"Where else would I be?"
The battle of Guadalcanal marked the first decisive Allied victory against the Japanese in World War II. For six grisly months, Japanese and American armies battered each other to the death on this jungle island in the southern Solomons.
From August 1942 to February 1943, in the underbrush at night, death came at any moment. Men leapt on each other like animals. They clubbed their foes. They stabbed them. They strangled each other.
“It was a darkness without time," said Marine Pfc. Robert Leckie. "To the right and left of me rose up those terrible formless things of my imagination….I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me.”
When the fighting at sea and on the land ended, the Japanese were had been crushed. As many as 30,000 of their men were dead. "Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history," said one Japanese commander. "It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.
Allied forces had been outnumbered by the Japanese at sea and on the land, yet they won. “Before Guadalcanal, the enemy advanced at his pleasure," said one American leader. "After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours.”
Into the thick of this came a Brooklyn-born Catholic priest, the Reverend Frederic Gehring. A Navy chaplain and lieutenant, he accompanied the First Marine Division into combat on Guadalcanal, landing there a few weeks after they made their beachhead. He would remain with them through six months of fighting.
Gehring was the first Navy chaplain to be awarded the Presidential Legion of Merit for conspicuous gallantry. His citation proclaimed that he was “brave under fire, cheerful in the face of discouragement, and tireless in his devotion to duty”
Good luck or grace
The grace of God followed Father Gehring. In the early 1930s he raised money for three years in the U.S. to help orphans in China. He then lived in China from 1933 to 1939 running several home for children.
When Japanese planes strafed one of his orphanages on Christmas Day in 1938, others dove for cover. Gehring grabbed a huge American flag, ran outside, and waved it at the swooping fighters. (At that time America was a neutral country; Father Gehring figured that his orphanages should be immune from attack.)
To his relief, the fighters swung away, ending the assault. He presumed it was God’s will until someone suggested that perhaps the pilots left only because they had used all their ammo.
Two days after Pearl Harbor, Father Gehring volunteered. On Guadalcanal, he astonished the GIs with his bravery. Fearless, he went to the front and leapt into foxholes to be near soldiers. After all, that was where the need for his services was greatest.
“Padre, what are you doing here?” a shocked GI asked him.
“Where else would I be?” he replied.
Without a gun or any weapon, this priest made three dangerous expeditions through enemy-occupied areas to evacuate trapped 27 missionaries by motorboat.
When the Japanese blew up Gehring's chapel tent before Christmas 1942, he put up a new one, and 700 weary GIs gathered there for Christmas Eve services.
There was a problem, though. No one knew how to play his beat-up hand organ.
Barney Ross stepped forward. He was Jewish and unfamiliar with Christmas carols, yet he mastered each one. The service concluded with Father Gehring accompanying him on the violin for My Yiddishe Mama.
(Ross was one of the few survivors of a patrol ambushed by Japanese soldiers. He held off 24 attacking Japanese soldiers for 12 hours until help arrived.)
Father Gehring's greatest feat came off the battlefield.
GIs found a six-year-old Chinese girl dying in a ditch. She was burning with malaria. Japanese soldiers had lashed her arms and legs with a sword or bayonet blade and left her to die. They also fractured her skull, apparently with a rifle butt. (Its imprint was visible.)
Little Treasure
Navy doctors told Father Gehring her injuries were grave and that she would die before dawn.
But Father Gehring knew illness, and he knew children. Most of all, he had faith. He wouldn't give up on her. Hour by hour and day by day she got better.
He gave her the name Pao Pei, which means “Little Treasure” in Chinese. When GIs complained that they couldn't pronounce that, they agreed to change her name to Patsy. (Even though Father Gehring spoke several Chinese dialects, Patsy responded to none of them.) He gave her the last name Li, which was the Chinese name he chose for himself before the war started.
When Patsy was well enough, the time came for Gehring to send her to an orphanage run by French nuns in the New Hebrides islands. By then Patsy had become attached to her savior. When he tried to put her on the airplane that would take her away, she wept and hugged him and begged to stay with him.
It so happened that a New York Times reporter was writing an article about Father Gehring. He witnessed this heart-wrenching farewell and wrote a dispatch about the father’s good works. He devoted some of the article to discussing how Gehring had saved the child's life and how emotional their parting was. The article said the girl's name was Patsy Lee, a name the priest chose out of thin air.
Soon thereafter, a Chinese woman in New York City read the article with astonishment. She cut the story out of the paper and mailed it to her sister Ruth Li, a refugee from Japanese-occupied Singapore.
She forwarded the article because the name of the child in the story had the same name as her sister's six-year-old daughter—Patsy Li.
Ruth lost Patsy when the Japanese torpedoed and sank their ship 4,000 miles from Guadalcanal.
Here is what happened: On February 13, 1942, as the Japanese advanced on Singapore, Ruth and hundreds of other terrified Singaporeans boarded the S.S. Kuala with her two children—one-year-old Lotie and six-year-old Patsy (or Pai-Ti Li whose name means 'white plum blossom.')
Japanese dive bombers plunged towards the ship. Their bombs ripped into it. Amid explosions and fire, women and children rushed to the ship’s railing to clamber down ropes to lifeboats.
Patsy screamed when she saw the last lifeboat pull away. Her mother told her to swim to a piece of wreckage and wait.
Another explosion hammered the ship. The shock sent Ruth and Lotie flying into the ocean. When Ruth came to the surface, her baby was gone. So was Patsy. In shock, Ruth made it to a lifeboat and a day later was rescued by the Japanese.
When she read the newspaper story, she became convinced that the Patsy on Guadalcanal was her Patsy. She began corresponding with Father Gehring.
When he got her letter, Gehring thought, “Merciful Father, help me! How can I tell this poor woman that the girl cannot possibly be her child?’
Nonetheless, he told her miracles happen. He encouraged her to adopt the child. In 1946 Li visited the orphanage in the New Hebrides. Upon seeing the little girl, she knew she was her daughter. But Patsy didn't recognize her.
Ruth saw her daughter's smallpox vaccination scar. Surely that was proof. But the child also had a blemish, and her daughter had had no such mark. Then Patsy noticed a scar on her eyelid. It was identical to that of her own child. The nuns were unconvinced.
Finally, Ruth gave Patsy a writing test. She had a sample of her earlier handwriting in which she wrote all her capital E’s backwards. When Patsy handed Ruth her new writing samples, sure enough, she had wrote those new E's backwards, too,
Later, a survivor of the shipwreck said he thought a little girl he saw been put on a freighter heading for Guadalcanal. In 1950, Patsy immigrated to the U.S. (soon followed by her mother) and became a nurse.
Father Gehring contracted Dengue fever on the island, was evacuated in February 1943, and died at the age of 95 in 1998. He and Patsy appear on this 1962 episode of the TV game show “To Tell the Truth.”
MORAL: Miracles happen.
For more stories similar to this one, buy my book Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory.