While Rosie the Riveter and millions of American women fought World War II on the home front, other women witnessed the war firsthand. Many of them were overtaken by Japan's military offensive in the South Pacific and subsequently held captive. Theresa Kaminski chronicles their harrowing experiences in this moving testament to women in wartime.

Although most of us are familiar with accounts of POWs, few realize that the Japanese imprisoned thousands of American civilian women in the Philippines during World War II. They were businessmen's wives and career girls, missionaries and teachers,...

Dorothy Dore was born in the Philippines to a British father who served there in the Spanish American War, and to a Filipina mestiza mother. This young woman was attending an exclusive private school when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. The Japanese Imperial Army made a swift invasion of the Philippines, and Dorothy's life became a nightmare. As recounted in this moving memoir, Dorothy studied nursing so that she could support the United States Armed Forces Far East (USAFFE). She spent the war years on the run, working for the USAFFE when she could, but abandoning those duties...

When the Japanese began their brutal occupation of the Philippines in January 1942, 76,000 ill and starving Filipino and American troops tried to hold out on Bataan and Corregidor. That spring, after having been forced to surrender, most of those men were thrown into Japanese POW camps while dozens of others slipped away to organize guerrilla forces. During the three violent years of occupation that followed, Allied sympathizers in Manila smuggled supplies and information to the guerrillas and the prisoners.
Theresa Kaminski's Angels of the Underground tells the story of four American...