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- Description:
- Edna Miller talks about her work as a teacher in the city of Baguio, Philippines beginning in August 1941 and being interned as a prisoner of war in a camp in the mountains outside of Manila after the Japanese invasion. Miller discusses the conditions in the camp, the prisoner's diet, holding makeshift church services, the behavior of the Japanese guards and her fellow prisoners. After the camp was liberated in 1944, Miller says that she decided to stay in the Philippines and joined the American Red Cross and then after the war ended, took a job with the U.S. Army teaching soldiers until 1947 when she left Manila for the states. Miller, who later taught in Army schools in occupied Japan, says that she has no regrets about her overseas experiences, despite the hardships and that her greatest thrill was meeting General Douglas MacArthur when her POW camp was liberated. Miller is interviewed by Evelyn McHiggins.
- Date Issued:
- 1984-06-30T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project
- Description:
- In a poignant oral history interview, American Red Cross worker Ruth Wysor talks about her adventures while serving in the Philippines during World War II and in American occupied Japan after the war, including being held prisoner in a Japanese prison camp and adopting and raising a war orphan. Returning to the Philippines with General Douglas MacArthur and the American Army, Wysor says that she was separated from U.S. forces, driven into the countryside and wounded and captured by the Japanese. She describes being held in the infamous Santo Tomas Internment Camp, subsisting on a diet of rice alone and receiving no medical attention. The camp was finally liberated after three months and she says that her untreated knee wound continues to trouble her forty years later. After the war, Wysor says that she was sent to Kamakura to help set up the first Red Cross club in Japan and that her unit befriended a group of destitute missionary sisters who lived nearby and gave them food, supplies and medical care. Wysor says that the nuns also cared for orphans and that she became godmother to a little girl, cared for her when she became ill and finally applied to adopt her. With the help of General MacArthur himself, Wysor says that she was finally able to return to the United States with her new daughter and became the first single woman in the state of Ohio to be allowed to legally adopt a child. Wysor says that her adopted daughter thrived in the U.S. and has gone on to be a successful adult. Recorded at the AOA Convention held in San Antonio, TX. Wysor is interviewed by Alf Thompson and Betty Thompson.
- Date Issued:
- 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
- Data Provider:
- Michigan State University. Libraries
- Collection:
- Women's Overseas Service League Oral History Project