A World War 2 Biography
February 1945. The American 37th Infantry Division pushed toward Manila, racing to liberate the Philippine capital after three brutal years of Japanese occupation. Between them and the city lay a deadly obstacle: an undocumented minefield stretching across the northern approaches. One wrong step would mean catastrophe—dozens, perhaps hundreds of American lives lost to concealed explosives.
Into this perilous landscape walked a solitary figure: a petite Filipina woman, twenty-seven years old, her body ravaged by disease, suffering from debilitating headaches and paralyzing fatigue. Taped between her shoulder blades was a hand-drawn map showing the precise locations of Japanese mines. She had already walked twenty-five miles. She had eight more to go.
When she finally reached the American lines and handed Captain Blair of the 37th Infantry her map, the captain stared at her in disbelief. “By God!” he exclaimed. “I never dreamed the Filipino women had such courage!”
He had no idea what she had endured to reach him—or that without her map, his division’s advance into Manila might have been decimated.
Her name was Josefina Guerrero. The Americans called her Joey. And she had just completed the most dangerous mission of a spy career built on a foundation that should have destroyed her: leprosy.
The Girl Who Heard Voices
Josefina Veluya was born on August 5, 1917, in Quezon Province, Philippines. Orphaned young, she found refuge with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, where the nuns shared stories of saints and martyrs with her. One figure captivated her imagination above all others: Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who heard divine voices and led armies.
“I played that I was Joan of Arc, and that I heard voices,” Josefina later recalled. The biographer Ben Montgomery suggests this identification awakened in her “a powerful defiance”—a conviction that even the powerless could change history.
After battling tuberculosis as a child, Josefina recovered and thrived. She loved music and poetry, excelled at sports, and carried herself with a confidence unusual for someone who had known such early hardship. In 1934, at just sixteen years old, she married Renato Maria Guerrero, a medical student from one of Manila’s most distinguished families. They had a daughter, Cynthia. Life seemed to promise comfort, security, respectability.
Then came 1941. Josefina began experiencing troubling symptoms: unexplained fevers, persistent aches, and strange lesions appearing on her skin. When the diagnosis arrived, it shattered her world with surgical precision.
Hansen’s disease. Leprosy.
Social Death
In the 1940s Philippines, a leprosy diagnosis meant something far worse than a medical condition. It meant erasure. Patients were referred to as “inmates” and forbidden to leave hospitals or accept visitors. Society didn’t merely fear the disease; it reviled those who suffered from it, treating them as morally contaminated, unclean, and dangerous.
Her husband left her immediately. Her two-year-old daughter, Cynthia, was removed from her care. The life she had built evaporated within days.
For a time, Josefina managed to control the symptoms with Chaulmoogra oil, a traditional treatment derived from tropical plants. She kept her condition hidden, knowing that discovery would mean exile to a leprosarium—those isolated colonies where patients disappeared from society entirely. But maintaining secrecy required continuous medication.
Then, in December 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines.
Occupation and Epiphany
The Japanese conquest was swift and brutal. Manila fell on January 2, 1942. American and Filipino forces retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island, holding out until May before surrendering. With the invasion, medical supplies became scarce. Josefina lost access to the medication that kept her disease manageable.
Her symptoms worsened. The lesions spread. The nerve damage intensified. She faced a future of slow deterioration, isolated, afraid, waiting for a painful death.
Most people confronted with such a fate would have succumbed to despair. Josefina Guerrero did something extraordinary instead: she asked herself what Joan of Arc would do.
When she approached resistance leaders expressing her desire to serve, one man dismissed her: they didn’t accept children. Josefina retorted that he would be surprised by what children could do, reminding him that Joan of Arc was a young girl.
Her logic was startling in its clarity: if the Japanese wouldn’t touch her, they couldn’t search her. Her greatest vulnerability could become her most powerful asset.
The resistance accepted her. At twenty-four years old, with her body failing and her future foreclosed, Josefina Guerrero became a spy.
