Margaret Utinsky
Margaret Elizabeth Doolin Utinsky (August 26, 1900 – August 30, 1970) was an American nurse who worked with the Filipino resistance movement to provide medicine, food, and other items to aid Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines during World War II.
Margaret was born in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up on a wheat farm in Canada.[1] In 1919, she married John Rowley. He died the following year, leaving her with an infant son, Charles.
On a sojourn to the Philippines in the late 1920s, Margaret met and fell in love with John "Jack" Utinsky, a former Army captain who worked as a civil engineer for the U.S. government. They married in 1934.[2] Margaret and Jack settled into life in Manila.
As the likelihood of a Japanese attack grew in the Far East, the U.S. military ordered all American wives back to the United States. Unwilling to part from her husband, Margaret refused to obey the order and took an apartment in Manila while Jack went to work on Bataan. In December 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. When Japanese troops occupied Manila on January 2, 1942, Margaret hid in her apartment rather than go into internment. She wrote in her book, "To go into an internment camp seemed like the sensible thing to do, but for the life of me I could not see what use I would be to myself or to anyone else cooped up there.... For from the moment the inconceivable thing happened and the Japanese arrived, there was just on thought in my mind—to find Jack."[3]
Undiscovered after ten weeks in hiding, Margaret ventured out and sought help from the priests at Malate Convent. Through various contacts, she obtained false papers, secured a position with the Red Cross, and went to Bataan to search for her husband.[4]
As cover, she created the identity of Rosena Utinsky, a Lithuanian nurse - Lithuania then being a nonbelligerent country under armed occupation by Nazi Germany. Traveling with a Filipino Red Cross medical team, she was shocked by the carnage of the Bataan Death March (the brutal forced march of tens of thousands of U.S. and Filipino soldiers after their surrender to the Japanese army on Bataan). She resolved to do all she could to help the POWs that still lived. Beginning with small actions, she soon built a clandestine resistance network that provided food, money, and medicine such as quinine to the thousands of POWs at Camp O'Donnell, and later at the Cabanatuan prison camp. After she learned that her husband had died in the prison camp, she redoubled her efforts to save as many men as possible.[5] Her code name was "Miss U," which is also the title of her 1948 book, the cover of which can be seen at the Medal of Freedom website.
Suspected of helping prisoners, the Japanese arrested her, held her at Fort Santiago prison, and eventually released her, feverish and battered. She spent six weeks recovering from injuries and gangrene at a Manila hospital. Soon afterwards, she escaped to Bataan and served as a nurse with the guerrilla forces, moving from camp to camp in the mountains until liberation in February 1945.[6]
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her actions.
Actress Connie Nielsen portrayed an idealized version of Margaret Utinsky in the 2005 film, The Great Raid, which is based on the 1945 raid to free POWs at Cabanatuan prison camp.
Notes
References
- Regis, Margaret. When Our Mothers Went to War: An Illustrated History of Women in World War II. Seattle: NavPublishing, LLC, 2008. ISBN 978-1-879932-05-0
- Utinsky, Margaret. "Miss U." San Antonio, Texas: The Naylor Company, 1948
External links
- Medal of Freedom Recipient "Margaret Elizabeth Utinsky"
- findagrave.com bio and full name Margaret Elizabeth Doolin Utinsky
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