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Good Housekeeping
Finding God's Angels
By Debra Gordon
The droning sounded like a swarm of insects to 13-year-old Mary Taylor as she lay sick in the stifling hot dormitory
in the Weihsien {cq} prisoner of war camp in northeast China on August 17, 1945. The Japanese had surrendered to
the Allies just three days before, but two more weeks would pass before the official papers were signed, and none
of the 1,400 American and British prisoners in the camp knew the war was over yet. On this day, Mary lay weak and
feverish, in the grip of the diarrhea that often struck prisoners subjected to the filthy conditions in the camp,
where flies and rats were constant companions.
And then the sound changed.
"It can't be," Mary thought, as she hurried to the window and looked out. But it was.
A B-29 bomber - the red, white and blue of the American flag clearly visible on its underside -- flew low enough
over the trees to nearly touch their tops. Then its belly slid open, and from the dark cavity within dropped seven
figures, their parachutes billowing behind them like a spider's silken web as they landed in a nearby cornfield.
Across Japan, similar teams, all composed of soldiers who had volunteered for these dangerous missions, dropped
into other prisoner-of-war camps. In the end, they would liberate more than 20,000 Allied prisoners of war and
civilian internees from Manchuria to Indo-China, including those at Weihsien.
Mary, along with the 150 other children and teachers from the Chefoo {cq}School, a boarding school for the children
of American and British missionaries, raced outside to see the soldiers. For the first time in three years, their
dreams of freedom seemed real. For Mary, along with her two brothers and sister, had been separated from their
parents since the Japanese captured Chefoo in 1941. As the Taylor children were transported from the coast of China
inland to this cramped, Presbyterian-school-turned-concentration-camp, their parents were fighting their own war
600 miles away in northwest China, where two warring armies created an impenetrable barrier between them and their
children.
In one way the Taylor siblings were lucky; their grandfather, a retired missionary, had lived on the grounds of
Chefoo, which his father had founded. So here he was, imprisoned right along with his grandchildren, his body so
shrunken with hunger he could barely keep his pants up.
Living conditions in the camp were deplorable, with no running water, boiled animal grain for food, and steamer
trunks used as beds. Diets were so deficient that children's permanent teeth grew in without enamel, young girls
moved into adolescence without ever menstruating, and burly men dropped upwards of 100 pounds. To provide precious
calcium, adults ground up the shells of the few eggs they obtained on the black market and fed teaspoons of the
gritty powder to the camp children. And every night the Japanese patrolled with their vicious guard dogs. One night,
as Mary lay in her bunk listening, she heard the dogs tear into the tiny kitten she'd adopted as her own. She turned
her face to her pillow to stifle her sobs.
But now men had come from the sky to rescue them, streaming out of a plane called, appropriately enough, the Armoured
Angel.
Screaming, dancing, ramming the front gates, the prisoners ran into the fields surrounding Weihsien to welcome
the six American soldiers and one Chinese interpreter. They ignored the Japanese soldiers pointing guns at them,
and the soldiers never fired a shot. They knew, Mary realized years later, that the war was over.
The prisoners carried the men - handsome, muscled and bronzed - into the camp, where the Americans quickly took
over command in a peaceful surrender. And for the next several weeks, as travel arrangements were made and the
prisoners processed to be sent home, the men were treated like movie stars. Girls chopped off pieces of the men's
hair as mementos, snatched the buttons off their shirts. Everywhere the soldiers went, they trailed a string of
children like the Pied Piper, who clamored for stories and songs of America, or for the sweet Juicy Fruit chewing
gum the men carried.
"We were madly in love with them," remembers Mary, an attractive, smartly dressed woman of 68 with medium-long,
ashy blonde hair and wide, spirited eyes.
The Taylor children were on the second planeload of prisoners flown out of the camp three weeks after its liberation.
They traveled by mule cart for the last 10 miles of the trip home to Fenghsiang, where their parents taught, on
that rainy September evening, finally running ahead in the mud. When they saw a man walking in the dark, they asked
his help finding the Reverend Taylor of the Christian Mission. The man happened to be a Bible student of their
parents, and immediately recognized the four children as the ones all the students had been praying for throughout
the war.
He led them to the Bible school where, through a window, Mary could see her parents sitting in a faculty meeting.
She began to scream. Her father looked up.
And the student pushed through into the room and announced, "Mrs. Taylor, the children have arrived."
Caked with mud, they burst through the door into a joyous homecoming.
