CORREGIDOR: The Saga of a Fortress

The authors spent seven years collecting and sifting material, including eyewitness reports, for this story of Corregidor's fortunes during World War II, and their research shows to excellent effect. This is not simply a popular presentation but a solid survey. The importance of Corregidor as the U.S. Rock of Gibraltar in the Philippines was evident even to Theodore Roosevelt when we captured the Philippines from Spain during the Spanish-American War. About 1904 ""the Rock"" was armed as a fortress. But during the decades, appropriations for its maintenance dwindled, its guns and shells were out-of-date and the military planners in Washington, studying the rise of Japanese might, decided to write Corregidor out of their defense plans for the South Pacific. Thus when war came, despite the fact that MacArthur had personally been overseeing our arming of the Philippines, Corregidor assumed the defensive posture of another Alamo and indeed suffered a similar experience. Defeat of the Rock was inevitable. The elaborate caving in of our defenses, the retreat to Manila and Bataan, and our eventual recovery of the Rock, are thoroughly related to our general South Pacific strategy, with plenty of immediate excitement.