Teedie Woodcock finds herself in a Life magazine photo taken during the liberation of Manila.
Photo by Bob Pennell
By PAUL FATTIG
Teedie Woodcock doesn't see gray-haired, retired men in the World War II combat veterans gathered for a reunion of the 148th Field Artillery Battalion.
Instead, the Medford resident sees the same grinning, strong-willed GIs whose can-do attitude helped free her and some 3,700 other prisoners of war in the Philippines on Feb. 3, 1945.
"They were heroes then, and they're heroes now," she said Wednesday, her eyes glistening during an informal meeting with the veterans attending the unit's reunion in Medford this week.
Woodcock will be the guest speaker at the unit's banquet tonight at the Rogue Regency Inn in Medford.
Now 72, she was 17 when she and her mother, Theodora, were taken prisoner by the Japanese in Manila early in January 1942. They spent 37 months as starving captives in what was then Santo Tomas University in Manila.
Although other American units were the first to break through the locked gate of their prison, the men of the 148th, already veterans of battles in New Guinea and New Britain, were part of the liberation force.
One was Joe Oaks, 72, of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The POWs' captors had already fled, he said.
"Our jeep -- I was driving a colonel -- was about the fourth vehicle through the gate," Oaks recalled. "All these people were coming out. They were skinny, but they were smiling. I'll never forget that."
Nor will Charlie Harkins, 78, of Ventura, Calif.
"We were hoping to get there while they were still alive," said Harkins, whose group was delayed by throngs of people on the road leading out of Manila.
"I cried like a baby when I saw them," he said of the POWs. "They were nothing but skin and bones."
But happy to be liberated, recalled Woodcock as she talked with Oaks and Harkins.
They stopped talking to study a photograph of that memorable day printed in the March 5, 1945, issue of Life magazine. It captured a skinny but happy Woodcock standing on a balcony overlooking the crowd celebrating their freedom.
"It was terribly exciting," she said. "The tanks literally drove through the gates."
The youngest of five children, Woodcock, born in North Bend, was the only child still at home when the family left Oregon. Her father, George Cowie, an officer with what is now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had just been named director of that agency's office in Manila.
When they arrived in Manila in April 1941, they found a peaceful city. They had no inkling of what would befall them before the year was out, she said.
"I didn't feel anything was going to happen in the Philippines," she recalled.
Nor did anyone else.
"Dad would have never taken us if he knew war was about to break out," she said.
As it did in Pearl Harbor, war erupted out of the blue with a surprise attack by Japanese bombers hitting military targets in the Philippines.
"They bombed us about the same time as they did Pearl Harbor," she said, then explained, "But it was Monday morning for us. We were on the other side of the (international) date line."
The continued bombing killed her father on the day before Christmas that year.
"My mother and I hunkered down in our apartment, waiting to see what would happen," she said.
What happened was that Japanese forces entered Manila on New Year's Day, 1942. Woodcock and her mother were among those deemed "enemy aliens," and imprisoned at what was then Santo Tomas University.
"It was bad, really bad," she said softly. "You thought about food, fear."
Her mother lost 65 pounds. "I was pretty thin," Woodcock said.
But she also knows that many of the soldiers also suffered. After all, the 148th had been part of a diversionary force of some 1,100 that had held off 70,000 Japanese troops for 10 days in New Britain.
Veteran Roy Agar, 79, of Hermiston, has a bullet hole the diameter of a pencil in his left ear, evidence of one close call from one battle.
"Yeah, he was just fooling around with a woman," jested a fellow veteran.
But just underneath the surface humor are memories of the serious mission that led them to Manila.
A longtime Rogue Valley resident whose late husband, Lorin, retired from NOAA, Woodcock intends to thank the soldiers en masse tonight.
And to tell them something she learned more than half a century ago, a lesson she says they already knew.
"Freedom, that's worth preserving," she said.