A schoolteacher who once ran a wholesale business in the Philippine capital has been identified as one of the most lethal guerrilla commanders of the Pacific War, a woman who American intelligence officers say personally killed more than 200 Japanese soldiers with a blade she sharpened herself and who led 110 local fighters in 110 separate ambushes during two and a half years of occupation.
Her name was Nieves Fernandez. She was born in the Philippine Islands around 1906, and before the war she taught school in Tacloban, the capital of Leyte, while also operating a wholesale trade that kept her in modest comfort. When Japanese forces invaded and occupied the archipelago, that life ended abruptly, and she took up arms in a manner that military historians still describe with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.
The occupation of the Philippines was among the most brutal chapters of the Second World War. An estimated 500,000 Filipinos are believed to have died during the Japanese occupation, according to figures cited in historical accounts of the period. Women were abducted from the streets and forced into sexual slavery as so-called comfort women for the Japanese military.
Mass executions, massacres, and dozens of atrocities against Allied soldiers in the region were ordered or tolerated by occupying commanders.
Resistance cells and guerrilla activity grew steadily as the war dragged on. More than a quarter of a million people are believed to have taken part in anti-Japanese operations across the islands, and their numbers swelled as the occupation continued. These groups gathered intelligence and smuggled it to American forces, but they suffered chronic shortages of equipment and weapons, and coordination between the scattered bands was often poor until more supplies began reaching the resistance later in the war.
The cruelty of the occupiers was staggering. Prisoners of war were forced into the open and beaten savagely by Japanese troops. Many were subjected to sadistic medical and surgical experiments without anesthesia, procedures that killed them.
Others were forced to drink excessive quantities of water, then bound to the ground while Japanese guards jumped on their stomachs. It was in this environment that Fernandez made her decision.
As a schoolteacher, she feared that the Japanese would seize her students by force, and she feared for her own life as well. She was especially terrified that her female pupils would be abducted and forced to work in the military’s rest stations. Fernandez concluded that she had endured enough, and she took up arms against the occupation.
She gathered a group of local men and began planning how to fight the Japanese soldiers and the occupying forces. The group believed that covert operations would be more successful than open combat, and she began training her men in fighting techniques and in the silent killing methods that would become her signature. They manufactured secret weapons, including shotguns built from gas pipes packed with gunpowder and rusty nails.
She and her group also built homemade hand grenades. They managed to steal some Japanese weapons, and with those acquisitions she became the only female guerrilla leader inside the Philippines.
Nieves herself was regarded as a skilled marksman and sniper, and as an expert fighter with the bolo, a heavy cutting knife common in the islands. She chose the bolo because it was easy to obtain, since the blade was ordinarily used to clear vegetation in difficult terrain. In her hands, however, it became a silent instrument of death, and she developed a technique that was as efficient as it was terrifying.
She was a silent killer who wore a black dress and fought barefoot so that no one could hear her approach. Her technique was specific: she stabbed the enemy from behind and below the earlobe, severing the carotid artery and the internal jugular vein. The wound reached the brain and forced the soldier to lose consciousness immediately.
She drove the blade in about two inches deep and then twisted it at a 90-degree angle. This left the victim unable to draw breath or cry out for help. The only sound was the victim’s struggle, but they had most likely already lost consciousness before drawing their final breath.
Japanese forces came to fear her deeply. She and her men carried out a series of ambushes against the Japanese under cover of darkness. They moved through the forest and attacked soldiers.
She and her 110 men carried out 110 attacks near Tacloban, and over two and a half years they killed more than 200 Japanese soldiers.
The Japanese were initially confused about who was carrying out these operations in the jungle, but they eventually heard about Nieves Fernandez, the woman leading a group of resistance fighters. They offered a reward of 10,000 Philippine pesos for anyone who brought them her head. Some tried to hunt her down, but she managed to evade capture and survived the war.
Her fighters are also credited with rescuing numerous women who had been assaulted or were about to be assaulted by Japanese troops. They succeeded in freeing some women from enslavement by those forces, and in some villages they managed to liberate the communities entirely from enemy soldiers, eliminating any presence there.
By the end of the Second World War, American forces had reached the region, and Fernandez and her troops had already liberated many villages and rescued a number of comfort women. She appeared in a photograph demonstrating her fighting method to the Americans. But the only article published about her during the war offered a stark summary of her service: an elegant former schoolteacher, and to our knowledge the only woman who fought for two and a half years with the Filipino rebels, today recounts how she led 110 local residents who killed 200 Japanese with rifles made from gas pipes.
She said: “That was when they called me Captain Nieves Fernandez.” She added: “Now, I am just Miss Fernandez.”
Her skin was lighter than that of most local women in the region, and her name, Nieves, is the Spanish word for snow. Miss Fernandez was barefoot and wore a simple black dress as she conferred with American officers. She was 38 years old at the time.
After working as a teacher in Tacloban, the capital that American forces had recently retaken during the campaign to liberate the Japanese-occupied Philippines, Miss Fernandez said she had established her own business. Describing the situation, she said: “But when the Japanese came, no one could keep anything anymore.”
She continued: “They took everything they wanted. They had their ways of persuasion, such as forcing you to bathe in very hot water and then in ice-cold water, alternating, without rest, and without food or water, except for the soapy water in the bathtubs.”
Working with the rebels south of Tacloban, Miss Fernandez rallied local men to resist the Japanese. She said: “These men had only three American rifles.” The rest, she explained, they made themselves from gas pipes.
They filled them with gunpowder and old nails. They also made hand grenades, and sometimes they obtained Japanese weapons.
American intelligence officers said the Japanese had offered a reward of 10,000 pesos for her head. She was wounded once. A bullet scar remains on her right forearm.
Nieves Fernandez was a former teacher who saw her role in the Second World War as taking up arms against the Japanese occupation. She was a strong and frightening woman who developed a terrifying fighting style that proved extremely effective. Today she is remembered as the rebel commander who shook the Japanese and killed hundreds of their troops in the Philippines, a quiet schoolmistress from Leyte who became one of the most feared irregular fighters of the Pacific theater.
Her story endures as a reminder of how ordinary people, thrust into the heart of the deadliest war the world has ever seen, can become extraordinary in the defense of their homes, their students, and their country. The barefoot woman in the black dress, armed with a farm tool and a homemade shotgun, left a mark on the occupation that the Japanese command could neither capture nor forget.