Name streets after our World War II heroes

When this column comes out today, I will be flying on board an Emirates Airlines plane somewhere over India on my way to Dubai for a short stopover on my way to Barcelona, my very first trip to what many Filipinos often say is our Mother country, Spain. This is the first part of my first full family vacation with my brother and sister, where we would have our very first Mediterranean cruise from Barcelona to the Greek isles and end up in Rome. In short this is a first for the family to be on this vacation of a lifetime.

While we are officially on this family vacation, for as long as we have internet connection, we will continue writing our columns, featuring the places that we will be visiting. Since this will be the first time for me to visit many places in the Mediterranean, I will try to do a video of this vacation using my iPhone and my Panasonic camera. If the quality is good, then I just might feature it on our talkshow Straight from the Sky. Wish me luck and see you back in Cebu by end of September.

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In support of the call of my fellow columnist, Atty. Paul Oaminal, I fully concur with what he wrote over the weekend about something that I have been writing long ago, but somehow the Cebu City Council never got into enacting it. I'm referring to the ordinance that would give honor to the late Col. James Cushing, the American miner who was on top of the guerilla operations in the mountains of Cebu, specifically in Barangay Tabunan where the headquarters of the Cebu Area Command (CAC) was located. Indeed until today we don't have a street or even a statue to honor the man who was Governor, Mayor or King of Cebu during the dark days of World War II.

But what I got from the column of Atty. Oaminal is that five years after the death of Col. Cushing (he was on board a ferryboat on his way to Palawan when he died on Aug. 26, 1968) five years later, the Cebu City Council did enact an ordinance naming a street after Col. Cushing. But it was located inside the Espina Subdivision in Barangay Capitol Site, on a private property, which is why the ordinance could not be implemented,

At this point, we urge the Cebu City Council once more to resolve this issue once and for all, perhaps with the Cebu City Historical and Cultural Commission (CHAC) taking the lead. If we enjoy our precious freedom today, it is because of the valiant efforts of our Cebuano guerillas who fought the Japanese occupiers for three years in Cebu under the command of Col. James Cushing.

While the CHAC will hopefully be deliberating this issue, allow me to include a street named after my uncle, the late Col. Manuel F. Segura who died on December 2013. It was Col. Segura's books, "Tabunan" and the "Koga Papers" that brought into the limelight the exploits of Cebu's guerillas during the dark days of World War II. His book "Koga Papers" has been used by other international authors like Steven Trent Smith's "The Rescue" which featured the capture of the highest ranking Japanese Imperial Naval Officer Admiral Shigeru Fukodomei, the chief of staff of Admiral Mineichi Koga, whose plane was lost while flying from Koror, Palau, on their way to Davao. They ran into a storm and crashed near San Fernando, Cebu.

The captured Japanese officers carried the Z-Plan or Sho-Plan for the defense of the Philippines. Col. Cushing then sent the Z-Plan documents to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Australia, which triggered him to move the invasion of the Philippines to October 1944 instead of December of that year. Thanks to Koga Papers, the exploits of the Cebu Guerillas have been featured in Prologue, the official magazine of the United States archives.

The problem with us Cebuanos is that we do not give any importance to our history. For instance the Heritage Monument in Parian as sculpted by Ed Castrillo do not even have the statue of Leon Kilat of Tres de Abril fame, not even a statue of our World War II veterans. This is because we got a Tagalog to do this monument who knows nothing about Cebu history. So naming a street after Col. Cushing and Col. Segura is just right.