The three of us watched Rescue at Dawn: The Los Banos Raid (2004) on the Military Channel.
The raid at Los Baños in the Philippines, early Friday morning on February 23, 1945, was executed by a combined U.S. Army Airborne and Filipino guerrilla task force, resulting in the liberation of 2,147 Allied civilian and military internees from an agricultural school campus turned Japanese internment camp. It has been celebrated as one of the most successful rescue operations in modern military history. It was the second precisely-executed raid by combined U.S.-Filipino forces within a month, following on the heels of the Raid at Cabanatuan at Luzon on 30 January, in which 512 Allied military POWs had been rescued.
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So Maw told me of how she road in an Amtrak, which floated across the bay and onto shore. As a child, she wasn’t scared but just looked on as people got off the amphibious vessel. Only one of her brothers didn’t make the war. The rest of her family escaped to the mountains.
The old black and white footage showed around one thousand starving civilians (of skin and bones and on the verge of death) being fed by others from aluminum garbage cans filled with soup. Most made the rescue mission by the 11th airborne division, which parachuted down to the prison camp in Los Baños.
Again, as expressed in my old blog entries, if it were not for the Americans, Philippines would have been slaughtered by the Japanese, who actually massacred over one thousand Filipinos in their towns and those seeking safety in a mission.
Most Filipinos are Catholics and believed God has sent the Americans to free them from the Japanese. Without former guerrillas to aide in hacking off the heads of these Japanese, the Americans would have had no support.
Without the aide of Filipinos to sneak food to these starving people, the Americans would have died. I could see how helpful Filipinos are back in those simpler days. However, the times have changed and today’s Filipinos are still good-natured but money and its evil have taken hold of these now greedy people.
To this day, some Filipino people (like my cousin) don’t see Japanese gardens as friendship but as reminders of a past of suffering and death. How ironic history has brought us this far.
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