"Where else would I be?"
The battle of
Guadalcanal marked the first decisive Allied victory against the Japanese in World
War II. For six long grisly months, the Japanese and American armies battered
each other to the bloody death on this jungle island in the southern Solomons.
From August
1942 to February 1943, in the thick underbrush at night, death could come at
any moment. Men leapt on each other like crazed animals. They beat each other
to death. They strangled each other.
“It was a darkness without time," said Marine
Pfc. Robert Leckie. "To the right and left of me rose up those terrible formless
things of my imagination….I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath
my eyelids and suffocate me.”
When the
fighting at sea and on the land ended, the Japanese were roundly defeated.
They had suffered brutally—as many as 30,000 of their men lay dead. "Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name
of an island in Japanese military history," said one Japanese commander.
"It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.
Allied
forces had been outnumbered by the Japanese at sea and on the land, yet they
won. “Before Guadalcanal, the enemy advanced at his pleasure," said one
American leader. "After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours.”
Into the thick of this horror came a
Brooklyn-born Catholic priest, the Reverend Frederic Gehring. A Navy chaplain
and lieutenant, he accompanied the First Marine Division into combat on
Guadalcanal, landing there a few weeks after they made their beachhead. He
would remain with them through six months of unspeakable fighting.
Endowed with the right stuff,
Gehring was the first Navy chaplain to be awarded the Presidential Legion of
Merit for conspicuous gallantry. His citation proclaimed that he was “brave
under fire, cheerful in the face of discouragement, and tireless in his
devotion to duty”
Good luck
or grace
Good luck or the grace of God seemed
to follow Father Gehring everywhere. In the early 1930s he successfully raised money for
three years in the U.S. to help orphans
in China. He then lived in China from 1933 to 1939 running several home for
children.
When Japanese planes attacked and
strafed one of his orphanages on Christmas Day in 1938, others dove for cover.
Instead, Gehring grabbed a huge American flag, ran outside, and waved it at the
swooping fighters. (At that time America was a neutral country; Father Gehring
figured that his orphanage should be immune from attack.)
To his delight, the fighters swung
away, ending the assault. He presumed it was God’s will (and good fortune)
until someone suggested that perhaps the pilots left only because they had spent
all their ammo.
Two days after Pearl Harbor, Father
Gehring volunteered. On Guadalcanal, he astonished the GIs with his bravery. Fearless,
he would go to the front and leap into foxholes so he could be near soldiers.
After all, that was where the need for his services would be the greatest.
“Padre, what are you doing here?” a
shocked GI asked him.
“Where else would I be?” he replied.
Without a gun or any weapon, this
priest made three highly dangerous expeditions through enemy-occupied areas.
The reason? To evacuate trapped 27 missionaries by motorboat. The GIs felt
lucky to keep him on their side of the battle.
When the Japanese blew up Gehring's
chapel tent before Christmas 1942, he put up a new one, and 700 bone-weary GIs
gathered there for Christmas Eve services.
There was a problem, though. No one knew
how to play his beat-up hand organ.
Then Barney Ross stepped forward. He
was Jewish and unfamiliar with Christmas carols, yet he mastered
each one. The service concluded with Father Gehring accompanying him on the
violin for a finale of “My Yiddishe Mama.”
(Ross was the sole survivor of a
patrol ambushed by Japanese soldiers. All the other GIs were either killed or
wounded. Ross held off 24 attacking Japanese soldiers for 12 hours until help
arrived.)
Father Gehring's greatest feat of
courage came off the battlefield.
GIs found a six-year-old Chinese
girl dying in a ditch. She burned with malaria. That was the least of it. Japanese
soldiers carved her arms and legs with a sword or bayonet and left her to
die. They had also fractured her skull, apparently with a rifle butt. (Its
imprint was visible.)
Little
Treasure
Navy doctors told Father Gehring her
injuries were so grave she would die before dawn.
But Father Gehring knew illness, and
he knew children. Most of all, he had faith. He wouldn't give up on her. Hour
by hour and day by day she got better.
He gave her the name Pao Pei, which
means “Little Treasure” in Chinese. When GIs complained that they couldn't pronounce
that, they changed her name to Patsy. (Even though Father Gehring
spoke several Chinese dialects, Patsy responded to none of them.) He gave her
the last name Li, which was the Chinese name he had chosen for himself before
the war started.
When Patsy was well enough, the time
came for Gehring to send her to an orphanage run by French nuns in the New
Hebrides islands. By this time, however, Patsy had become attached to her savior.
When he tried to put her on the airplane that would take her away, she wept and
hugged him and begged to stay with him.
It so happened that a New York Times
reporter was writing an article about Father Gehring. He witnessed this
heart-wrenching farewell. He wrote a dispatch about the father’s good works. He
devoted some of the article to discussing how Gehring had saved the child's life and
how emotional their parting was. The article said the girl's name was Patsy
Lee, a name the priest chosen out of thin air.
Soon thereafter, a Chinese woman in
New York City read the article with astonishment. She cut the story out of the
newspaper and mailed it to her sister Ruth Li. She was a refugee from
Japanese-occupied Singapore.
She forwarded the article because
the name of the child in the story had the same name as her sister's
six-year-old daughter—Patsy Li.
Ruth Li had lost her child when the
Japanese torpedoed and sank their ship 4,000 miles from Guadalcanal.
Here is what happened: On February
13, 1942, as the Japanese were advancing on Singapore, Ruth and hundreds of
other terrified residents of Singapore boarded the S.S. Kuala with her two children, along with hundreds of others
trying the escape.
Ruth Li had her two children with
her—one-year-old Lotie and six-year-old Patsy (or Pai-Ti Li whose name means
'white plum blossom.')
That morning Japanese dive bombers
plunged towards the ship. Their bombs ripped into it. Amid explosions and fire,
women and children rushed to the ship’s railing to clamber down ropes to
lifeboats.
Patsy screamed when she saw the last
lifeboat pull away. Her mother told her to swim to a piece of wreckage and wait.
Another explosion hammered the
ship. The shock sent Ruth and Lotie flying into the ocean. When Ruth came to
the surface, her baby was gone. So was Patsy. In shock, Ruth finally made it to
a lifeboat and after a day later was rescued by the Japanese.
When she read the newspaper story, she
became convinced that the Patsy on Guadalcanal was her Patsy. She began
corresponding with Father Gehring.
When he got her letter, Gehring
thought, “Merciful Father, help me! How can I tell this poor woman that the
girl cannot possibly be her child?’
Nonetheless, he told her that
miracles happen. He encouraged her to adopt the child. In 1946 Li visited the orphanage in the New Hebrides. Upon
seeing the little girl, she instantly knew she was her daughter. But Patsy
didn't recognize her.
Then Ruth saw her daughter's smallpox
vaccination scar. Surely that was proof. But the child also had a blemish, and
her daughter had had no such mark. Then Patsy noticed a scar on her eyelid. It
was identical to that of her own child. The nuns were unconvinced.
Finally, Ruth gave Patsy a writing
test. She had a sample of her handwriting. In it she had written
all her capital E’s backwards. When Patsy handed Ruth her new writing samples,
sure enough, she had written those E's backwards, too,
Later, a survivor of the shipwreck
said that he thought a little girl had saw been put on a freighter heading for
Guadalcanal. In 1950, Patsy immigrated to the U.S. (soon followed by her
mother) and became a nurse.
As for Father Gehring, the Padre of
Guadalcanal, he contracted Dengue fever on the island and was evacuated in
February 1943. He died at the age of 95 in 1998.
MORAL: Blossom where you are planted.
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