An unsung wartime hero

Florence Finch, war hero.

So often they are the unsung heroes - not boasting of their actions or achievements - just doing their very best to make this world we live in a better and safer place for us all.
This is the story of Florence Finch, an American and World War II heroine who virtually no one outside her family knew was a highly decorated Coast Guard veteran and a former prisoner of war whose exploits had been buried in time.

Even on those rare occasions when she recalled her heroics in the Philippines - supplying fuel to the Filipino underground, sabotaging supplies destined for the Japanese occupiers, smuggling food to starving prisoners and surviving torture after she was captured - she did so with utter modesty.

"I feel very humble because my activities in the war effort were trivial compared to those of the people who gave their lives for their country."
It was only after an announcement by the Coast Guard recently that she would be buried with full military honours [she died on December 10 in upstate New York at 101] that word of her death spread nationwide.

After stating that she did not want her funeral to disrupt her relatives' Christmas holidays or mourners to travel north during icy and dangerous winter weather that the military stepped in with a ceremony befitting this Philippine-born daughter of an American father and Filipino mother - who, in 1947, received the US's highest award to a civilian, the Medal of Freedom.

When the Japanese occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945 Finch posed as a Filipino but became a US citizen after the war. She had been raised where her parents were based and was hired as a stenographer at Army Intelligence headquarters in Manila.There she met Charles E Smith whom she married in 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Soon after war was declared her husband reported to his PT boat but he was killed in 1942 while trying to supply US and Filipino troops trapped on Corregidor Island and the Bataan Peninsula. Five weeks earlier Manila had fallen to the Japanese.

Finch [then Mrs Smith] convinced the occupying forces that she was Filipino and, armed with superior penmanship, wangled a job writing gas rationing vouchers for the now Japanese-run Philippine Liquid Fuel Distributing Union. Unbeknown to her employer, however, she was actually collaborating with the Philippine resistance movement. Her job enabled her to divert precious fuel supplies to the underground and help sabotage shipments to the Japanese.

After she learned of her husband's death, her efforts became even more vigorous. She was honoured by the Philippine government in 2011.

She learned of the capture of her commanding officer, Major Englehart, and that he and fellow prisoners were being maltreated. She helped smuggle food, medicine, soap and clothing to them until she was caught. Confined to a two-by-four cell, she was interrogated and then tortured, enduring repeated shocks from electrical clamps on her fingers. She never talked. She was tried and sentenced to three years hard labour at the Women's Correctional Institution outside Manila.

When she was finally freed by US troops on February 10, 1945, she weighed only 80 pounds [36kg].

She moved to Buffalo where she joined the Coast Guard Women's Reserve - enlisting to avenge her husband. When her superiors learned of her wartime exploits, she was awarded the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon, the first woman to receive the decoration.
She was later discharged, as a seaman second class after the war, enrolled in secretarial school in New York City and that was where she met Army veteran Robert Finch, whom she married, and they moved to Ithaca, New York.

An unsung hero - one of so many whose stories only ever come to light occasionally - and one to whom we can only in retrospect say, thank you!