PREFACE

I don't recall meeting Al McGrew, because it soon seemed that I'd known him most of my life. I recall seeing him sitting quietly amidst the sharp green grass overgrowing the ruins of what used to be Battery Ramsey, Corregidor. What was he thinking, all these years after? What brought him back to Corregidor, year after year, to commune with ghosts? 

I suspect he was recharging his batteries. 

In a way, we all know Al.  He's the naive country kid who left home in search of adventure, and found the great Pacific War instead.  He aged from seventeen to forty in six months. Yet with the rising and falling of empires around him, Al emerged from his POW years a peculiar amalgam of strengths and weaknesses. Nietzsche said that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and Al's memories of all those years ago are clearer than what he did yesterday, and we are all the better for it.     

We don't own history, we only hold it in trust for our children. People who experience, achieve and survive something extraordinary, when others have not, voluntarily shoulder certain obligations upon themselves, not just for society, but also for those of their contemporaries who did not survive.

One of the more poignant obligations of survival is to relate the experience, on behalf of those who did not. The knowledge of surviving veterans, whose time is shortly upon them, is a living treasure. Their memories,  but our treasure. 

One of the obligations of the generation that follows them is to record their human experiences, their humanity. These fragments  are our treasures in trust, valuable only when we can renew their experience by passing them on.  So-called historians can come along a hundred years later, and tell us what their history was. Yet only those of us who can sit with the veterans in their parlour, and who listen closely, can record their humanity.

Sit now with a Survivor. 

Paul F. Whitman
The Corregidor Historic Society

 

READ ON

Preface | Frontispiece | The Road to Adventure | Angel Island | Across the Pacific | Corregidor April 22, 1941 | Duty Assignment | Battery Hartford | To The Field | War | Surrendered!| 92nd Garage | The Spoils | Goodbye Corregidor | Bilibid | Cabanatuan Camp III | Pasay School | Nichols Field | Feet on Fire | Survival | Goodbye Pasay | Noto Maru | Moji Japan to Omori | Kawasaki, Nishin Flour Mill | Air Raid | Fire Bombs! | Out of Kawasaki | Suwa in the Mountains | The War is Over | The Yanks and Tanks | In The Air To Where? | Luzon? Again! 29th Replacement | Gray Cruise Ship to Home | Madigan General Hospital, Seattle | Last Leg to Home | Fletcher General Hospital, Cambridge Ohio |

 

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© 2002 Al McGrew