Corregidor - Part Two

At the highest point of the island there is a war memorial in the shape of a flame – one of only two (do they mean in the Pacific?) built by the United States (the other is in Pearl Harbor). In back of the flame there is an overlook from which you can see the tail of the island – you can see that it was a volcano. In front, the path is lined by a series of tablets listing the major battles of the war. Then there is a parachute-shaped dome over an altar. The oculus of the dome was designed so that the sun shines directly on the altar only one day a year – on May 6, the anniversary of the date that Corregidor fell.

Also part of the memorial is a small museum with photographs and memorabilia, and a statue of soldiers – the latter is surrounded by the ruins of the bachelor officers quarters. We also went past the flagpole from which the American flag flew, was lowered, and was re-raised, and then on to the Spanish lighthouse.

Then it was down to the Corregidor Inn for a delicious buffet lunch – chicken adobo (that is what I had with Debbie at the Filipino restaurant in New York– this is the first time I have had it here!), salad, fruit, pine-straw juice (that was good too!). If you stay overnight at the Inn, you can go hiking or to the beach, and you might see monkeys, deer and other wildlife – but we were just there for the day. We then stopped at the point from which Douglas MacArthur departed – he was ordered to go to Australia to plan the balance of the war – but of course he did keep his promise to return.

We passed some Japanese caves – the last soldier of the war (on another island) surrendered in 1976 - and went to a Japanese peace garden built on the spot of a Japanese cemetery (unusual, because Japanese are usually cremated; the bones were disinterred and sent to Japan long ago). The cemetery was forgotten and was rediscovered based on a photograph found in a garage sale in Portland, Oregon. We also went to a monument to the Filipino fighter – they fought against the Spanish, the British, the Americans, the Japanese, Marcos and more (and there is still fighting here…).

In the neck of the tadpole, at a strategic point, the US used ten years’ worth of slave labor to build a tunnel, including a 1000-bed hospital (the nurses stayed through some of the battle rather than be evacuated). We saw the optional sound-and-light show in the tunnel and then it was time for the boat ride back to Manila.

On Sunday (between a 10:00 am pre-conference meeting and a 3:30 pre-conference documentors meeting, which was followed by a 4:30 pre-conference speakers’ briefing and then a 5:30 alcohol-free cocktail party for conference facilitators, moderators, presenters, documentors and assistants – i.e. a lot of work for a Sunday!), I went back to the American Cemetery, continuing the WWII theme. I had wanted to go back and read all of the maps – maybe 20 of them in all. They depicted overviews of the region, major army battles, key naval battles, strategic supply routes, submarine attacks, fast carrier attacks. There was a series of maps of just the Philippine campaigns – Leyte, Luzon, Manila. And there were separate maps for some of the other key battles of the War in the Pacific – Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima. All those names ingrained in the mind are ingrained because they were important – tiny islands retaken one by one. I was there for about an hour and a half, and was treated to carillon music from the memorial chapel on each hour. There are several WWI and WWII American Cemeteries in Europe as well as the ones here and in Honolulu. This is the biggest – over 17,000 graves and over 36,000 names of the missing. The grounds are meticulously kept, the grave markers lined up in neat rows, the men resting in peace. While I was there, some U.S. servicemen in uniform came by – I listened in on their informal tour for a while, which added to the experience, and then it was time to get back to the 21st century.