Free The Leper Spy by Ben Montgomery

from the guerrillas, some of whom had secret radios and even communicated with MacArthur in Australia. The guerrillas relied on Joey and other couriers to dispatch the news to the people.
    At first, Joey carried the messages inside her hair, which she twisted and curled and bunched up in a chignon. Her techniques of getting the messages from place to place were up to her; the guerrillas told her that if she was caught, they’d never heard of her. One day she happened to be struck by the feeling that she needed to change her hiding place. The same day a Japanese sentry tugged on her hair, and her ponytail came loose.
    She often tucked messages between two pairs of socks, and if she was stopped and asked to remove her socks for a search, she simply peeled both pairs off at once. Other times she carried the messages in hollowed-out fruit in a basket and pretended to be a street vendor.
    She walked miles for the underground, hiding her face behind a veil and her secrets behind her stigma, the whole time wondering how long the war would last and what would happen once she was again an outcast.

 17 
PROMISE
    T he general wrote the words on the back of an envelope as he rode in a private train car toward the seaside Australian city of Adelaide. Reporters now knew MacArthur had escaped Corregidor, and they’d be waiting. Roosevelt had broken the news at a press conference three days before, knowing full well that the Axis would interpret the move as the abandonment of the Philippines. For three months and ten days, the general had held the Japanese at bay on Luzon, and his retreat would appear more surrender than regrouping. “I know that every man and woman in the United States admires with me General MacArthur’s determination to fight to the finish with his men in the Philippines,” the president said. “But I also know that every man and woman is in agreement that all important decisions must be made with a view toward the successful termination of the war. Knowing this, I am sure that every American, if faced individually with the question as to where General MacArthur could best serve his country, could come to only one answer.”
    MacArthur, he said, was now in command of everything, including sea and air forces, east of Singapore in the southwestern Pacific. The reaction was immediate and optimistic: Americans felt the dashing MacArthur was up to the task of stopping Japan’s push southward and the late move to high command was some indication that intelligence officers now saw evidence that the tidesof war in the Pacific were beginning to turn. The New York Stock Exchange even registered a spike when the news broke.
    The general needed the right message, not only for Americans back home. He needed to send a message to his men—Filipinos and Americans alike—still fighting on Bataan and Corregidor and to the beloved inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, his second home. He needed to encourage them to keep fighting, to never give in to the occupiers.
    â€œThe President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines,” he wrote. “I have come through and I shall return.”
    I shall return.
These became the most famous words spoken during the war in the Pacific, and they lit a fire in Filipino hearts, becoming a battle cry against an impossible foe. Soon after MacArthur delivered the words, American subs began supplying Philippine guerrillas with branded materials. Gum, chocolate bars, matchboxes, buttons, playing cards, all printed with MacArthur’s solemn promise.

 18 
BELEAGUERED
    A ll night on April 8 and all day on April 9, the refugees from Bataan poured into Corregidor by boat,
banca,
raft, or on anything that could float. General Wainright had