The Invisible Courier
Her early missions were relatively straightforward: carrying messages between resistance cells, memorizing Japanese troop positions, and reporting on military movements. She would tuck intelligence into her hair—until one day a Japanese sentry pulled at it, threatening to dislodge her secrets—or hide documents between pairs of socks or inside hollowed fruit in a vendor’s basket.
As her disease progressed and lesions became more visible, something remarkable happened: Japanese soldiers began actively avoiding her. When a guard asked for identification papers, she would cry out: “I’m a leper!” The guards would recoil, waving her through. Terror of contagion—unfounded but deeply culturally rooted—made her nearly invisible.
She exploited this fear systematically. She passed through checkpoint after checkpoint, carrying intelligence that would mean immediate execution if discovered. But soldiers never searched her. They saw the wrapped hands, the facial veil, the tell-tale marks of disease—and they looked away. Some turned their backs. Some gestured frantically for her to pass. None came close enough to discover what she carried.
Josefina had weaponized stigma itself.
But this was no comfortable espionage. Hansen’s disease causes progressive nerve damage, chronic pain, and crushing fatigue. Every mission pushed her deteriorating body past its limits. And the danger was omnipresent: Japanese occupation forces were notoriously brutal toward suspected resistance members. Torture preceded execution. If captured, she wouldn’t just die—she would endure horrors designed to extract information that could destroy the entire network.
She knew this. She kept walking anyway.
Beyond the Ordinary
Her operations expanded beyond simple courier work. She began smuggling food, medicine, and clothing into POW camps where American and Filipino soldiers faced starvation and disease. The American prisoners, grateful for any relief, nicknamed her “Joey”—the name that would follow her into history.
She guided escaped prisoners through Manila’s back streets to safe houses, memorizing routes that avoided Japanese patrols. She sketched military installations—troop positions, supply depots, artillery placements—either drawing them on paper when safe or committing crucial details to memory when carrying documents was too dangerous.
On September 21, 1944, the Americans successfully used her map to crush Japanese defenses in Manila Harbour. Her intelligence had directly enabled Allied victories.
Then came January 1945. The Americans had landed at Lingayen Gulf and were pushing south toward Manila. Liberation seemed imminent. But the Japanese had prepared a vicious welcome: extensive minefields guarding the northern approaches to the capital. Without detailed maps, the American advance could be catastrophically slowed—or worse, turned into a bloodbath.
The resistance obtained a map showing the minefield locations. They needed someone to deliver it to American headquarters, thirty-five miles north of Manila, through occupied territory swarming with Japanese troops.
They called for Josefina. She was told to make things right with God because she wouldn’t be coming home.
The Final Walk
The journey should have been impossible. Josefina was already suffering from severe headaches and fatigue. The route passed through active combat zones, across bombed-out bridges, past Japanese checkpoints, and through areas controlled by river pirates.
She taped the map to her back and set off on foot. For hours, she walked along the shoulder of a two-lane highway, heading toward Malolos. Japanese soldiers saw her—a sick, staggering woman—and dismissed her as harmless. They paid more attention to others along the guarded roads.
Twenty-five miles to Malolos. In the town, residents warned her of heavy fighting ahead. She hired a banca—a small canoe—to take her downriver through Hagonoy, adding miles to her journey but avoiding the worst combat. The boat was chased by river pirates who hoped the unfamiliar woman carried something valuable. They escaped.
Landing again, she walked the remaining eight miles to Calumpit, only to discover that the 37th Infantry Division had already advanced. Their headquarters had moved to Malolos—back where she’d started.
Another woman would have collapsed. Josefina turned around and walked back.
When she finally found Captain Blair and delivered the map, her body was shutting down. She couldn’t eat. She had pushed herself beyond all reasonable limits. But the map was delivered. The minefields were documented. American lives would be saved.
She rode with the advancing troops as they stormed Manila, the city finally liberated after three years of occupation. During the brutal house-to-house fighting that followed, Josefina worked tirelessly—caring for wounded soldiers and civilians, praying with the dying, carrying children to safety. She worked until she hemorrhaged blood from her lungs.
