Florence Finch-Wife, Mother & WWII Coast Guard Resistance Fighter

Florence Finch was an atypical hometown hero. For nearly 50 years after World War II, virtually no one outside of her family knew that she was a highly decorated Coast Guard veteran and a former prisoner of war whose exploits had been buried in time.

 "Women don't tell war stories like men do," her daughter, Betty Murphy, of Ithaca, N.Y., said.

And 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 American prisoners and surviving torture after she was captured-Florence Finch did so with the utmost modesty.

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

It was perhaps reflective of that modesty that when she died on Dec. 8, 2016, at the age of 101 in an Ithaca nursing home, the news did not travel widely. Newspapers in central New York carried a brief obituary, but her death went unreported virtually everywhere else.

It was only after the announcement by the Coast Guard that she would be buried with full military honors on Apr. 29, 2017, at Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Cayuga Heights, N.Y., that word of her death spread nationwide.

Indeed, the almost five-month delay in her memorial owed something to her solicitous nature. Near death, she had made it clear that she did not want her funeral to disrupt her relatives' Christmas holidays or to make mourners travel during a dark and icy Southern Tier winter-besides, she relished the annual resurgence wrought by spring. So, the funeral was put off. 

The funeral was held in Ithaca, with the military honors coming afterward, a ceremony befitting this Philippine-born daughter of an American father and Filipino mother-one who, in 1947, received the Medal of Freedom-the forerunner of today's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest award to a civilian.

When the Japanese occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, Florence Finch posed as a Filipino, but she became a United States citizen after the war. "Because she was over 18, she could have chosen to be American or Filipino," her daughter Ms. Murphy said. "When the Japanese landed, she chose to be mum, but in her heart, she had chosen to be an American."

Florence was born Loring May Ebersole on Oct. 11, 1915, in Santiago, on Luzon Island in the northern Philippines. Her father, Charles, had fought in the Philippines for the Army during the Spanish-American War and remained there after it was over. Her mother was the former Maria Hermosa.

Betty, as she was known all her life, graduated from high school and was hired as a stenographer at Army Intelligence headquarters in Manila under Maj. E. C. Engelhart. While working there, she met Charles E. Smith, a Navy chief electrician's mate. They married in August 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7th.

When the war did begin, Charles Smith reported to his PT boat. He died on Feb. 8, 1942, trying to resupply American and Filipino troops trapped on Corregidor Island and the Bataan Peninsula.

Five weeks earlier, Manila had fallen to the Japanese.

Florence (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 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. 

Meanwhile, Maj. E.C. Englehart managed to get word to her that he had been captured and that he and fellow war prisoners were being maltreated. She helped smuggle food, medicine, soap, and clothing to them in a prison until she was caught.

Confined to a two-by-four-foot 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 labor at the Women's Correctional Institution in Mandaluyong, just outside Manila.

When she was finally freed by American troops on Feb. 10, 1945, she weighed 80 pounds.

Rather than remain in her native country, she moved to Buffalo, New York, where her father's sister lived. She joined the Coast Guard Women's Reserve, or the SPARs (a contraction of the Coast Guard motto "Semper Paratus" - Always Ready). She enlisted, she said, to avenge her husband.

When her superiors learned of her wartime exploits, she was awarded the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon; the Coast Guard described her as the first woman to receive the decoration. The Medal of Freedom was bestowed for meritorious service.

After the war ended, she was discharged as a seaman second class in 1946 and enrolled in secretarial school in New York City, where she met and married an Army veteran, Robert Finch. A chemist, he was hired by Agway, the supplier of the agricultural products, and moved the family to Ithaca.  Robert died in 1968, leaving behind his wife Florence and daughter Betty and son Bob.  

As she was rearing her children and working as a secretary at Cornell University, her neighbors never suspected that they were in the presence of a war hero.

In the early 1990s, though, she was rediscovered by the military after she completed a government questionnaire that she had received in conjunction with plans to erect the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Washington. The Coast Guard named a building on Sand Island in Hawaii in her honor in 1995.

Betty decided to alert the news media about the building dedication, noting that her mother would be in attendance.

"It was the first anyone knew," Betty said. "I figured it was time. And when she came home, and people met her at the bus station, she was flabbergasted."

Florence Finch is survived by her daughter Betty and son Bob; a sister Olive Keats; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.