shadow war of the existence of hitherto secret agencies. In Germany it was the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst; in Britain it was MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE); in the United States it was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); in Japan it was the Kempet'ai; and in Italy the Servicio di Informazione Militare (SIM). Sixty years after World War II secrets are still being revealed about the covert activities that took place. Many countries had secret agencies maintaining covert operations, but even ostensibly neutral countries also conducted secret operations. Changes in American, British, and even Soviet official attitudes to declassification in the 1980s allowed thousands of secret documents to be made available for public examination, and the result was extensive revisionism of the conventional histories of the conflict, which previously had excluded references to secret intelligence sources. The Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence tells the emerging history of the intelligence world during World War II. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the secret agencies, operations, and events. The world of double agents, spies, and moles during WWII is explained in the most comprehensive reference currently available.

World War II Spies

World War II Spies
Author: Sean Price
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2014
Genre: Espionage
ISBN: 1476535922

"Describes the activities of famous spies of World War II"--

The Role of Female Spies in World War II

The Role of Female Spies in World War II
Author: Hallie Murray
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2019-12-15
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1502655519

Although spying has always been a part of warfare, espionage didn't become an official part of American war efforts until World War II. The United States government established the Office of Strategic Services, which employed spies, translators, map readers, and code breakers to help gather information. Many of these roles were filled by women. This compelling book tells the riveting stories of six of these lady spies, including singer Josephine Baker, who smuggled military secrets on her sheet music; model and countess Aline Griffith; and the dangerously effective "Limping Lady," Virginia Hall.