I shall digress from the usual celebratory mode that always attends the Talisay Landing, which was once again reenacted yesterday, the 69th anniversary of the start of the liberation of Cebu, and write about the frenzied redeployment and retreat of Japanese troops From Leyte towards northern Cebu.
Terry Davenport, an American veteran now based in Cebu, has so kindly provided me with a treasure trove of declassified information from the Americal Division Archives in Washington, DC.
On August 28 next year Terry and other members of the Ulysses Buzzard Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post No. 12130 in Cebu as well as members of the Americal Division will be in barangay Caduawan, Tabogon town in north Cebu to unveil a commemorative marker on the 70th anniversary formal Japanese surrender there.
The VFW post here in Cebu is now busy raising funds to make the marker a reality and donations are most welcome.
Incidentally, there is some truth to the story that Gen. Douglas MacArthur did not want such a surrender ceremony happen as it might steal the show ahead of the formal Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri docked in Tokyo Bay. But that is getting ahead of the story, which I hope to write about in August during the anniversary of the surrender.
Among the papers (and a lot of never-before-seen photographs) that Terry provided me are a summary of the Japanese troop movements and preparations for the eventual American landing in Cebu.
As early as Jan. 9, 1945, or about three-and-a-half months before the landing at various beaches in Talisay, the Japanese First Division (or Tama Heidan) was ordered by the Japanese high command then headquartered at a cave in Mt. Canquipot in Villaba, Leyte, to evacuate to northern Cebu, there to carry out their final stand under Lt. Gen. Tadasu Kataoka.
This evacuation was not an easy task with the seas in Leyte and off Camotes now teeming with American ships while the skies had turned dark with the incessant comings and goings of American planes.
Nevertheless, the retreat succeeded in moving some barges that carried, among others, the general and his command staff which landed in the dark in Tabogon.
From there other barges slowly trickled and mopping-up operations (a euphemism for rounding up and executing guerrillas and perceived civilian Cebuano enemies) proceeded in the next two months right in Tabogon and also in Bogo, Medellin, San Remigio and Tabuelan.
Tuburan was not as badly affected by these events because the United States forces had already built a small airport and stationed some troops there.
When the Americal (short for American and New Caledonia, where the division troops trained before the landing in Leyte) Division finally landed in Talisay without any active armed Japanese resistance and was quickly moving towards Cebu City that same morning of March 26, 1945, the
Japanese First Division had already completed evacuating its troops from Leyte to northern Cebu. It had also been bolstered by then with the troops from Cebu City and its environs, bringing the total number of Japanese troops in Cebu to 14,900.
That is why the Talisay Landing ceremonies, which show a reenactment of Japanese troops fighting American and Filipino soldiers, is nothing more than a ceremony as not a single Japanese soldier was guarding the beaches when it happened, leaving it strewn instead with land mines and other buried explosives which resulted in casualties on the American side.
The Japanese Cebu Defense Unit (CDU), as it was called, was up in the hills of Babag where they had set up anti-aircraft guns that allowed firing at American planes and ships almost at eye level.
Fighting in the hills of Babag Ridge would eventually ensue by the first week of April until April 17, 1945 when the CDU retreated hastily, abandoning a makeshift hospital located inside a set of tunnels below where a retirement and retreat house of the Redemptorist Fathers still stands today with its lawn decorated with two barrels of Japanese anti-aircraft guns that the late Fr. Rudy Romano and his seminary classmates fortuitously saved from the junk shop by bringing them down from the ridge in the late ‘60s. (Oh what stories Fr. Rudy would have told us had he not been abducted by the military in 1982.
His body remains unfound and he is still listed as a desaparecido. But this noble act of saving these heavy pieces of history also helps provide us with a glimpse at his and his seminary classmates’ concern for history.)
The CDU marched through the rugged terrain that characterizes the Cebu cordillera, eventually reaching the relative safety of Lugo and Sagay, which had been under Japanese control – but not for long.
In this unit were Japanese female nurses who would eventually join the nearly 10,000 Japanese officers and men who eventually surrendered after four months of dogged but futile resistance in northern Cebu.
I end on a happy note. Mrs. Esusebia Ycot, who was then a 5-year-old witness to the surrender of Japanese soldiers in her own backyard, has generously donated 12 square meters of her property for everyone to finally remember those days of 1945 when Cebu was finally rid of three years of darkness and brutality.
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