I Shall Return

I may well return one day to Corregidor, the World War II island so closely associated with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. After a short visit there today with Shelly and Jim, there's plenty left to see.

MacArthur never actually said "I shall return" while he was on Corregidor. That most famous of MacArthurisms was actually spoken from the safety of Darwin, Australia, after President Roosevelt had repeatedly ordered MacArthur to leave the island before it fell to Japanese forces.

One of the first stops on our tour was a U.S. enlisted-men's barracks, bombed by the Japanese in 1942. Ironically, while the steel rebar used in the barracks was from the U.S., the concrete had been purchased from Japan. Barracks for Filipino soldiers, less than a mile up the road, was left almost untouched by Japanese bombers, as the Japanese were hoping Filipinos would become allies.

After MacArthur's successor, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, surrendered to the Japanese in May 1942, Corregidor remained in Japanese hands until MacArthur did return in January 1945. The bombed out buildings, huge guns, caves and tunnels still remain and are a popular day-trip destination from Manila.

Buildings across the island are pockmarked by machine gun fire, such as the holes on the rear wall in this photo.

Visiting Corregidor on a tour bus was the natural next stop on my tour of War in the Pacific battlefields, adding it to Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Majuro Atoll, Pohnpei and Palau. But Corregidor was a completely different experience than in any of the other places. On the island of Peliliu, in Palau, Shelly and I took a tour on which we were the only tourists. On Pohnpei, Mom and I nearly walked past a cluster of Japanese tanks, they were so overgrown with brush. On Tinian, where there are no tour guides, Mom and Jerry and I climbed through an old Japanese administration building -- complete with the toilet facilities intact, but with no roof overhead -- and then sped at 100 mph down the same runway the Enola Gay used for her atomic-bomb-dropping flight to Japan. On Corregidor, at least on the guided tour, there was much less time for the sort of exploration we had done on Tinian, but with a tour guide, I learned more than I had anywhere else.

And would I return? Absolutely, especially if we end up with visitors who are interested in that sort of thing.

If you visited Corregidor a decade ago, there were no handrails on this building. The rails, along with a rope barrier on the roof, were installed at the insistence of the U.S. Secret Service in preparation for a 1994 visit by President Clinton.

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Guards on the island today wear replicas of the World War II-era Philippine Scout uniform designed by MacArthur.

MacArthur said he would return. He did, three years later, when he liberated Corregidor from the Japanese Empire.

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Our trip to Corregidor coincided with my first time driving outside the neighborhood where we live. Thanks to Shelly's excellent navigational ability, we were able to negotiate our one detour and my one wrong turn with no problem at all. I swear, though, that when I take my new driving skills back to the states, the DMV will probably want to revoke my license. Never in my life have I been so good at switching lanes without signaling, turning left from a non-turn lane and passing on the right.