TY  - BOOK
AU  - Vaughan, Elizabeth
AU  - Petillo, Carol M.
TI  - The Ordeal of Elizabeth Vaughan : : a wartime diary of the Philippines / 
SN  - 820307513 (hardbound)
PY  - 1985///
CY  - Athens, GA : 
PB  - University of Georgia Press
KW  - Vaughan, Elizabeth,
KW  - Prisoners of war
KW  - Philippines
KW  - Biography
KW  - United States
KW  - World War, 1939-1945
KW  - Concentration Camps
KW  - Personal narratives, American
KW  - Prisoners and prisons, Japanese
N2  - Elizabeth Head Vaughan was a remarkable and independent American woman for that time: she was a scholar and had finished a master’s degree in sociology, had taught courses in a university and had worked as a research assistant for a project on culture, geography and economy in the southern US. She went to Shanghai, stopped by the Philippines and taught English at the University of the Philippines. She also fell in love and married an American civil engineer. They settled down in the Visayas, and were living in Bacolod when the war broke out. Elizabeth was alone with her two children, as her husband was in Manila on a business trip.

Her wartime diary begins on December 8, 1941, recording her anxieties and daily concerns, particularly on trying to reach her husband. (Her husband, stuck in Manila, joined the USAFFE, was captured on Bataan and died in prison camp). This diary records the struggles of a wife and mother now having to care for two children alone, while in the midst of war; she was concentrated in Bacolod with other “enemy” nationals, was moved to Santo Tomas Internment Camp in March 1943, where she was liberated in 1945. She was repatriated to the US; her camp experiences, notes and sociological mind enabled her to write a scholarly dissertation on the community forced behind walls.

She died of cancer in 1957; her sister saved Elizabeth’s diary, and put it into shape. Petillo, an American historian, added notes and further edited the manuscript. - Prof. Ricardo T. Jose
ER  -