"Grenades," I said. "That's the answer, right? Short range explosives." A series of doubtful looks were exchanged by the opposing team across the room. Perhaps I was wrong.
"Yes! Point for Team A!" the moderator announced. Maybe I wasn't as wrong as I thought I was. I heard the sound of a fist colliding with a chair, followed by the crash of someone's buzzer being thrown against an adjacent desk. Our opponents from Metro Manila didn't take losing points very well. They were young, wealthy, and brutish, answering with the fervor of someone who had everything to gamble. It was literally just an interschool competition.
It was the day of the National History Bowl. I had spent weeks trying to assemble a team of my high school batch's most trusted history enthusiasts, and after one complication after another, our unlikely little mix finally made it to the actual competition. We had someone specializing in Ancient History, Art History, Current Events, an All-Around guy, and for Military History: our team had me. There I sat, hair pinned back in a perfect low ponytail, lashes coated in mascara, my pencil skirt hugging me tight as my heels tapped against the tiled floor. I was a girl who specialized in Military History with strict emphasis on World War Two, of all wars, and with the way things were looking, my opponents did not like that at all.
I could understand their confusion. Weren't girls supposed to care about Queen Victoria or something? World War Two was a man's war.
Wrong.
World War Two was everyone's war. I know this to be true because the first person to introduce me to it was a woman.
Of course, my love for the war truly developed after hearing stories from my granddad and watching movies with my parents, but stories from my great-grandmother were responsible for bringing the war to life in the four corners of her bedroom in Laguna, miles away from where the war hit her. She told me stories of air raids, bomb shelters, and a certain American soldier who'd give her chocolates every now and then. World War Two wasn't a far off event — it came to life on hot summer days on Wednesday Street in the early 2000s. These were stories of my great-grandmother's life long before she knew any of us, and that includes my great-grandfather who also had war stories that could rival any Oscar Best Picture nominee. My great-grandfather was a teen when the war broke out, and their family hid a particular American soldier who only went by 'Miller'. Across the pond, my father's maternal grandmother was a translator for the US Army, and only recently did I come across her records. She later on married a man who put himself in harm's way all in the name of journalism as a war reporter.
From childhood, it never once crossed my mind that World War Two was something to be gatekeeped by men obsessed with upholding the macho man trope. To me, the war was everyone's business, because as far as I was concerned, it affected not only my grandfathers, but my grandmothers as well. And I was lucky in the sense that it treated the women in my family better than it did most. In eleventh grade, my class filmed a mini WWII mockumentary at our friend's house. We had the unexpected honor of making the acquaintance of her eighty year old great-grandmother. I vividly recall her telling us she didn't want to remember the war — didn't want to remember how the Battle of Manila had left her orphaned at six. We didn't push any further after she shared that. Jacob, the star of our movie, had begun to weep at some point. It was a moving story, after all, but then he started telling us his own family history. His grandmother had been taken as a comfort woman. There wasn't a single dry eye in that room, even as mosquitoes swarmed overhead. Sitting in a room with newfound friends and an elderly woman who had somehow lost everything and eventually remade the world into something whole again, I recognized that that very second was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.
We were just a bunch of teenagers with nothing in common, yet somehow, a nearly eighty year old war had us sharing pieces of our souls with each other. Slowly, we began sharing more and more about what World War Two meant to us, and what it meant to us now that we knew just how much it shapes the world and the people we love today. We were brought together by stories of how the war affected the women in our lives, and while we did continue to celebrate our forefathers, hearing untold tales of what the war did to our women felt like a pinprick to the heart. World War Two isn't just about generals, warships, and handsome young men who 'liberated' countries from German and Japanese usurpers, World War Two is the story of all of humanity. Women and children were the first to be sent to Auschwitz gas chambers, innocent German women were raped by Russian 'liberators', Korean and Filipina women were forced into sex camps as comfort women for the Japanese — the war had traces of women everywhere. However, it is also important to note that women were more than just victims.
When you think of a liberator, you picture a stalwart young man, either British or American. If Captain America and Guy Madison had a baby, it would be him. You're probably right, but only to a certain extent. And I guess that's why my brutish young opponents lost. They were so focused on the idea of a macho man saving the entire world, they forgot that liberators came in different faces, and sometimes, they looked like me. That day, I showed up with perfect hair and a pretty little skirt with a pocket that safely held my lipstick bullet. In the Battle of Kamansi, Remedios Gomez Paraiso showed up to the frontlines with perfect pin curls and bright red lipstick as she and her squadron took on hordes of Japanese soldiers. She was Kumander Liwayway, and she had led those men to their victory. Women were heroes, too. We were heroes. Eight thousand women were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and they intercepted countless Nazi messages for the British Intelligence. The Russian Night Witches was a group of female bomber pilots who attacked Nazis by night, and there were gangs of Dutch girls who seduced Nazis before leading them to an unexpected demise. Women were everywhere. World War Two was far from being just a man's war. It was, and still is, everyone's war. It belonged to my great-grandmother just as much as it did to my great-grandfather, and it belongs to me just as much as it does to my tantrum-throwing opponents that stared me down after each victory I made.
It is the 9th of April in the year 2021. Today, my country remembers the 60,000 men who perished in the harrowing trek from Bataan to Capas, Tarlac in what is now known as the Bataan Death March. I keep them in my heart all the same, but I write this for the women history chooses not to remember. For them, I will remember, and I will tell their tales. History is not just his, it's hers, too.
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