Not long after, the Taylor family returned to the United States, settling in a small town in Michigan. Mary married,
moved to New Jersey, became an English teacher and raised a daughter. In 1974, she became executive director of
the Camden County (NJ) Children's Shelter, an institution for troubled youths. It was there she was able to put
into practice many of the lessons she learned in Weihsein about structure, predictability, self-respect and love,
transforming a troubled institution into one that today reaps praise from lawmakers and social workers alike. She
even wrote a book about "her" children, Hungry Ghosts: One Woman's Mission to Change Their World.
But she never forgot Weihsein. Years later, she and other camp survivors returned to China with their children
to show where they'd spent so many years. She even wrote a magazine article about her experiences to commemorate
the 40th anniversary of the war's end. Yet although she remembered her heroes - had even seen their names on a
copy of the declassified military mission report -- she never tried to track down the men themselves.
"I just had no idea where to start," she says.
But in 1997, while running for the state Senate of New Jersey, that changed.
She was asked to speak before a China-Burma-India Veterans' Association on Memorial Day. The day of her speech,
she rummaged through her files and found the mission report that listed the names of her heroes. Tad Nagaki. James
W. Moore. Raymond Hanchulak. Peter Orlich. Stanley A. Staiger. James J. Hannon. And the last, the Chinese interpretor,
Eddie Wang. They were part of an elite unit commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of
the CIA. In her heart, silly as it sounds, she felt sure one of them would be sitting in the audience.
But when she shared her story and read the seven names aloud to the veteran's group, there was only stunned silence.
Tears poured down many of the vet's faces, yet no one came forth to say they knew Mary's angels. That summer, the
association ran a story in its newsletter about Mary and her search. And in September, a woman called and said
her sister lived next door to a Raymond Hanchulak in northeast Pennsylvania, barely two hours from Mary's house
in Haddonfield, N.J.
Her hand shaking, Mary dialed the number. "I'm calling for Raymond Hanchulak," she said to the woman
who answered.
"What's this in reference to?" the woman asked.
When Mary told her, the woman cried out: "Oh, no. My Raymond died last year."
It was devastating news to hear. But Mary kept searching. Another veteran sent her a thick list of names, phone
numbers and addresses of every man in the country that had the same name as her heroes. She began calling on
weekends, leaving scores of messages on answering machines, "making a fool of myself," she says now,
asking if anyone knew of the Weihsien camp.
That's how she found the widow of Peter Orlich in New York, who sadly told her Pete had been dead for four years.
"I was beside myself," she recalls. "I feared I'd never have a chance to say thank you to the men."
Until she dialed a number in Alliance, Nebraska.
"I'm calling for Tad Nagaki," she said to the voice on the other end of the phone.
"Speaking," Nagaki said.
Mary was euphoric. She was actually talking to one of her heroes. They chattered for the next hour - about the
camp, the rescue, the way the prisoners had put the men up on a pedestal. And Mary heard for the first time the
refrain she'd hear from every one of her heroes: "I am not a hero. I only did what any American would have
done."
For, one by one over the next year, she found the rest of her angels. Nagaki put her in touch with Jimmie Moore
in Dallas, Texas. Who led her to Major Stanley Staiger in Reno, Nevada, the team's leader, and James Hannon in
Yucca Valley, California, whose name had been misspelled on the mission report. The men had put the war behind
them, not even talking of their experiences to their wives. Mary's phone calls brought it all back.
She visited them all, using up her frequent flier miles, withdrawing money from savings, combining trips with business.
On every visit she'd call the men's local newspapers and ask, "Did you know you have a hero in your midst?"
She spoke to their churches, to community groups in their towns. To the national meeting of the China-Burma-India
Veterans' Association. She wanted everyone to know what her angels had done. A group of former FBI agents even
flew Moore - a retired FBI agent -- and his wife to New Jersey for a surprise visit with Mary on the floor of the
state Senate, where television cameras captured their tearful reunion.
"I could never honor them enough for what they did," Mary says. "They risked their lives."
For the men had all volunteered for the mission -- choosing to liberate the camp when they could have stayed safely
on base. Another 7-man rescue team that parachuted to rescue another interment camp was nearly executed by the
Japanese who ran the camp. Moore hadn't even had to serve in the Army at all. As an FBI man, he was exempt. But
he'd attended the Chenfoo school as a child, and after reading of the school's capture, volunteered, hoping he
could be of some help in China. When the mission to liberate Weihsein was announced, he made sure he was on that
plane.
It wasn't until she was an adult that Mary truly understood such bravery, she says. "A child never imagines
that this hero could have died in the rescue. We just knew that God was going to send us angels, and that these
were God's angels."
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