Anniversary: The Fall of Corregidor — May 6, 1942

At noon on 6 May 1942, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered the fortress island of Corregidor to Col. Motoo Sato, ending a month-long siege at the mouth of Manila Bay. Roughly 11,000 US and Filipino troops, including the wounded and nurses sheltering inside the Malinta Tunnel, went into Japanese captivity. It was the last organised American resistance in the Philippines.

Wainwright had tried to surrender only the fortified islands, keeping the rest of the archipelago’s forces in the field. The Japanese refused: they demanded the capitulation of all 140,000 Allied troops remaining in the Philippines, and got it. The peacetime tunnel that Congress had once refused to fund above ground — deemed too provocative toward a «friendly» Japan — had, in the end, sheltered a government and a headquarters through the fortress’s last month, and could not save the men inside it from what followed.

The Corregidor Island and Malinta Tunnel entry tells how the same fortress fell in 1942 and was retaken in 1945, and the two memorials that remember it differently.