Full honors for Fil-Am WWII vet who died at 101
This June 16, 2016 photo provided by the United States Coast Guard shows Florence Ebersole Smith Finch. Finch, who joined the U.S. Coast Guard after surviving months of torture by the Japanese for helping Filipino guerrillas during World War II, will be buried with full military honors on Saturday, April 29, 2017, in Ithaca, N.Y. She died in December 2016 at age 101. (United States Coast Guard via AP)
ALBANY, NEW YORK — Held captive by the Japanese during World War II, Florence Ebersole Smith Finch was tortured and forced to curl up in a 2-foot-by-4-foot box.
She endured by repeatedly telling herself: “I will survive.”
“And my goodness, she did,” said her daughter, Betty Murphy, of Ithaca, New York, where Finch, a US Coast Guard veteran, will be buried on Saturday (Friday in Manila) with full military honors. She died Dec. 8 at age 101.
The burial ceremony will be a fitting tribute for the Philippines-born American who joined the US Coast Guard in the war’s final weeks after enduring months of cruelty at the hands of the Japanese.
After the war, Finch was awarded the Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.
Finch was born in the Philippines in 1915 to an American military officer and his Filipino wife. According the Coast Guard, Finch was working as a secretary for US Army intelligence in Manila when the Japanese invaded the Philippines soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
After American and Filipino forces surrendered in May 1942, Finch hid her American background and instead passed herself off as a Filipino citizen to avoid being placed in prison camps with other American civilians.
Landing a secretarial job with a Japanese-controlled fuel distribution company, she managed to direct supplies to the Filipino resistance movement as well as food and medicine to POWs, including the Army officer who was her former boss in the intelligence office.
She was caught in October 1944, around the time American forces started retaking the Philippines. Despite being tortured with electricity and forced to spend weeks in a confined space that forced her into a squatting position, Finch never divulged the information her interrogators sought, Murphy said. —AP
