‘Liberation’ of Cebu

For millennials, the 1986 Edsa people power uprising is distant memory. So how distant to them still were the horrors of World War II and the Japanese occupation of the country in the early ‘40s? I am asking this because it seems to me only Talisay City is hyped on commemorating the 72nd anniversary of Cebu’s “liberation” from the Japanese.

That would be on March 26, when World War II veterans, or at least those who are still alive, gather to remember that period in our history and the younger generations pay homage to their heroism. The “American landing” used to be a major affair for Talisay City. Or didn’t the local government unit build a marker on the beach where American and a sprinkling of Filipino guerrillas first set foot?

I was among the generations that didn’t feel much the horrors of those times until I wrote a book on the history of Tudela, the hometown of my father in the Camotes group of islands. My father already passed away when I started writing the book but my mother, who was born in the neighboring town of Poro and grew up there narrated to me how her family of 12 members survived the Japanese occupation without leaving town.

For us who didn’t experience Japanese oppression and exploitation, it sounds absurd to be celebrating a date that saw a colonizer retake its possession of Cebu from another colonizer. When we talk about the liberation of Cebu, we use the word “liberation” in its narrowest sense, which would mean our liberation from the Japanese, not our liberation from all colonizers.

But Cebuanos felt the need to commemorate that “narrow liberation” because it freed them from a cruel regime. It was like them holding their breath for so long so that finally letting out the air was already a liberating feeling.

The American landing is an important section in the book, “The War in Cebu” by Resil Mojares, David W. Taylor, Valeriano S. Avila, David Colamaria and J. Eleazar R. Bersales. It is in Chapter 10 titled “The Americans Return” (Taylor). The glossy reproduction of old photos of the Americans seeking a beach head in Talisay transports us to that very time when Cebu was still a virginal province.

Where wood, bamboo and nipa cottages are now --those cottages signified the years when the Talisay City, which was then a town, was the favorite destination of beach goers--stood a forest of coconut trees difficult to penetrate without the resources that the Americans possessed. Here’s how Taylor partly described the assault, done after a series of bombing runs:

“As the first glimmers of light appeared over the skies east of the Philippine islands on 26 March 1945, ships of the ‘Victor II’ landing force—protected by the American Seventh Fleet’s Task Force 74—steamed into the southern limits of Bohol Strait. The ships then swung north to the coast off the town of Talisay. The Victor II landing force was composed of the Americal Division under the command of Gen. William H. Arnold, which had defeated the Japanese in heavy fighting on Guadalcanal, Bougainville and Leyte. Now it was ordered to defeat the Japanese in the island of Cebu.”

The “liberation” of Cebu is one beautiful story. Let us celebrate it with Talisay folk this Sunday..