Survivors to Return 43 Years Later to Scene of Battle for Corregidor

On May 6, 1942, American guns fell silent on the rocky island of Corregidor in the Philippines--and for thousands of captured American soldiers, three hellish years began.

On that day, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and his forces surrendered the two-square-mile island to the Japanese. American POWs then suffered starvation, brutality and disease until the war ended in 1945. Many died during the infamous Bataan Death March.

Next month, to mark the 43rd anniversary of the defeat, a handful of Southern Californians--mostly San Diego County residents--who survived the Death March plan to present a Filipino general with a copy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 1945 proclamation that turned the island over to civilian rule.

Their goal isn’t simply to commemorate a historic battle. Concerned about current political strife and Communist insurgency in the Philippines, they hope the document will remind the Filipinos of a time when they were unified in a common goal: to throw out the Japanese.

Why would anyone return to a place fraught with such terrible memories?

Because “there’s something special about the place. I think that’s where I became a man,” said San Diegan Al McGrew, 62, who, as a soldier in the 60th Coast Artillery, was captured on Corregidor and spent three years in various POW camps in Asia.

Beatings and malnutrition were commonplace. “I lost an eardrum when a guard hit me from behind,” recalled Encinitas resident Carl Hill, who was in the 59th Coast Artillery. “I weighed approximately 80 pounds after I was liberated (by American forces in 1945). I had weighed 160 pounds before.

“My father was a coal miner and I joined the Army to avoid doing that--and I ended up digging coal for the emperor.”

Corregidor is at the entrance to Manila Bay. A shrine commemorates the battle in which Filipino and American soldiers fought unsuccessfully against a far larger Japanese force. Wainwright surrendered to Japanese Lt. Gen. Homma Masaharu on May 6, 1942. As a result many American soldiers were sent to POW camps in Japan and elsewhere across the Pacific.

U.S. forces under MacArthur liberated the island in 1945.

A giant copy of MacArthur’s proclamation will be presented to Brig. Gen. Sinforoso L. Duque, acting administrator of the Ministry of National Defense, according to Raymond L. Hoobler, president of the San Diego Council of the Navy League, a veterans’ organization. (The original proclamation is missing, McGrew noted.)

Former Marine and Death March survivor Frank Dillman recalled carrying an ailing Army lieutenant on his back for “the last five miles because if you fell, you were bayoneted.” The Japanese forced 70,000 American and Filipino POWs--many of them sick and ill-fed --to walk 55 miles to a prison camp. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 men died during the march. Thousands of others escaped into the jungle.

“There are times when I can hardly write,” said Dillman, who lives in San Diego, “because certain nerves were destroyed because of malnutrition.”