What Happened to MacArthur’s Wife After Corregidor?

On the night of March 11th, 1942, a 4-year-old boy was carried onto the deck of a torpedo boat in the dark and handed down to a sailor. 600 m of open water lay ahead of him, all of it patrolled by the Japanese Navy. Beside him stood his mother, 43 years old, from Nashville, Tennessee.

She had been offered a seat on a submarine out of that island twice already and had turned it down both times. Her name was Jean MacArthur, and what she chose to do in the four months before that night is the part of the story almost nobody tells. She had been living under that hill for 2 and 1/2 months.

Gene Marie Faircloth was born on December 28th, 1898 in Nashville, Tennessee. She was small, sharp, and from a comfortable southern family. And by her middle30s, she was unmarried and traveling. She met Douglas MacArthur on a ship crossing the Pacific in 1935. He was 55 years old, the most senior soldier in the United States Army, and recently finished as chief of staff.

She was 36. They married quietly in New York City on April 30th, 1937. And then she followed him to Manila. He had been married once before, briefly and badly, and had not expected to marry again. To understand what she gave up later, you have to see what she had first. Their home was the aironditioned penthouse of the Manila Hotel, six rooms above the bay with a private lift and a view across the water to the Batan Peninsula.

Their son Arthur was born there in 1938. Gene ran the household, learned enough Spanish and Tagalog to manage it, and was known in Manila society as the woman who could get an answer out of the general when nobody else could. It was by any measure one of the most comfortable postings in the world. Nobody in that penthouse expected a war to arrive within 4 years.

Then on December 8th, 1941, 9 hours after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft hit Clark Field. The Philippines were under attack and the force defending them, the United States Army forces in the Far East, was a mixture of American regulars, the Philippine scouts, and a Philippine army that had barely finished forming.

But within days, it was falling back on every front, and the men knew no fleet was coming. If your father or your grandfather served in the Philippines in that winter, put his name and his unit in the comments now. Those men have never had the attention that Normandy has, and there are not many of them left to ask. Manila could not be held.

On Christmas Eve 1941, the MacArthur left the penthouse with what they could carry and crossed to the island fortress of Corugodor at the mouth of Manila Bay. Jean took one suitcase. She left behind the furniture, the silver, the photographs, and a library her husband had spent a lifetime collecting, all of which was destroyed.

The boy took a stuffed rabbit and a small tricycle. Manila was declared an open city 2 days later. The crossing to the island took under an hour, and she did not see the city again until 1945. Porgador was a rock 2 mi long shaped like a tadpole and the safest place on it was the Minta tunnel, a road tunnel cut a 100 ft into the hillside with side chambers running off it.

Inside were the headquarters, a hospital and several hundred people living under electric light. The bombing came in daylight, sometimes for hours. Jean and Arthur had a bunk in a lateral off the main passage. She washed the boy’s clothes in a helmet. She learned which rumble meant a bomb and which meant the ventilation fans.

And she never once went to the shelter before the nurses did. The air inside smelled of diesel, disinfectant, and unwashed men. Across the bay on the Batan Peninsula, tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers were being pushed back into a shrinking pocket on halfrations and then quarter rations, dying of malaria and dysentery faster than of gunfire.

They could see Corugodor. Corodor could see them. Everyone on that rock understood what was coming. And everyone understood that no relief convoy was going to arrive because the fleet that would have brought it was lying on the bottom at Pearl Harbor. What nobody on the island knew yet was that Washington had already made a decision about the general.

Twice her husband arranged for her to leave. A submarine could take her and the boy out. Other officers had already sent their families away. She said no both times. stand where she was standing for a moment. You have a four-year-old. You have a way out and it is offered and no one would think less of you for taking it. Staying does not help the garrison.

It does not shorten the siege. It only means your son is under the bombs with you. Other officers wives took the boat out and nobody ever thought worse of them for it. I do not know what I would have done in that tunnel. She stayed and she never publicly explained why. Then the decision was taken out of her hands.

On February 23rd, 1942, a message went into Corodor over the president’s name drafted with the Secretary of War and the Army Chief of Staff. The president directs that you make arrangements to leave and proceed to Mindanao. It was not a suggestion. Roosevelt had concluded that losing MacArthur to a Japanese prison camp would cost more than the Philippines were going to cost anyway and that he was worth more in Australia.

