In the Hills of Panay

The eleven U.S. missionaries were getting ready for Christmas when the Japs found them. For two years, in a hideaway called "Hopevale," high in the beautiful hills of Panay Island, they had hidden successfully with about 100 other Americans and Filipinos.

The missionaries--seven women and four men--had picked the spot to hide in before the Philippines fell. With their fellow refugees, they had lived like natives, eating rice and bananas and sleeping in grass, huts with bamboo floors. Often, when the Japs were rumored to be advancing, they had hurriedly abandoned the little settlement and hid out in native huts or in foxholes until the scare passed. When the Japs finally did come to Hopevale, there was no warning.

Most of the missionaries' time had been spent in trying to improve the lives of their fellow fugitives. With medical supplies almost nonexistent, they dressed the wounds of guerrillas. In a deep gorge, they cut seats, altar, lectern and pulpit out of rock and fashioned a chapel. The congregation dwindled as U.S. submarines, supplying the guerrillas, began to evacuate some of the Americans. The missionaries chose to stay.

Last week the War and State Departments allowed the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society to announce what this choice had cost. In December 1943, the Japanese captured a guerrilla officer and tortured him into revealing Hopevale's location. The day after the Japs took the village, all eleven missionaries, and the nine-year-old son of two of them (the Rev. and Mrs. Erie F. Rounds) were executed, probably beheaded.

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