Post by buster on Apr 9, 2010 13:18:32 GMT 8
The ‘other’ peninsula
Editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 April 2010.
IT WAS 68 YEARS AGO TODAY WHEN JAPANESE troops finally overran USAFFE or United States Armed Forces in the Far East positions, maintained by Filipino and American soldiers, in Bataan. The stirring but ill-starred defense of the Bataan peninsula marked the high point of the resistance against the Japanese invasion. A grateful nation remembers it today for that reason, but also and mainly for forging, in the crucible of wartime defeat, an entire generation of martyrs.
The Japanese invasion of the Philippines was based on a 50-day plan; the strategic retreat into Bataan and the USAFFE’s gallant stand delayed the Japanese Imperial Army’s timetable by at least three months. Ferdinand Marcos later all but claimed credit for the delay, through his alleged guerrilla work. But the meaning of Bataan, hallowed by tradition in the last six decades, has been large enough to recover from the deceptions and false claims of a fake war hero.
This recovery alone should give all of us hope; the country’s true history will assert itself, and Filipinos will remember what ought to be remembered, despite the machinations of those in power, or seeking power, today.
The extraordinary defense of Bataan is a genuine military milestone. Despite the military genius that Gen. Douglas MacArthur later displayed as supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, he completely failed to protect the country from invasion. Even the retreat into the Bataan peninsula and into Corregidor, the strategic island that guards the entrance to Manila Bay, though called for by War Plan Orange, was not adequately prepared for. Thus, an under-provisioned, outgunned army scattered into Bataan, its chances of survival resting squarely on the hope that the United States, which had controlled the country since the turn of the century, would send the necessary reinforcements.
It was the Japanese, however, who received new troops, new equipment and new supplies. The invading army, while quick to use Davao as base for launching an attack on what was then called the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, needed to defeat the USAFFE in the field to make its occupation of the open city of Manila more than merely symbolic. After finally getting the reinforcements he asked for, the Japanese commanding general, Masaharu Homma, began his final offensive on April 3, 1942—Good Friday.
Bataan fell the following Thursday.
But while the months in Bataan helped swell patriotic pride—to dramatize their stubborn resistance and the dire straits they found themselves in, the defending soldiers learned to call themselves the Battling Bastards of Bataan (and MacArthur, quite unfairly, as “Dugout Doug”)—it was what happened in the aftermath of surrender that left an indelible mark on the Filipino imagination.
The soldiers who surrendered were force-marched through the searing heat of mid-summer to a concentration camp in Central Luzon. Memoirs like those of Death March survivor Venicio Jalandoni help give us an idea of what those days must have been like. In “A Silent Sacrifice,” Jalandoni recounts: “The 80-kilometer march [to San Fernando, Pampanga, not the final destination], taking roughly seven days of tortuous plodding, almost always started at six a.m. and went on through 11 a.m. with no rest in between. At noontime, no meals were served, and our captors forced us to sit on the dusty, sun-seared road until around 4 p.m. when the march would resume. The cadence was slow and arduous. We did not have any idea where we were going. We just followed the man right in front of us, until perhaps he would collapse on the road, and then we who were behind him became the leading marchers.”
The torture did not end there. In San Fernando, Jalandoni and his fellow survivors (an ironic term, that) “were loaded into cattle cars and brought to Capas, Tarlac, and from there to Camp O’Donnell, the bivouac site of our battalion ... Never did I imagine that it would serve as a death camp for soldiers.”
The historians Ricardo T. Jose and Lydia Yu-Jose, in “The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines,” estimate that by late May 1942, “there were around five hundred deaths a day in the camp.”
It was in these grim conditions that a people, taught to think in Christian terms by missionaries from another, farther peninsula, found a new generation of martyrs.
Editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 April 2010.
IT WAS 68 YEARS AGO TODAY WHEN JAPANESE troops finally overran USAFFE or United States Armed Forces in the Far East positions, maintained by Filipino and American soldiers, in Bataan. The stirring but ill-starred defense of the Bataan peninsula marked the high point of the resistance against the Japanese invasion. A grateful nation remembers it today for that reason, but also and mainly for forging, in the crucible of wartime defeat, an entire generation of martyrs.
The Japanese invasion of the Philippines was based on a 50-day plan; the strategic retreat into Bataan and the USAFFE’s gallant stand delayed the Japanese Imperial Army’s timetable by at least three months. Ferdinand Marcos later all but claimed credit for the delay, through his alleged guerrilla work. But the meaning of Bataan, hallowed by tradition in the last six decades, has been large enough to recover from the deceptions and false claims of a fake war hero.
This recovery alone should give all of us hope; the country’s true history will assert itself, and Filipinos will remember what ought to be remembered, despite the machinations of those in power, or seeking power, today.
The extraordinary defense of Bataan is a genuine military milestone. Despite the military genius that Gen. Douglas MacArthur later displayed as supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, he completely failed to protect the country from invasion. Even the retreat into the Bataan peninsula and into Corregidor, the strategic island that guards the entrance to Manila Bay, though called for by War Plan Orange, was not adequately prepared for. Thus, an under-provisioned, outgunned army scattered into Bataan, its chances of survival resting squarely on the hope that the United States, which had controlled the country since the turn of the century, would send the necessary reinforcements.
It was the Japanese, however, who received new troops, new equipment and new supplies. The invading army, while quick to use Davao as base for launching an attack on what was then called the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, needed to defeat the USAFFE in the field to make its occupation of the open city of Manila more than merely symbolic. After finally getting the reinforcements he asked for, the Japanese commanding general, Masaharu Homma, began his final offensive on April 3, 1942—Good Friday.
Bataan fell the following Thursday.
But while the months in Bataan helped swell patriotic pride—to dramatize their stubborn resistance and the dire straits they found themselves in, the defending soldiers learned to call themselves the Battling Bastards of Bataan (and MacArthur, quite unfairly, as “Dugout Doug”)—it was what happened in the aftermath of surrender that left an indelible mark on the Filipino imagination.
The soldiers who surrendered were force-marched through the searing heat of mid-summer to a concentration camp in Central Luzon. Memoirs like those of Death March survivor Venicio Jalandoni help give us an idea of what those days must have been like. In “A Silent Sacrifice,” Jalandoni recounts: “The 80-kilometer march [to San Fernando, Pampanga, not the final destination], taking roughly seven days of tortuous plodding, almost always started at six a.m. and went on through 11 a.m. with no rest in between. At noontime, no meals were served, and our captors forced us to sit on the dusty, sun-seared road until around 4 p.m. when the march would resume. The cadence was slow and arduous. We did not have any idea where we were going. We just followed the man right in front of us, until perhaps he would collapse on the road, and then we who were behind him became the leading marchers.”
The torture did not end there. In San Fernando, Jalandoni and his fellow survivors (an ironic term, that) “were loaded into cattle cars and brought to Capas, Tarlac, and from there to Camp O’Donnell, the bivouac site of our battalion ... Never did I imagine that it would serve as a death camp for soldiers.”
The historians Ricardo T. Jose and Lydia Yu-Jose, in “The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines,” estimate that by late May 1942, “there were around five hundred deaths a day in the camp.”
It was in these grim conditions that a people, taught to think in Christian terms by missionaries from another, farther peninsula, found a new generation of martyrs.