MacArthur considered resigning and staying to fight as a volunteer. His staff talked him out of it. He was 62 and he had spent his career in those islands. Understand what that order actually meant on that island. The general was leaving. His wife was leaving. His son was leaving. The nurses were not leaving.

The gunners were not leaving. The men on Batan, sick and starving, four miles across the water, were not leaving. Command of everything and everyone was going to Major General Jonathan Wayright, who would hold Corgodor until the 6th of May and then surrender it. Whatever else you think about the escape, that arithmetic was clear to every man on the rock at the time, and nobody’s in it, never stopped being clear to them afterwards.

Nobody on Corodor was told the date of the departure in advance. The way out was four wooden boats. Motor Torpedo boat squadron 3 had four serviceable craft left, 77 ft of plywood each, powered by three aircraft engines and armed with torpedoes and machine guns. Their commander was Lieutenant John Balkley, a man with a reputation for going at things head first.

His own boat, PT41, would carry the family. The boats had no radar and no reliable charts for where they were going. Their engines were worn out from 3 months of combat. 21 people would go out on them in total. Three of those four boats would not survive the following month, and their crews stayed behind and fought on.

Jean was told she could take one bag. She packed it and left everything else in the tunnel, including her jewelry, which she gave away. She kept a small red pillowcase her son had slept on since Manila. On the last afternoon, she walked through the hospital laterals and said goodbye to the nurses, most of whom she had come to know by name over 10 weeks, and most of whom would spend the next 3 years in Japanese internment at Sto.

Tomas. She did not tell them where she was going because she was not permitted to and they did not ask. 10 weeks earlier, she had been living in a hotel penthouse with a private lift. She did not mention that either. There was a fourth passenger in the family group and she is the one history drops.

The boy’s nurse had been with him since Manila, a Cantonese woman recorded in the escape party as Lo Chu and known in the family by another name entirely. She had no reason to go. She was not American. She was not military. And stepping onto that boat meant leaving her own life behind for a country she had never seen.

She got on anyway and she stayed with that child. She would spend the rest of the war in a foreign country where she knew almost nobody. Remember her because the histories of this night usually count 20 passengers and a general. There is something else about that night that does not sit comfortably. The escape had been ordered by the president and delayed by MacArthur for over two weeks, and the timing he finally chose was driven by the moon and the state of the boats, not by the state of Batan. The men across the water were

4 weeks from surrender. Nobody on the dock said any of this out loud, and the official account has never had to answer it directly. 2 weeks is a very long time when men are dying of malaria on quarter ration. What happened on the water that night is not the part that is argued about. We are just getting to the part that is.

At a/4 to 8 in the evening on March 11th, PT41 cast off from the north dock at Corgodor. MacArthur took off his cap on the deck and held it up toward the island. 15 minutes later, the four boats found each other in the dark and formed up. Gene was below with Arthur, who had been given a seditive by the party’s doctor, and slept through most of the first night.

The plan was to run without lights at speed through waters the Japanese Navy had patrolled unopposed for 3 months, and to be out of sight of land by first light. behind them. The island went on being shelled, and the men on the guns could see the wakes going out. The sea did not cooperate. The wind rose, and the boats, built light and fast for smooth water, began slamming.

MacArthur later described the motion as what it must be like to take a trip in a concrete mixer, and he was one of the people who was sick. Spray came over the bow in sheets and drove into skin-like grit. There was no cabin worth the name. People wedged themselves against bulkheads and held on.

Salt got into the fuel drums, lashed on deck. Two of the four boats lost formation in the dark, and the group broke apart. One of the boats, believing it was being pursued, threw its deck fuel drums into the sea to gain speed. The distance is one of those numbers that never settles. The official history calls it about 560 mi.

Other accounts say 600. Some say 500. Nobody agrees. Partly because the boats did not travel in a straight line and partly because the charts they were using were not good enough to say. What is not in dispute is the time it took. They left on the evening of the 11th, and they did not reach Mindanao until the 13th, which is roughly 35 hours in an open boat for a woman and a small child.

The fuel they were burning had sat in drums for months, and had gone bad, and it cost them speed. On the evening of the 13th, with the coast in sight, a lookout on PT41 reported a warship on the horizon. It was taken for a Japanese cruiser. Bulkley turned the boat west directly into the setting sun so that the glare sat between them and the other vessel sleet heav and held that heading and until the shape dropped away behind them.

