Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient. She was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was presented by United States President Harry Truman in 1946 for her efforts as a volunteer Red Cross nurse during World War II. Using the identity as "Rosena Utinsky," a Lithuanian nurse in the Philippines as her alias, she led an underground movement to smuggle medication, food, and other needed supplies to American Prisoners of War. Since Lithuania was a nonbelligerent country under armed occupation of Nazi Germany, she had the freedom to help others with her identity of being Lithuanian instead of an American. Eventually, she was captured, imprisoned for 32 days, and tortured, but after being release, resumed the same activities. She suffered with an infected wound on her leg, dysentery with a loss of 45 pounds, and had to have abdominal surgery after her beatings. She is credited with helping countless American soldiers, saving many lives. After the war, she wrote from memory a 30-page report about her activities in the Filipino Resistance Movement, in which she listed the names of soldiers who had been tortured, the names of their torturers, and the names of collaborators and spies. She was attached to the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, and later was flown to meet the 511 survivors, out of the nearly 9,000 soldiers and civilians, who were rescued from the Cabanatuan POW camp on January 30, 1945.Born to James and Lydia Doolin in Missouri, she spent her childhood on a farm in Canada. At the age of nineteen years old, she married John Rowley, a son was born to the couple, and within a year her husband died. In the late 1920s, she and her son traveled to the Philippines with the original plans to stay for only months. While in the Philippines in 1934 she married John "Jack" Utinsky, a civil engineer born in West Virginia, who was employed by the United States government. When American dependents were ordered to evacuate, she decided to stay with her husband, but her son was sent back to the United States. In December of 1941 Japanese forces invaded the Philippines and she went into hiding. Her husband was captured by the Japanese, survived the Bataan Death March, but died on August 6, 1942 from starvation and buried in a mass grave. which she was able to visited years later. In 1948 she published her autobiography, "Miss U," which was her code name during her World War II ordeal. The film "The Great Raid" told the story of the Cabanatuan POW camp and the part she played. An article in the May of 2009 issue of "The American Journal of Nursing," was written by Sherrilyn Coffman, "Margaret Utinsky: A Nurse Undertook Heroic Underground Activities in Support of American Prisoners in the Philippines during World War II."