Sydney to Hong Kong, parts 4 and 5 - Cruise Line Fans: Cruise Forum, Reviews and Chat From Real Cruisers

joramrose · 07-12-2006, 12:14 AM

This should read 5

Anyway here is the Philippines segment, f

AT SEA, A HALF DAY'S SAIL NORTH OF MANILA --
Nearly 60 years ago, when I was a staff reporter on the Wichita Falls, Texas, afternoon daily, we ran these lines on our lead story:
"Texans who remember the Alamo will never forget the men and women who fought and suffered and died at Corregidor."
The occasion was a celebration in our town to honor survivors of Corregidor and Bataan, those who had gone through Hell in five months of bombardment to buy time for our nation to prepare to fight an all-out war in the Pacific, and then had endured more than three years on the infamous Death March and imprisonment in Japanese POW camps. More than half the men who had been stationed on The Rock when war broke out had come from Texas and Oklahoma.
I had known a couple of them, and I knew relatives of others. Corregidor had always been a part of that war that was very real to me.
Yesterday, those lines ran through my head again as I walked on that hallowed ground of Corregidor.
It was an emotional experience, but I had known it would be.
The Queen had docked early that morning in Manila, and those of us who opted for an escorted trip to Corregidor had rushed through breakfast and dashed down the gangplank to board buses shortly after 8 o'clock. We were taken to another pier to embark on a very comfortable ferry for the 23-mile journey across the wide bay to the small island -- Corregidor, dubbed The Rock. It had been fortified in the early part of the century to protect Manila. The larger island of Bataan is a short swim away.
This was the bay which Admiral Dewey entered in 1898 to demolish the small Spanish fleet there, a victory which led to the US taking over the Philippines.
On the pleasant cruise over, we were treated to a history of the area, and of the war years, narrated by an elderly Filipino, whose great pride in his native land gave us a startlingly different perspective on US involvement in Asia than we had learned in our history books. It was interesting to note that the Japanese aboard either listened stoically without visible emotion or completely disregarded the talk, laughing among themselves. It must have been hard for them - it was their shrine too, considering how many of them were killed there, but our narrator's comments were hardly complimentary to their race.
The island is beautiful, with lush vegetation covering its rocky hills, many tropical flowers and well kept areas by the Filipinos who revere it as well.
Once ashore we boarded vehicles called "transios" which had hard benches, a rooftop to keep the sun out and open sides to let the fresh warm air in.

We drove all over the island. Still standing on the hillsides are the many ruins of barracks and buildings which once housed the men and women of two armies, US and Filipino. They were constructed of heavily reinforced concrete but their massive walls could not withstand the heavy shelling of the invaders. They stand as a memorial to the devastation of war, grim and gray.
The huge home of the base commandant was in ruins, and the row of officers' housing was nothing but pulverized dust.
We made a stop at one of the batteries, where the last big gun had frozen up two days before the final surrender on May 6, 1942. There is a crater where a Japanese bomb had landed in the midst of them.
Walls of the arsenal next to the battery were pockmarked by bullet holes. I ran my hands along the rough concrete and tried to visualize what it must have been like. During those long months of the siege, the skies were as blue as this day, the seas as sparkling, the air as warm. But surely no birds sang as they did now, no flowers remained to perfume the air.
I was reminded of the many battlefields I have tromped in recent years, and felt again an intense anger at the futility of war. I felt much the same when I saw the bullet holes, both Rebel and Yankee, in houses at Gettysburg, and those of both Colonials and British at Yorktown. I felt anger as I stood in the crater that exploded and took so many lives at Petersburg, and again as I stood beside the cannons keeping sentinel from the heights over Vicksburg, both Civil War mementos.
But mostly these walls reminded me of the broken bunkers on the cliffs above Omaha Beach on the coast of Normandy where I had visited a couple of years ago.
For someone who hates the thought of war as much as I do, I manage to visit a lot of battlefields. I don't think that is as strange as it may appear, for each one only reinforces my firm unshakable belief that wars are obscene, that they are useless, that they only testify to the failure of man to solve his differences with others peaceably.
There are impressive memorials erected at Corregidor. The one put up by the US to honor its heroes gleams sparkling white under a large dome. A museum also sits at the site. The Filipinos put their memorial up several miles away, a bronze soldier standing atop a pedestal looking out to sea. Leading up to him are bronzed panels in bas-relief depicting the history of their nation. Impressive.

There is another bronze statue, this one of General MacArthur, conqueror, defender and liberator of the Philippines. This one stands within feet of the sea where he boarded a small boat as he left Corregidor with that famous promise on his lips -- I shall return. And at that same spot, he came back, not too many years later, to paraphrase, I have returned. The statue shows him facing the land, his hand in the air, and you can interpret him as raising it in farewell, or in greetings.

The real tug on my emotions came at Malint Tunnel. We all know the story of these tunnels, built for air raid shelters long before Japan was on the march. They housed hospitals and headquarters as they withstood heavy bombardment. The ruins in the side tunnels came about when the Japanese -- some say as many as 7,000, blew themselves up rather than surrender when the Americans charged in with a vengeance.
Anyone who knows me knows how claustrophobic I am, and I was not sure I could endure the tunnel. I would not have gone in at all if I had known they were going to close the entry door and move the transio around to the other side of the hill. I had no choice but to stay the course.
And yes, I sobbed during the whole 300 yards, whether in sorrow for what was then or in panic for what was now. I had cold chills, also, in that hot breathless tunnel, but I can be strong willed, and I called on the courage of those who had gone about their business in there while the world was coming apart outside. Nobody was looking at me, it was so dark for the sound and light show. And I made it.
I have to admit, I kept expecting Paulette Goddard in a white nurse's uniform to pop up in the dioramas. Remember that classic movie about the nurses at Corregidor?