Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆
In September 1941, the author returns to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, starting work as a nightclub singer and falls in love with American GI, John Phillips. Which is unfortunate timing, because soon after, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, kicking off the war in the Pacific. A hasty marriage to John follows on Christmas Eve, but Japan invades, and Claire’s husband becomes a prisoner of war. Left to fend for herself, after a period spent hiding out in the countryside, she returns to Manila, adopting the persona of Dorothy Fuentes, born in the Philippines of Italian parents. In order to help the resistance, she opens a venue, Club Tsubaki, aimed at officers of the occupying forces.
This has a nice irony, since the profits from the business are used to fund both humanitarian work for the POW’s held on the islands, and the growing guerrilla forces up country. Additionally, “Dorothy” – also known as High-Pockets, for her habit of keeping valuables in her bra! – keeps her ears open, and becomes skilled at extracting useful intelligence from her patrons, though a combination of flattery and alcohol. This information, about troop movements, industrial facilities, etc. is then funneled back to the Allies for use in the conflict over the next couple of years. It’s a risky business, and eventually, the Japanese break up the ring, arresting those involved. Claire has to withstand torture and hellish prison conditions, before being sentenced to 12 years for her activities.
Fortunately, there is a happy ending here, since the Americans re-took Manila, freeing our heroine after a rough eight months, during which time she lost about 35% of her body weight. After the war she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and a movie was made of her story – I Was an American Spy, starring Anne Dvorak as Claire. There are some doubts as to the accuracy of her account: a post-war claim for compensation was severely reduced, with many of her statements “later found to be without foundation,” the court even concluding there was “no corroboration of her testimony that she was married.” So we should likely take this her tale here with a pinch of salt as to the details, though the basic elements seem credible enough.
It takes a while to get to the good stuff, with rather too much about her social life, etc. Even after the invasion, she spends a good while suffering from malaria in a hut. The more it goes on, however, the more this improves, as you began to understand the daily terror of living in occupied territory, where every night could be your last, and any knock on the door might be the dreaded kempei, the military police. It’s also fascinating to read her techniques for extracting useful information from her clientele with seemingly innocent questions like “How many will be in your party? I must know so that I can reserve places.” Her matter-of-fact recounting the horrors of prison life is also memorable, such as the incident where a fellow prisoner caught and skinned a cat, eating it raw. Worst of all is the sentence which follows: “There was another cat on the premises, and I began to look at it longingly.”
To modern ears, there is something of a not-so casually racist tone here, Phillips spattering the text with references to “Japs”, “Nips”, etc. and mocking their efforts to speak Engrish [how’s her Japanese, I wondered…] However, given the war circumstances and situation – this was an invading force after all – we need to put this in context. This was a time, after all, when Hollywood was making cartoons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. We probably shouldn’t condemn the author by applying modern standards to an entirely different situation, to which they do not fit.
Author: Claire Phillips
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as a paperback or e-book.
a.k.a. Manila Espionage