Corregidor

Being in the Philippines presented me with an opportunity I couldn't pass up, I had to go see 'Fortress Corregidor'. A day trip was being organized from the Oriskany to go tour Corregidor and I hastened to sign-up. About twenty of us queued up at the bus stop one bright morning and boarded a chartered bus. Our bus driver was an affable Filipino that made the first stop -- at his house! He had a new California style stucco house with a tin roof and he proudly introduced us to his wife and children. Meeting his family was nice, but we were rarin' for adventure! Soon we were driving down the Bataan peninsula seeing some of the loveliest scenery on God's great Earth. It was Spring going into summer and the woods and jungle were alive with new growth in many vibrant shades of green and brown. It was early on a Saturday and people were starting to bustle about on week-end business and pleasure. Buses and jeepnies became numerous and we were soon over-whelmed with all of the points-of-interest and historical facts about the Bataan death march related by our driver. Most memorable was seeing the large cross on Mount Samat marking the battle and, finally, the surrender of Major General Edward P. King and his Battling Bastards of Bataan to the Japanese in 1942.

Arriving at Manila Bay, we discovered that our transportation to Corregidor consisted of canoes with the addition to each one of a Briggs and Stratton engine with a small prop. With shrugs we climbed aboard these native boats updated to the twentieth century, after all we were sailors and able to swim. Those delightful little contraptions got us to Corregidor with no problems, although we did have an impressive and close view of the new hydrofoil ferry plying the Manila waters. Disembarking right at the pier serving Bottom-side, we were allowed to venture only a short distance into the Malinta tunnel as it was now considered a hazard site and dangerous. You could still sense the desperation and angst experienced there over thirty years ago(then). My memory has burped, I don't remember whether we rode jeeps or a bus to explore the island. I was agog at our first glimpse of the visible ferocity of the fighting at bottom-side, yes, even those thirty years later. Concrete walls on the barracks three-feet thick, decimated by machine gun fire. Destroyed and abandoned equipment, both American and Japanese -- remember we took it back. As we continued up through middle-side we saw rusting anti-aircraft guns, destroyed cannons, burnt out jeeps, a ten-foot thick concrete roof blown off of an ammo dump and over top of a long gun. We were much sombered realizing how much of the humanity and suffering had been dimmed by those thirty-odd years of mother nature......

We reached top-side and the bright, if hazy, panoramic view of Manila Bay, the Pacific, and the diminishing 'tail' of Corregidor Island. A spiffy new visitors center and memorial were in the process of being completed, reminiscing Veterans were becoming big tourist business. We ate there, of a lunch brought with us, and wondered about a bit before riding back down the same road we had come up on, re-examining the burnt out and blasted buildings, seeing for the first time the damaged trees that had recovered or been moldering back into the jungle. As we got back into our boats at the wharf, it struck me that it was probably the same one MacArthur had departed from. I wondered if it too would end up off-limits to the public, only to be viewed from a distance as most of the Malinta tunnel. It was early dusk as we rode back across Manila Bay in our canoes, three feet off the water and experiencing the increased high tide traffic that was rolling past. There was an ambiance and vitality as we got closer to shore that reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Honest, Walt did a good job.

We dried out fairly quickly once ashore and boarded our bus back to Subic crusty and tired.

A number of guys dozed off as we headed back up the Bataan Peninsula, but everybody was awake as the cross came into sight.