Hello, Dear Readers,
I suspect some of you realized I did not send out a blog post at the first of this week. My reason was simple: I got lost in a rabbit hole and I had to dig myself out. My plan was to do a simple Google search, asking the question: “What was the reason that no efforts were made to rescue the American patients, doctors, nurses, and Filipino staff who were stranded on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island?” I planned to write my blog about that subject. Starting last weekend, I searched, literally, for days, onto one site and then to another, and another, until…I just gave up. Each site revealed nothing about this thorny question. I tried many way to find out, beginning with the question above, and pursuing each website that looked even slightly promising, only to come up with a blank page and a weary mind. I even tried a different starting point: “What happened after General MacArthur and his wife and son left Corregidor Island?” or “Did General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright stay on Corregidor until the Japanese captured them?” Still nothing of the “why” no help came before their capture.
I was reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein: “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.” And another quote I heard first from Ann Lamont: “If you steal from one source, that’s ‘plagiarism;’ if you steal from many sources, that’s called ‘research.’” This week, I wasn’t stealing from anyone. I just plain reached a dead end.
If I didn’t know better, I might think the answer to my questions were and still are a military top secret, or part of a national security risk. What I have heard, probably from Aunt Sally herself, is that the United States Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor, President Harry S. Truman, chose to channel a good portion of its war efforts into the European Theater, where Hitler and Mussolini were doing there best to lay all the countries flat. And we all know the outcome and the profound loss of soldiers’ lives in the last battles in Europe. May 8, 1945 was called VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day. I did find a quote from President Truman on VE Day, when he cautioned that the Allies “must work to finish the War” by defeating the Japanese in the Pacific. Kudos to Truman for remembering the Pacific Campaigns. Sally and the others at Santo Tomas were freed in February, 1945. But the Japanese did not surrender until August, 1945, when President Truman ordered the atomic bombs to target two Japanese Cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
So here is where my faithful readers can help me out: Whether you are a WWII scholar, or you are among the “trivia challenged,” most of you know how to search the Web through Google or other search engines. If you have a few spare minutes, would you please do a search of your own and send me links to anything you can find? The subject, again, is “What was the reason that no efforts were made to rescue the American patients, doctors, nurses, and Filipino staff who were stranded on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island?” You may send anything you find to MegCorrigan@comcast.net
Thank you so much! I will continue to let you in on some of Sally’s Philippine Adventures, and I’ll reserve enough “stuff” that you will all want to pre-order the book, sooner than you think!
Grace and Peace,
Meg Corrigan
Brilliant Resilience 