THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 12, 1994 TAG: 9410120012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
That hundreds of millions of people turned their attention to the 50th-anniversary commemoration of the Allied assault upon Hitler's Festung Europa on June 6, 1944, is thoroughly understandable.
Fewer millions will note the 50th anniversary of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines - an event that will be appropriately honored in Norfolk next week. That inattention is understandable, too, although the Leyte landing and the quartet of Leyte Gulf naval victories scored by the United States were also extremely important events.
The greatest invasion force in history had been transported across the English Channel to breach the Nazis' Atlantic Wall and hasten the European war's end. The Normandy landings were recognized as momentous at the time, even though Americans were already engaged in battles against the Wehrmacht in Italy and the Red Army in the east was pushing the Germans inexorably back to the Fatherland.
By June 6, 1944, U.S. soldiers, sailors and Marines had stormed a considerable number of hostile beaches, especially in the Pacific. Successive U.S. Navy triumphs over the Japanese Imperial Navy - particularly, at the pivotal naval battle of Midway - and Gen. Douglas MacArthur's ``island-hopping'' campaign had dramatically diminished Tokyo's wartime dominion.
The Allies had agreed after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that defeating Hitler would be their first order of business. The lion's share of American military resources poured into the European theater. Americans in the Pacific theater had to make do with less. They did well.
Much slaughter still lay ahead when, 31 months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt had him spirited away from Japanese-beseiged Corregidor in a PT boat, Gen. MacArthur reached the Philippines. While cameras clicked and whirred, Gen. MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte.
That was Oct. 22, 1944. The general had arrived offshore two days before with the most powerful naval armada ever assembled. He had persuaded President Roosevelt that liberating the Philippines would provide a better steppingstone for the final assault on Japan than Formosa (Taiwan) while also keeping faith with the Filipino people.
Filipino Americans will play a conspicuous part in the Oct. 20-22 remembrances in Norfolk of the Leyte landing. There will be a Filipino Festival at Ocean View Park, where MacArthur's return to the Philippines will be re-enacted, in addition to a symposium at the MacArthur Memorial, where the general is buried, and commemorative ceremonies, with music, at the memorial and Nauticus.
As noted above, much of the world won't be watching. But 50 years ago it was. by CNB