BENSENVILLE, Ill., May 27, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, a day that will live in INFAMY, the United States of America was shocked by the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The crippled U.S. Navy war vessels, destruction of the U.S. Air Force bombers and fighter planes on the ground, and thousands of casualties resulted into an emergency crisis and distress that prompted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to declare war as the Japanese-American World War II suddenly mobilized the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur.
From every nook and corner of the Philippines, 240,000 officers and soldiers of young high school boys answered the battle-call-to-arms by President Roosevelt to defend the United States of America. One of these young boys is the author, Eli Camaganacan, of the book To Reach Yonder, a fresh graduate of high school, enlisted as private ASN 067287 U.S. Army who recounts the unfolding episodes in that World War II trying to paint the battlefield scenes with truth and accuracy the mind never forgets.
The Japanese victory on April 9, 1942, resulted in the terrible Bataan Death March. On May 10, 1942, the last contingent of 2,000 U.S. Army and 10,000 Philippine soldier forces in Mindanao were concentrated as Japanese Prisoners of War in Malaybalay, Bukidnon. The author, Eli, was one of 2,000 Japanese Prisoners of War who were transferred January 13, 1943, to the Japanese naval base in Davao City. It was here that Eli, the author, got in contact with the 10th Military District Guerillas under Colonel Wendell Fertig as Intelligence Officer furnishing vital military targets for the U.S. Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area that shortened the war and assured victory for the U.S. Army. The author witnessed the combat of four Japanese Zero fighter planes against four U.S. P-38s he described vividly, are they still living today?
The author escaped on December 1944 from the Japanese Concentration Camp and joined the 10th Military District under Colonel Wendell Fertig. The rescue of 13 crew members by our Guerillas of a U.S. Air Force B-24 shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft guns who bailed out and dropped in no-man's land forest area between the Japanese and Guerilla territory who were finally picked up by a Naval PBY Catalina plane, where are they now? The Guerillas constructed an emergency air strip within the forest by widening the 1-kilometer-straight Davao-Agusan Highway making it possible for DC-3s, C-47s, and other U.S. Navy and Air Force fighter planes. The elder president, George H. Bush, was the youngest Navy pilot to land at our airstrip. And so with Major Phillip Blenner May. Do they still remember that event? Finally the liberation forces of the United States defeated Japan by the destructive atomic bomb forcing Japan to surrender.
The author is appealing to the readers to repeal an unconscionable law, the Rescission Act of February 1946, enacted by the U.S. Congress six months after the atomic bombing and final surrender of Japan on September 1945. The law is unfair and denied recognition of 240,000 Philippine veterans of World War II living and dead who answered the call to arms by President Roosevelt in December 7, 1941.
About the Author
The author attributes his survival of the war to faith in God and Divine Intervention in his life. He was born June 1919 near the end of World War I in a village in Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines. He came to the United States as a delegate to a Rotary International Convention of 13,000 delegates from all over the world at Kansas City, Missouri, on May 1984. He finally settled down in Bensenville, Illinois.
To Reach Yonder * By Eli Camaganacan
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