Word: corregidor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...alarm bells of history clanged last week for more than Tokyo. While the air attack on the Empire's capital was going on, the impatient Americans in Luzon were rushing back onto Bataan and Corregidor. Other Americans swarmed ashore on Iwo Jima-an island as menacingly close to Japan's heart as Bermuda is to New York. The war-worn Chinese rallied to take back a section of the hard-won Canton-Hankow railway line. A jungle-trekking British force popped up to menace the conquered oil-field district of Burma. There were more fires than fire brigades...
Bataan and Corregidor were names which had been branded on the memory of the U.S. The gallant garrisons of the peninsula and "the Rock" had been lost, with Lieut. General Jonathan M. ("Skinny") Wainwright, because the U.S. had tried to do too much with too little. Last week, while one of his armies (the Sixth) fought the cornered Japs in southern Manila, General MacArthur had ample force to swing another of his armies (the Eighth) down Bataan and across the four-mile channel to the Rock. Wainwright and his men were not yet fully avenged, but the sweetness of revenge...
...These Are My Own Men." Douglas MacArthur went back to the staff car and drove off. His next stop was a hospital where some of the rescued veterans of Bataan and Corregidor were lodged. "These are my own men and I am one of them," he said. "I owe them a lot. I promised I would return, and I'm long overdue. . . " Down through a double line of cots the General strode, pausing at bedside after bedside. Down the gaunt faces ran the unashamed tears of fighting men - now the wasted victims of malnutrition and dysentery. Said MacArthur...
Most anxious of newsmen returning to Manila was the U.P.'s Frank Hewlett, whose wife had stayed behind as a nurse when he left for Bataan and Corregidor with General MacArthur on New Year's Eve, 1941. Self-effacing Reporter Hewlett, in the middle of a long dispatch, reported simply: "I found [my wife] today, recovering from a nervous breakdown. . . . Her weight had dropped to 80 pounds. But I found her in excellent spirits. It was a reunion after years about which I do not want to think...
Later they were able to talk, quietly and coherently. In an evacuation hospital they recalled the horrors and degradation they had endured for almost three years; the last days on Corregidor, when the enemy lost 4,500 troops in his final frenzied attack; the death march from Bataan; the sight of Filipino children impaled on Jap bayonets; the notorious compounds at Camp O'Donnell, where the death rate among captives had been as high as 250 a day; the filthy and vermin-ridden compound at Pangatian, where every foot of ground finally was a filled-in latrine; the diet...