Florence Finch

Florence Finch's neighbours in Ithaca, New York knew her as an administrative
secretary at Cornell. They found out what she had done in 1995, when the Coast
Guard named a building after her. She was eighty.

*Finch after enlisting in the Coast Guard SPARs, having been captured and
interrogated by the Japanese for helping the Philippine resistance and
American prisoners of war. United States Coast Guard.*

Before the war

She was born Loring May Ebersole in Santiago, Isabela Province, in the
Philippines in 1915 — a Filipina mother and a white American father, an Army
veteran of the
Spanish–American War
that had taken the islands. The boarding school for mixed-race girls that she
attended gave her the name Florence.

Her first job was assistant business manager at the Army/Navy YMCA, where she
met Chief Electrician's Mate Charles Smith. They married in August 1941. Not
long afterwards she moved to US Army Intelligence, assisting Major — later
Lieutenant Colonel — Edward C. Engelhart, second in command of G-2 at Army
Headquarters in the Philippines.

When the United States evacuated its intelligence staff from Manila, **she
stayed**, to look after her sixteen-year-old sister. Manila fell in January

1942. American and British residents were interned; her Filipino citizenship
      kept her out of the camps. Her husband was killed the following month in the
      fighting on Bataan.

Two kinds of resistance, from inside a Japanese office

She took a job with the Japanese-controlled Philippine Liquid Fuel
Distribution Union. Her secretarial work put her in charge of writing names on
fuel ration cards.

So she wrote names that did not exist. Members of the resistance used the
cards to draw food and supplies without ever giving a Japanese official a real
identity. Historians estimate she was diverting as much as **250 gallons of
fuel a week**.

The second thing she did was harder. Engelhart, by then a prisoner, got word
out to her about conditions in Bilibid Prison and the Santo Tomas camp. Finch
smuggled in food and medicine — often paid for with the proceeds of the stolen
fuel — and clean laundry.

Arrest

The Japanese took her in October 1944. They interrogated and tortured her, and
held her first in Bilibid and then in Mandaluyong Women's Prison.

American forces reached the prison in February 1945. **She weighed under 85
pounds. She had given them nothing.**

*US Army nurses preparing to leave Manila in 1945. Finch was one of many women
liberated from Mandaluyong and Santo Tomas. U.S. Army, via Women of World War
II.*

She enlisted

She crossed to the mainland on a Coast Guard transport and settled in Buffalo,
her father's home town. In July 1945 — the war in the Pacific still running —
she joined the
Coast Guard Women's Reserve,
one of the first Asian American women to do so. She said later she had never
heard of the Coast Guard, and had joined to "avenge the death of her husband."

The war ended weeks afterwards.

Afterwards

She was the first woman to earn the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon. In 1947,
on the evidence of former American prisoners, President Truman awarded her the
Medal of Freedom. Engelhart's commendation reads:

She displayed outstanding courage and marked resourcefulness in providing
vitally needed food, medicine and supplies for American Prisoners of War and
internees, and in sabotaging Japanese stocks of critical items … constantly
risking her life in secretly furnishing money and clothing to American
Prisoners of War and carrying communications for them.

Her own account of it was shorter:

I feel very humble because my activities in the war effort were trivial
compared with those of people who gave their lives for their country.

Finch rarely spoke about the war. United States Coast Guard.

She stayed in New York City with the SPARS, married Robert Finch, moved to
Ithaca, worked at Cornell and raised two children. The Coast Guard named the
administration building at its Honolulu base after her in 1995, and a Fast
Response Cutter in 2022.

She died in Ithaca in 2016, aged 101.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's account of Florence Ebersole Smith
Finch, a work of the United States government in the public domain, with the
Coast Guard's own biography.