It is the single moment in the crossing when the whole thing nearly ended. Jean was below with her son. Nobody told her what was happening on deck at the time, and she learned about it afterwards like everyone else. Later assessments suggest it may not have been a cruiser at all, but nobody aboard could have known it. They came into Kagayan Deoro on the north coast of Mindanao on the 13th of March and were met by an officer sent by the American commander on the island.

Jean stepped off that boat after two nights at sea, still holding the bag she had been allowed with the boy and his nurse behind her. There was then a 4-day wait at a Pineapple Plantation air strip called Del Monty because the aircraft that were supposed to collect them were unserviceable and replacements had to be flown up from Australia.

The airirstrip had been built to serve a fruit company and it was now one of the last usable runways southern Philippines in the southern Philippines still in American hands. At 1 in the morning on the 17th of March, two B17 bombers lifted off from Delmony Field with the whole party aboard stripped of guns and armor to carry the weight.

They landed at Bachelor Field south of Darwin at 9 that morning. From there it was trains and light aircraft across the Australian interior. On the 20th of March at a railway siding at Teroi in South Australia, MacArthur made the statement that would follow him for the rest of his life. I came through and I shall return.

Darwin itself had been bombed a month earlier, which is why they were put down at a field well inland instead. The reaction was not what Washington had hoped. In Berlin, Joseph Gobles called him a fleeing general. In Rome, Mussolini called him a coward. Neither of those mattered. What mattered was the reaction on Batan where American and Filipino soldiers who had been told for weeks that help was coming heard that the commanding general had gone to Australia with his family.

Many of them felt in the plainest terms betrayed. To blunt the propaganda, the army chief of staff arranged for MacArthur to be awarded the Medal of Honor within weeks of his arrival. He had not asked for it and he understood exactly why he was being given it. And on the 9th of April 1942, the force on Batan surrendered.

Something in the order of 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers were marched north in the heat without adequate water, and thousands of them died on that road or in the camps at the end of it. Corodor held until the 6th of May when Wayright surrendered the island and went into a Japanese prison camp for the rest of the war.

The nurses Gene had said goodbye to in the tunnel went into internment. She had been in Australia for 3 weeks. The number who died on that march has never been fixed with certainty, and the estimates still vary by thousands. She spent the rest of the war where her husband was, which meant Melbourne, then Brisbane, then back to the Philippines in 1945.

She did not give interviews. She wrote letters to the families of men in his headquarters. In August 1945, she went with him to Japan and lived in the American embassy in Tokyo for the whole occupation. and she made a point of being seen in the city shopping and walking at a time when that was a deliberate act.

She stayed until he was relieved of command in 1951. She was by every account of the period the one person who could tell him he was wrong and be listened to. Her husband died in 1964. She was 65 years old and she outlived him by 36 years. She moved back to New York to an apartment at the Waldorf Towers, and she spent those decades doing one thing consistently, which was showing up.

She went to reunions of the men who had been on Cororeidor and Baton. She answered their letters. She served as honorary chairman of the Memorial Foundation in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1988, President Reagan gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Philippine government followed with its own award. The citation called her a woman of substance and character and a patriot.

So, here is the argument, and it has never been settled. Some would say Gene MacArthur is the best of that whole story. She refused two chances to leave. She raised a child in a bomb tunnel. and for the next 60 years she turned up for the men who had been left behind when she was not. Others would say exactly the opposite. That a general’s family got a torpedo boat out while 76,000 men got a prison camp and that no amount of turning up afterwards balances that.

Both of those are held by people who were there. Both of those things can be true at the same time. I am not going to tell you which is right. Tell me below. Gene Marie Fairloth MacArthur, born December 28th, 1898 in Nashville, Tennessee, died on January 22nd, 2000, in Manhattan, aged 101. She had outlived the war by 55 years and her husband by 36.

She is intombed beside him in the rotunda of the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and you can stand in that room today. Loe, who carried the same child onto the same boat, has no memorial anywhere. Her name is even recorded differently in different accounts. A like on this video is a small thing, but it puts both of those names in front of a few more people.

She spent 60 years going to reunions for men most of the country had stopped thinking about. She never described herself as anything other than a soldier’s wife. If your father, your grandfather, your uncle, anyone in your family served in the Philippines, on Batan or Corodor, or in the camps afterwards, leave their name and what they did in the comments below.

Don’t just leave the name. Tell us one thing about them. One thing they did, one thing they said, one thing you remember. The men who were there deserve more than a name in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Subscribe if you want the next story.

