Women's War

The last Jap holds on the Philippines were being pried loose. On Mindanao last week two U.S. Army divisions were pressing close to Davao. A second landing was made on Negros. Major General Innis P. Swift's I Corps, racing the rainy season that starts in mid-May, stepped up its drive over the razor-backed ridges of northern Luzon and captured Baguio, summertime capital of the islands.

From Luzon TIME Correspondent William P. Gray radioed:

The mountain war for Baguio may be remembered best in time to come as the war of the Igorot women. Scores of these sturdy, brown, barefoot descendants of headhunters have padded softly out of Baguio and down through the protecting jungles into the U.S. lines. Now they are climbing back, carrying rations, water and ammunition for the 33rd Division, helping to solve a tough problem in mountain logistics.

Each morning the Igorot women line up beside the road, standing or squatting like bright salt shakers on a shelf, awaiting their orders for the day. They are modestly clothed, many in American house dresses, though their men frequently wear only loose-tailed shirts and red G-strings.

The women go where the bulldozers have not gone and the trucks cannot go. They carry their burdens on their backs, holding them with thin, woven bamboo head straps. Each woman takes up to 50 pounds, one-fourth the load saddled on pack horses on the same trails. But there are six times as many Igorot women available as pack horses.

First Forty. It was the women's own decision to go to war. There was a shortage of men carriers and 40 women volunteered. The Army paid them 1.50 pesos a day. The first day they made three times as many trips as the men. At least one battalion of the 33rd Division lived and fought last week on supplies, carried up by the Igorot women. When Japs fired on the trails the men dropped their loads and scattered; the women, undisturbed, plodded on in a long single file to the front.

There are pretty young girls and a few pregnant matrons among them. There is also Aning Andao, a wizened old lady in a brocaded black head cover, grey striped shirt and patched quilted skirt, wearing an athlete's gold medal around her neck. She has the milky rings of old age around her irises and old cigar stains on her teeth, but she can climb and carry with the best of them.

All, with soft rippling laughs, will tell you what they see on their way to the front. Said one: "First we came on 20 dead Japs. Then, farther up the trail, we came to a place where there were 40. And when we got up where the soldiers were, there were more than 100 dead Japs. It was a beautiful sight."

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