Recklessly Abandoned: Manila American Military Cemetery

After Spending last Saturday evening at Intramuros, Sunday we attended our normal early service at church. Since this begins at 8 that means we are finished by about 9:40. No one had any real desire to go to the mall and it was too early for lunch out, so my dad asked if it was far to the American Military Cemetery and Memorial here in Manila. Traffic on Sunday's is usually a breeze so we headed off to Makati and the business district. If you are ever in Manila, we highly reccomend visiting this memorial. As my mom said, it was very moving. It is a gorgeous plot of 152 acres with acacia trees through out. A little tidbit of trivia that my dad and I found intereesting is that the grass on this 152 acres was all grown from 2 square yards of Zoysia sod that was brought in from Maryland in 1951. The sheer number of graves here is sobering and this only represnts 40% of graves of Americans buried in Asia who died in the Pacific region during WWII.

According to the American Battle Monuments Commission "It contains the largest number of graves of our military dead of World War II, a total of 17,202, most of whom gave their lives in the operations in New Guinea and the Philippines. The headstones are aligned in 11 plots forming a generally circular pattern, set among masses of a wide variety of tropical trees and shrubbery. Twenty-five large mosaic maps recall the achievements of the American Armed Forces in the Pacific, China, India and Burma." There is a chapel and an open air building "inscribed with the names of 36,285 of the missing who gave their lives in the service of America and who rest in unknown graves. Carved in the floors are the seals of the American states and its territories. "

The only disappointment to this trip was that we didn't have our cameras. I found the above picture on the web. Below are a few more pictures from our trip to Intramuros. For some reason blogger wouldn't upload the pics before. I added some to the previous post about Intramuros also.