History lesson of the day

FilAm blogger Belmont Club compares the fall of Sinapore with the defense of Bataan, and how what happened at these places reverberated into mythology far beyond the actual events.

Lieutenant Norman Reyes, the US Army broadcaster who read out the announcement that Bataan had fallen, used a canny text written by Salvador Lopez, a man who would become the future dean of the University of the Philippines. Reyes’ text was frankly religious in tone and designed to play to the sympathies of a Roman Catholic population, then observing Holy Week, with which the surrender coincided.

Bataan has fallen…. Men fighting under the banner of unshakable faith are made of something more that flesh, but they are not made of impervious steel. …
All of us know the story of Easter Sunday. It was the triumph of light over darkness, life over death. … We, too, shall rise. After we have paid the full price of our redemption, we shall return to show the scars of sacrifices that all may touch and believe. When the trumpets sound the hour we shall roll aside the stone before the tomb and the tyrant guards shall scatter in confusion. No wall of stone shall then be strong enough to contain us, no human force shall suffice to hold us in subjection, we shall rise in the name of freedom and the East shall be alight with the glory of our liberation.