06/06/2026
"Training is just for fun bro!" "Let's just have a good time, don't take it so serious."
Yeah, tell Her that.
200 DEAD — When Japan Destroyed Her Island and a Teacher Took Revenge
Nieves Fernandez, an elementary school teacher, barefoot, a dress, a bolo knife, 200 Japanese soldiers, dead. The American soldier who found her in the jungle of Leyte Island in 1944 thought his interpreter had made a mistake. He asked again. The number came back the same. 200. He took out his camera. He pointed it at this small Filipino woman standing in front of him in bare feet, and he asked her to show him how she did it.
She did not hesitate. She reached out, grabbed the nearest soldier by the collar, pulled his head back, and showed him exactly where the knife went. The soldier wrote in his field report that he had never seen anything like it in 3 years of war. That report was filed, stamped, sent up the chain of command, and then it disappeared.
The United States government never gave Nieves Fernandez a medal, never issued a formal commendation, never mentioned her name in any official record of the Pacific War. The photograph exists. The soldier who took it exists. The report exists somewhere in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. But her name, the name of the woman who killed more enemy soldiers than most decorated American officers, was never spoken in any official ceremony.
Not once. You are about to find out why. October 1944, Leyte Island, Philippines General Douglas MacArthur had just waded ashore on the beaches of Leyte and declared to the Filipino people, "I have returned." The liberation of the Philippines had begun. American forces were pushing inland, fighting through jungle, clearing villages, looking for Japanese positions.
In the hills above the town of Tacloban, they found something they were not looking for. A woman, barefoot, surrounded by 110 armed Filipino men who answered only to her. Her name was Nieves Fernandez. She was a school teacher. She had been teaching elementary school children on Leyte when the Japanese arrived in 1942.
When they came, she made a decision that no military training had prepared her for and no government had asked her to make. She picked up a bolo knife and she did not put it down for 3 years. But here is what the history books will not tell you. She did not start with 110 men. She started completely alone. And the first Japanese soldier she killed, she had to do it with her bare hands because she did not yet have a knife... https://ifeg.info/2026/06/04/200-dead-the-untold-story-of-nieves-fernandez-the-teacher-who-became-a-legend-of-leyte/