What Happened to MacArthur’s Wife After Corregidor?

On the night of March 11th, 1942, a 4-year-old boy was carried onto the deck of a torpedo boat in the dark and handed down to a sailor. 600 m of open water lay ahead of him, all of it patrolled by the Japanese Navy. Beside him stood his mother, 43 years old, from Nashville, Tennessee.

She had been offered a seat on a submarine out of that island twice already and had turned it down both times. Her name was Jean MacArthur, and what she chose to do in the four months before that night is the part of the story almost nobody tells. She had been living under that hill for 2 and 1/2 months.

Gene Marie Faircloth was born on December 28th, 1898 in Nashville, Tennessee. She was small, sharp, and from a comfortable southern family. And by her middle30s, she was unmarried and traveling. She met Douglas MacArthur on a ship crossing the Pacific in 1935. He was 55 years old, the most senior soldier in the United States Army, and recently finished as chief of staff.

She was 36. They married quietly in New York City on April 30th, 1937. And then she followed him to Manila. He had been married once before, briefly and badly, and had not expected to marry again. To understand what she gave up later, you have to see what she had first. Their home was the aironditioned penthouse of the Manila Hotel, six rooms above the bay with a private lift and a view across the water to the Batan Peninsula.

Their son Arthur was born there in 1938. Gene ran the household, learned enough Spanish and Tagalog to manage it, and was known in Manila society as the woman who could get an answer out of the general when nobody else could. It was by any measure one of the most comfortable postings in the world. Nobody in that penthouse expected a war to arrive within 4 years.

Then on December 8th, 1941, 9 hours after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft hit Clark Field. The Philippines were under attack and the force defending them, the United States Army forces in the Far East, was a mixture of American regulars, the Philippine scouts, and a Philippine army that had barely finished forming.

But within days, it was falling back on every front, and the men knew no fleet was coming. If your father or your grandfather served in the Philippines in that winter, put his name and his unit in the comments now. Those men have never had the attention that Normandy has, and there are not many of them left to ask. Manila could not be held.

On Christmas Eve 1941, the MacArthur left the penthouse with what they could carry and crossed to the island fortress of Corugodor at the mouth of Manila Bay. Jean took one suitcase. She left behind the furniture, the silver, the photographs, and a library her husband had spent a lifetime collecting, all of which was destroyed.

The boy took a stuffed rabbit and a small tricycle. Manila was declared an open city 2 days later. The crossing to the island took under an hour, and she did not see the city again until 1945. Porgador was a rock 2 mi long shaped like a tadpole and the safest place on it was the Minta tunnel, a road tunnel cut a 100 ft into the hillside with side chambers running off it.

Inside were the headquarters, a hospital and several hundred people living under electric light. The bombing came in daylight, sometimes for hours. Jean and Arthur had a bunk in a lateral off the main passage. She washed the boy’s clothes in a helmet. She learned which rumble meant a bomb and which meant the ventilation fans.

And she never once went to the shelter before the nurses did. The air inside smelled of diesel, disinfectant, and unwashed men. Across the bay on the Batan Peninsula, tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers were being pushed back into a shrinking pocket on halfrations and then quarter rations, dying of malaria and dysentery faster than of gunfire.

They could see Corugodor. Corodor could see them. Everyone on that rock understood what was coming. And everyone understood that no relief convoy was going to arrive because the fleet that would have brought it was lying on the bottom at Pearl Harbor. What nobody on the island knew yet was that Washington had already made a decision about the general.

Twice her husband arranged for her to leave. A submarine could take her and the boy out. Other officers had already sent their families away. She said no both times. stand where she was standing for a moment. You have a four-year-old. You have a way out and it is offered and no one would think less of you for taking it. Staying does not help the garrison.

It does not shorten the siege. It only means your son is under the bombs with you. Other officers wives took the boat out and nobody ever thought worse of them for it. I do not know what I would have done in that tunnel. She stayed and she never publicly explained why. Then the decision was taken out of her hands.

On February 23rd, 1942, a message went into Corodor over the president’s name drafted with the Secretary of War and the Army Chief of Staff. The president directs that you make arrangements to leave and proceed to Mindanao. It was not a suggestion. Roosevelt had concluded that losing MacArthur to a Japanese prison camp would cost more than the Philippines were going to cost anyway and that he was worth more in Australia.

