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Captain Nieves Fernandez was a Filipino guerrilla commander who fought against the Imperial Japanese occupation during the Second World War. She was the only female guerrilla commander in the Philippines.
Biography[]
Fernandez was a schoolteacher living in Tacloban Province in the Philippines. When the Philippines were invaded by Imperial Japan in 1941, Fernandez witnessed horrific atrocities against the local population by Japanese soldiers. The final straw was when her school was shut down by the Japanese, who informed Fernandez that her female students were to be taken away and used as "comfort women" (sex slaves) by the Japanese army. This prompted Fernandez to form an anti-Japanese guerrilla group of 110 men.
Fernandez's group conducted a number of stealth attacks against the Japanese army, with Fernandez training her men in how to kill their enemies quickly and silently with a bolo knife. She also showed them how to make shotguns out of gas pipes and makeshift grenades using gunpowder and nails. During guerrilla night raids, Fernandez would wear a black dress to make herself harder to see and walked barefoot so the enemy could not hear her coming. The Gas Pipe Gang, as Ferandez's group were known, were credited with the killing of over 200 Japanese soldiers and were also known to have freed a number of comfort women and prisoners from Japanese camps. Japanese authorities placed a bounty of ₱10,000 on her head, but she was never captured, although she was once shot in the arm.
By the time of the American liberation of the province in 1944, a number of villages in Tacloban had already been liberated due to Ferandez's group wiping out the entire Japanese presence in the areas. During the invasion Fernandez was photographed demonstrating her method of killing to American soldiers. It is known that she lived to see the complete liberation of the Philippines in 1945, but her fate after the war is unknown.