Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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to the Philippines, they had circumnavigated the globe, visiting Singapore, Penang, Colombo,
India, Egypt, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and many of the Pacific islands.
In spite of the Suez Canal adventure, they married in 1934 and settled into Davao City.
Their first son, Robert, was born in 1935, followed by James in 1937, Fe Rebecca in 1939 and
Winston in 1941.
On December 7, 1941, less than four months after Winston’s birth, Japan bombed Pearl
Harbor, and, seven hours later, invaded the Philippines. Reece Oliver, off in the hinterlands
establishing schools when Davao City was occupied, returned ten days later but was unable to
enter the city.
Not knowing if his family was dead or alive, he returned to the jungle and began a
military campaign that for the next several years made his guerilla forces so notorious he was
“wanted dead or alive” by the Japanese with a bounty to be paid for his capture.
[Editor’s Note: This is the second part of the series about Akron native Reece A. Oliver.]
In the spring of 1942, Reece Oliver organized and commanded the 107th Mindanao
guerrilla division, directing a mix of Americans and loyal Filipino resistance fighters.
He was a man on the run. There was a price on his head.
He was ever vigilant for fear the natives would be willing to collaborate with the enemy
for a price. None did, and in 1943 he was made deputy chief of staff with a formally organized
guerrilla force that grew to the point that Japanese forces were reluctant to enter the area.
Finally, on February 29, 1944, he was able to write to his sister, “I am here safe and
sound.” It was the first time his Hoosier family had heard from him since the war began.
More than a year later, on May 2, 1945, by then an army major with U.S. forces in
southern Mindanao, he led the first U.S. combat unit across the Bankerohan Bridge to liberate
Davao City and immediately located his family’s home. When they weren’t at one house, he went
to the other and found no one.
Finally, someone told him his wife and children had fled to the farm.
Although it was located in still-contested territory, he armed himself to his teeth with a
Tommy gun and sidearms and, in his typically loner fcashion, went in search of them.
He wouldn’t know until later that when the bombing began, Flora Oliver, certain he was
dead, had been ordered out of the family’s home because it was to be used as quarters for senior
Japanese officers.
Working in pitch blackness, she and the children selected their most precious belongings-
-primarily utility clothing--and loaded them onto Bob’s red Radio Flyer wagon and walked many
miles to their farm in rural Mindanao.
For the next four years, they lived in a crude house that lacked plumbing, screens, beds or
mattresses while battling disease, near-starvation, bouts with malaria and incredible close calls.
When her breast milk dried up, she baked yams over the coals of an open fire and stirred their
cores with warm water to form a gruel that she attempted to feed the infant.
The older boys trapped fish and Bob became adept at setting traps to catch ground birds
and lizards that they roasted to augment native bananas, oranges and pummelos.
It was to this house that Reece Oliver eventually made his way, only to find the family
had been forced to evacuate to an in-counry site known as the Devil’s Cauldron. He left a
message in chalk across the top of an olive-colored trunk that his wife found when she and the
children returned.
After all those years of thinking he was dead, it was a major shock.
When he returned through the tall jungle grass a few days later with heavily armed U.S.
soldiers, Flora Oliver was overcome with emotion.
It was the first time she had seen her husband in nearly four years, but there was no time
for a tearful reunion.
Reece Oliver quickly hustled his family into a small group and led them out along a
jungle trail with their dog Tanny following. A few times the group stopped and everyone
crouched in silence because of perceived danger ahead.