MacArthur considered resigning and staying to fight as a volunteer. His staff talked him out of it. He was 62 and he had spent his career in those islands. Understand what that order actually meant on that island. The general was leaving. His wife was leaving. His son was leaving. The nurses were not leaving.

The gunners were not leaving. The men on Batan, sick and starving, four miles across the water, were not leaving. Command of everything and everyone was going to Major General Jonathan Wayright, who would hold Corgodor until the 6th of May and then surrender it. Whatever else you think about the escape, that arithmetic was clear to every man on the rock at the time, and nobody’s in it, never stopped being clear to them afterwards.

Nobody on Corodor was told the date of the departure in advance. The way out was four wooden boats. Motor Torpedo boat squadron 3 had four serviceable craft left, 77 ft of plywood each, powered by three aircraft engines and armed with torpedoes and machine guns. Their commander was Lieutenant John Balkley, a man with a reputation for going at things head first.

His own boat, PT41, would carry the family. The boats had no radar and no reliable charts for where they were going. Their engines were worn out from 3 months of combat. 21 people would go out on them in total. Three of those four boats would not survive the following month, and their crews stayed behind and fought on.

Jean was told she could take one bag. She packed it and left everything else in the tunnel, including her jewelry, which she gave away. She kept a small red pillowcase her son had slept on since Manila. On the last afternoon, she walked through the hospital laterals and said goodbye to the nurses, most of whom she had come to know by name over 10 weeks, and most of whom would spend the next 3 years in Japanese internment at Sto.

Tomas. She did not tell them where she was going because she was not permitted to and they did not ask. 10 weeks earlier, she had been living in a hotel penthouse with a private lift. She did not mention that either. There was a fourth passenger in the family group and she is the one history drops.

The boy’s nurse had been with him since Manila, a Cantonese woman recorded in the escape party as Lo Chu and known in the family by another name entirely. She had no reason to go. She was not American. She was not military. And stepping onto that boat meant leaving her own life behind for a country she had never seen.

She got on anyway and she stayed with that child. She would spend the rest of the war in a foreign country where she knew almost nobody. Remember her because the histories of this night usually count 20 passengers and a general. There is something else about that night that does not sit comfortably. The escape had been ordered by the president and delayed by MacArthur for over two weeks, and the timing he finally chose was driven by the moon and the state of the boats, not by the state of Batan. The men across the water were

4 weeks from surrender. Nobody on the dock said any of this out loud, and the official account has never had to answer it directly. 2 weeks is a very long time when men are dying of malaria on quarter ration. What happened on the water that night is not the part that is argued about. We are just getting to the part that is.

At a/4 to 8 in the evening on March 11th, PT41 cast off from the north dock at Corgodor. MacArthur took off his cap on the deck and held it up toward the island. 15 minutes later, the four boats found each other in the dark and formed up. Gene was below with Arthur, who had been given a seditive by the party’s doctor, and slept through most of the first night.

The plan was to run without lights at speed through waters the Japanese Navy had patrolled unopposed for 3 months, and to be out of sight of land by first light. behind them. The island went on being shelled, and the men on the guns could see the wakes going out. The sea did not cooperate. The wind rose, and the boats, built light and fast for smooth water, began slamming.

MacArthur later described the motion as what it must be like to take a trip in a concrete mixer, and he was one of the people who was sick. Spray came over the bow in sheets and drove into skin-like grit. There was no cabin worth the name. People wedged themselves against bulkheads and held on.

Salt got into the fuel drums, lashed on deck. Two of the four boats lost formation in the dark, and the group broke apart. One of the boats, believing it was being pursued, threw its deck fuel drums into the sea to gain speed. The distance is one of those numbers that never settles. The official history calls it about 560 mi.

Other accounts say 600. Some say 500. Nobody agrees. Partly because the boats did not travel in a straight line and partly because the charts they were using were not good enough to say. What is not in dispute is the time it took. They left on the evening of the 11th, and they did not reach Mindanao until the 13th, which is roughly 35 hours in an open boat for a woman and a small child.

The fuel they were burning had sat in drums for months, and had gone bad, and it cost them speed. On the evening of the 13th, with the coast in sight, a lookout on PT41 reported a warship on the horizon. It was taken for a Japanese cruiser. Bulkley turned the boat west directly into the setting sun so that the glare sat between them and the other vessel sleet heav and held that heading and until the shape dropped away behind them.

