No one would have expected Nieves Fernandez, who worked as a teacher in Tacloban, to be a cunning lone assassin in World War II. However, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941 completely changed her life, and she went from being a once nurturing school teacher to a renowned assassin, where she has been linked to taking out over 200 Japanese soldiers.
Nieves was highly protective of her students and went by the name "Miss Fernandez" with them. When the Japanese threatened her students, her intense maternal instincts came to the forefront.
Cerebral killer
After the Japanese seized her belongings, tiny business, and threatened to take away her students, Fernandez made the decision to take matters into her own hands.
Known as "The Silent Killer," Fernandez would set up ambushes in the jungle by herself, armed only with a bolo and a mock shotgun she had built out of a gas pipe.
Fernandez operated alone, conducting ambushes for 2.5 years. Going into the woods barefoot and in all-black clothes, she would dispatch scores of enemy forces on her own.
Fernandez claims that she kills her opponents right away by striking the jugular and the carotid arteries.
Guerilla trainer
Her bravery eventually won the men of Tacloban a cult. Fernandez went from teaching school children the alphabet to teaching soldiers how to kill covertly.
The Americans were amazed that a woman headed their small guerilla army because it proved so effective and lethal. During World War II, Fernandez was the sole female guerilla leader in the Philippines.
Because Fernandez was becoming so annoying to the Japanese, they decided to place a P10,000 bounty on her head in the hopes that she would be betrayed by her fellow Filipinos.
Fernandez led her 110-man unit in hundreds of raids against the Japanese Imperial Army in the Philippines, freed prisoners of war, and sabotaged Japanese supplies throughout the conflict.
By the time the Americans reached Leyte in 1944, Fernandez and her guerilla troops had rescued scores of comfort women and liberated many communities from the Japanese toward the close of World War II.
She was referred to as “Miss Fernandez” by her students, but among the 110 insurgents she commanded, she will always be known as “Captain Fernandez.”
