Patrick Ganio had lived
to see his country invaded, its defenses smashed, and his comrades fall
on the battlefield. But he had lived, and that was no small feat – not
after the Allied surrender and the torturous march that followed, 60
miles inland from their defeat on the Bataan peninsula, all the way to
the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Battered, wounded and starving, the
soldiers who stumbled along the way were swiftly dispatched, run through
with the blade of a Japanese bayonet. There would be no slowing down.
To falter meant certain death.
Still, Ganio had survived. In a war that claimed nearly 57,000
Filipino soldiers and untold numbers of civilians, Ganio lived to see
the dawn of the Philippine liberation. He was freed, allowed to go home
to his family and rejoin the fight on behalf of the Philippine
resistance. By 1945, three years of Japanese occupation were at a close,
and the end of World War II was mere months away. All it would take
would be one final push to effectively expel the Japanese Army from the
Philippine Islands.
That’s how Ganio found himself once again in the battlefield,
this time pinched between two mountain ranges on the rugged slopes of
Balete Pass. Sniper fire whistled down from the peaks, where enemy
fighters had barricaded themselves inside caves and pillbox bunkers.
Control over Luzon, the Philippines’ main island, was at stake.
Read more at: They Fought and Died for America. Then America Turned Its Back.
No comments:
Post a Comment