When McNerney asked an older nun why she thought the story was buried for decades, the nun responded, “I think that everyone was just tired of the war when it was over. People just wanted to move forward at that time and put the past behind.”
In 2016, a journal kept by one of the nuns, Sister Hedda Jeager, was published in the book “,” and filmmakers are at work on a docuмentary of the harrowing experience.
Buka Island in the South Pacific remains remote to this day, but it takes a dose of imagination to conjure up how far it was from anywhere 78 years ago. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange set out from Los Angeles in September 1940 on a 704-passenger ship that took them to New Zealand and on to Australia. Next came a 48-passenger ship that carried them to the Solomon Islands — which sticks in memory because two years after sisters’ passage, U.S. Marines stormed ashore on Guadalcanal.

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They boarded a 23-ton sailing boat just off Guadalcanal that made several stops as it moved northwest to their final destination.
Their journey had taken three months.
“They were young, they were zealous, they were educated and they felt called to do this,” McNerney said. “I don’t think they had a clue about the war.”

The war took hold in earnest in March when Japanese warships appeared off Buka. Father James Hennessey, a Boston-born priest who was also on a mission, was taken away — never to be seen again by the nuns. And then Buka plantation owner Percy Good was found, as Sister Hedda recorded, “His throat was cut, and they buried him in a grave about a foot deep. Such treachery! It makes us just sick, as we think the same fate might have befallen Father Hennessey.”
The time had come to flee to Bougainville, a larger neighboring island with more jungle cover. They had no idea their ordeal on the island would last for more than nine months as they played cat-and-mouse with Japanese soldiers bent on capturing them.
Despite such entries in Sister Hedda’s journal, the sheer terror felt by the nuns rarely surfaces in her accounting, but the journal made clear that they knew that in time they were bound to fall into Japanese hands.


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On New Year’s Eve 1942, the nuns and 25 others who would eventually be rescued from the island made their way in darkness to the beach in Teop harbor.
As they neared the beach, Father Albert Lebel, an American priest from Maine, told them: “’A submarine is going to pick you up.’” Sister Hedda wrote. “Our hearts must have stopped beating for a moment. We hadn’t anticipated this means of deliverance.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/07/14/the-remarkable-story-of-four-stranded-nuns-a-remote-island-and-a-heroic-submarine-rescue/?utm_term=.2fdc2087ca6f