It is the single moment in the crossing when the whole thing nearly ended. Jean was below with her son. Nobody told her what was happening on deck at the time, and she learned about it afterwards like everyone else. Later assessments suggest it may not have been a cruiser at all, but nobody aboard could have known it. They came into Kagayan Deoro on the north coast of Mindanao on the 13th of March and were met by an officer sent by the American commander on the island.

Jean stepped off that boat after two nights at sea, still holding the bag she had been allowed with the boy and his nurse behind her. There was then a 4-day wait at a Pineapple Plantation air strip called Del Monty because the aircraft that were supposed to collect them were unserviceable and replacements had to be flown up from Australia.

The airirstrip had been built to serve a fruit company and it was now one of the last usable runways southern Philippines in the southern Philippines still in American hands. At 1 in the morning on the 17th of March, two B17 bombers lifted off from Delmony Field with the whole party aboard stripped of guns and armor to carry the weight.

They landed at Bachelor Field south of Darwin at 9 that morning. From there it was trains and light aircraft across the Australian interior. On the 20th of March at a railway siding at Teroi in South Australia, MacArthur made the statement that would follow him for the rest of his life. I came through and I shall return.

Darwin itself had been bombed a month earlier, which is why they were put down at a field well inland instead. The reaction was not what Washington had hoped. In Berlin, Joseph Gobles called him a fleeing general. In Rome, Mussolini called him a coward. Neither of those mattered. What mattered was the reaction on Batan where American and Filipino soldiers who had been told for weeks that help was coming heard that the commanding general had gone to Australia with his family.

Many of them felt in the plainest terms betrayed. To blunt the propaganda, the army chief of staff arranged for MacArthur to be awarded the Medal of Honor within weeks of his arrival. He had not asked for it and he understood exactly why he was being given it. And on the 9th of April 1942, the force on Batan surrendered.

Something in the order of 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers were marched north in the heat without adequate water, and thousands of them died on that road or in the camps at the end of it. Corodor held until the 6th of May when Wayright surrendered the island and went into a Japanese prison camp for the rest of the war.

The nurses Gene had said goodbye to in the tunnel went into internment. She had been in Australia for 3 weeks. The number who died on that march has never been fixed with certainty, and the estimates still vary by thousands. She spent the rest of the war where her husband was, which meant Melbourne, then Brisbane, then back to the Philippines in 1945.

She did not give interviews. She wrote letters to the families of men in his headquarters. In August 1945, she went with him to Japan and lived in the American embassy in Tokyo for the whole occupation. and she made a point of being seen in the city shopping and walking at a time when that was a deliberate act.

She stayed until he was relieved of command in 1951. She was by every account of the period the one person who could tell him he was wrong and be listened to. Her husband died in 1964. She was 65 years old and she outlived him by 36 years. She moved back to New York to an apartment at the Waldorf Towers, and she spent those decades doing one thing consistently, which was showing up.

She went to reunions of the men who had been on Cororeidor and Baton. She answered their letters. She served as honorary chairman of the Memorial Foundation in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1988, President Reagan gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Philippine government followed with its own award. The citation called her a woman of substance and character and a patriot.

So, here is the argument, and it has never been settled. Some would say Gene MacArthur is the best of that whole story. She refused two chances to leave. She raised a child in a bomb tunnel. and for the next 60 years she turned up for the men who had been left behind when she was not. Others would say exactly the opposite. That a general’s family got a torpedo boat out while 76,000 men got a prison camp and that no amount of turning up afterwards balances that.

Both of those are held by people who were there. Both of those things can be true at the same time. I am not going to tell you which is right. Tell me below. Gene Marie Fairloth MacArthur, born December 28th, 1898 in Nashville, Tennessee, died on January 22nd, 2000, in Manhattan, aged 101. She had outlived the war by 55 years and her husband by 36.

She is intombed beside him in the rotunda of the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and you can stand in that room today. Loe, who carried the same child onto the same boat, has no memorial anywhere. Her name is even recorded differently in different accounts. A like on this video is a small thing, but it puts both of those names in front of a few more people.

She spent 60 years going to reunions for men most of the country had stopped thinking about. She never described herself as anything other than a soldier’s wife. If your father, your grandfather, your uncle, anyone in your family served in the Philippines, on Batan or Corodor, or in the camps afterwards, leave their name and what they did in the comments below.

Don’t just leave the name. Tell us one thing about them. One thing they did, one thing they said, one thing you remember. The men who were there deserve more than a name in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Subscribe if you want the next story.