I Saw the Fall of the Philippines

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1943. Hardcover. fair, ex-lib.. ciii, [4], 323, [1] pages. Illustrations. Some soiling inside hinges. Ex-library copy with usual library markings. Name in ink inside front board. Boards and spine scuffed, soiled, and worn. Carlos P. Romulo, one of the most decorated Filipinos of all time, told the story of the Filipino-American defense against Japanese invasion and aggression. Because he worked as both MacArthur's aide-de-camp and chief public relations officer, he was privy to what was occurring around the Philippines. The author was a Filipino editor, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and personal aide to General MacArthur. The War Department requested that certain statements be deleted. "The request came to late for the book to be reset. These deletions are indicated by heavy black lines". This printing is a rare example of specific military censorship during the Second World War. Derived from a Kirkus review: In charge of press and radio during the siege of the Philippines, close friend of General MacArthur and now his aide de camp, Col. Romulo writes his version of the story of Corregidor and Bataan and the boys that ""were trapped like rats but dying like men"". When Manila was declared an open city, Romulo joined MacArthur at Corregidor, and from there carried on his ""Voice of Freedom"" radio station to the boys on the front lines. He went frequently to the ""fox holes of Bataan"" to carry news, encouragement and hope; and there witnessed the horrors they endured of hunger, gangrene, malaria, dysentery. When MacArthur was ordered out, Romulo stayed on, though he knew there was a heavy price on his head. Finally, with the fall of Bataan, he was ordered to leave and was actually ""last man out"" in an old amphibian plane. Another version of an heroic saga, which reads movingly.