Margaret Elizabeth Doolin "Peggy" Utinsky (August 26, 1900 – August 30, 1970) was an American nurse who worked with the Filipino resistance movement to provide medicine, food, and other items to aid Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines during World War II. She was recognized in 1946 with the Medal of Freedom for her actions. Most information about her World War II activities comes from her autobiography, Miss U, and is not verifiable from other sources. Biography Utinsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up on a wheat farm in Canada. In 1919, she married John Rowley. He died the following year, leaving her with an infant son, Charles. On a sojourn to the Philippines in the late 1920s, she met and fell in love with John "Jack" Utinsky, a former Army captain who worked as a civil engineer for the U.S. government. They married in 1934. Margaret and Jack settled into life in Manila. As the likelihood of a Japanese attack grew in the Far East, the U.S. military ordered all American wives back to the United States. Unwilling to part from her husband, Utinsky refused to obey the order and took an apartment in Manila while Jack went to work on Bataan. In December 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. When Japanese troops occupied Manila on January 2, 1942, she was forced aboard the Washington, the last ship leaving with Americans, she sneaked off the ship at the last moment and returned to hide in her apartment rather than go into internment. She wrote in her book, "To go into an internment camp seemed like the sensible thing to do, but for the life of me I could not see what use I would be to myself or to anyone else cooped up there. ... For from the moment the inconceivable thing happened and the Japanese arrived, there was just one thought in my mind—to find Jack." Undiscovered after ten weeks in hiding, Utinsky ventured out and sought help from the priests at Malate Convent. Through various contacts, she obtained false papers, creating the identity of Rena Utinsky, a Lithuanian nurse—as Lithuania was a nonbelligerent country under armed occupation by Nazi Germany. She secured a position with the Filipino Red Cross as a nurse, and went to Bataan to search for her husband. She was shocked by the state of the survivors of the Bataan