The war had taken everything from her. But she had helped win it.
Recognition and Exile
In 1948, Josefina received the Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm—one of America’s highest civilian honors, recognizing actions “instrumental in saving the lives of many Americans and Filipinos.” Major General George F. Moore credited her with demonstrating “more courage than that of a soldier on the field of battle.”
When she arrived in San Francisco by ship, she was greeted with great fanfare by a crowd including soldiers who knew her as ‘Joey’—the woman who smuggled food through Japanese lines, carried messages, and drew charts of gun emplacements and minefields.
But recognition couldn’t erase stigma. Josefina became the first foreign national with leprosy to receive a U.S. visa, arriving at the Carville National Leprosarium in Louisiana in July 1948. Carville wasn’t technically a prison, but it had barbed wire, restricted movement, and rare visitors. It was exile dressed as medical care.
At Carville, Josefina wrote in the facility’s newspaper: “Like a person coming out of a bad dream, I felt a deep sense of well-being.” After years of war, starvation, and constant danger, even a leprosarium felt like a sanctuary.
She would remain there for nine years. New sulfa drugs—revolutionary treatments for Hansen’s disease—slowly arrested her condition. The lesions faded. The nerve damage stopped progressing. By 1957, her disease was dormant. She was discharged, cured.
But the disease’s shadow followed her. Despite her wartime heroism and Medal of Freedom, she struggled to find employment, getting fired whenever employers discovered her history with Hansen’s disease. As a non-citizen, she faced potential deportation. Only through intervention by military personnel, journalists, and attorneys was she finally granted permanent residency—and in 1967, American citizenship.
Erasure
In 1970, Josefina wrote a revealing letter to an old friend: “The reason most people think I have died is because I have tried very hard to efface the past. I simply want to forget it! It was too traumatic and has given me no end of heartbreak.”
She had changed her name multiple times. She had remarried. She had built a new life that bore no connection to her previous identity. She worked as a secretary, volunteered with the Peace Corps, and served as an usher at the Kennedy Center. She lived quietly in Washington, D.C., where people passed her daily on the street without knowing they walked beside a war hero.
Her daughter Cynthia, taken from her in 1941 as a toddler, met her only once after the war—a single, painful encounter described in Montgomery’s biography. Josefina never returned to the Philippines.
She died on June 18, 1996, at George Washington University Medical Center. She was seventy-eight years old. She was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery with little public notice. By then, most had forgotten her name.
Legacy of the Untouchable
There are no monuments to Josefina Guerrero in Manila. No statues in Washington. Her name appears in a few history books. Yet her story refuses to stay buried because it illuminates something we desperately need to understand: courage takes forms we don’t expect, and sometimes those we dismiss as powerless hold the keys to liberation.
Josefina didn’t overcome her disease to become a hero. She weaponized it. While others saw leprosy as a curse, she saw possibility. While society saw contamination, she saw camouflage. She looked at the thing that made her untouchable and asked the most strategic question imaginable: How can I use this?
Her genius wasn’t just courage—though she had that in abundance. It was the refusal to accept the role society assigned her. When told she was worthless, she proved herself indispensable. When exiled from normal life, she walked into the most dangerous situations imaginable. When her body betrayed her, she turned that betrayal into disguise.
“This was my quiet war,” she later reflected. But there was nothing quiet about carrying intelligence through enemy lines, knowing discovery meant torture and death. Nothing quiet about walking sixty miles through combat zones with a map taped to your deteriorating body. Nothing quiet about choosing service when society had already written you off as worthless.
Josefina Guerrero proved that power doesn’t always announce itself with strength and health, and visibility. Sometimes it walks through checkpoints wrapped in bandages, carrying secrets in scarred hands, turning fear itself into a weapon.
The Japanese wouldn’t touch her because she had leprosy. So she became the spy they never saw coming—until her maps had already guided liberation forces, until her intelligence had already saved countless lives, until freedom had already won.
And Josefina Guerrero—dismissed, diseased, declared socially dead—had already changed history. One quiet, painful, impossibly courageous step at a time.