Most Filipinos would know for a fact that General Douglas MacArthur famously vowed in 1942 to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese invaders in World War 2 after he was ordered by US President Theodore Roosevelt to abandon the defense of Manila.

“As I came out (with his tail tucked between his legs, some would later say), I shall return,” MacArthur, whose father Arthur had served as America’s military governor of the Philippines until 1902, had said.

MacArthur delivered that snippet as part of a rousing speech upon reaching the safety of Australia following a daring escape with his family from the Philippines by boat and plane.

That’s as quotable a quote as anyone can get, especially since the pipe-smoking general would make good on his promise with what is now a mere historical footnote, famously wading ashore in October 1944 at Leyte saying, “I have returned.”

MacArthur would be good for another, in my mind weightier quote: “The soldier — above all others prays for peace — for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”

This is so true, as while presidents and kings declare wars, the soldiers, first and foremost, do the dying on the battlefields. Nonetheless, a few war-mongering leaders of nations would be executed, including Italy’s Benito Mussolini, at the end of WW2.

But the ghastly costs of war are not paid for in blood and lost limbs by soldiers alone as we’ve seen with MacArthur’s return and what we are seeing now in urban clashes that have been killing scores of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza.

While Manila was largely spared destruction upon the coming of the Japanese invaders, it having been declared an “Open City” and the defense of the Philippines being centered in Bataan, the so-called Liberation of Manila, or the more aptly called “Rape of Manila,” decimated Filipino communities.

American liberators in 1945 flattened Manila with bombs and artillery to minimize casualties among their ranks, while the retreating Japanese massacred at least 54,000 Filipinos and raped Filipinas with wild abandon.

Records would show that the Japanese turned the original Bayview Hotel into a rape center housing Filipino comfort women, including those from families in the then-affluent Ermita district.

Well, the Americans not only tried to protect their own fighting men, the GI Joes, but also the Americans held prisoner by the Japanese, including this Contrarian’s great-grandfather.

It was no accident that not a single American bomb landed on the University of Santo Tomas as its Main Building housed those American internees who were abandoned by their Japanese captors.

As we ponder what’s happening in the West Philippine Sea, with China going by the ageless pursuit of petty tyrants of grabbing another nation’s territory, the brutality of war should always be foremost in our minds.

Nobody wants war, yes, but we Filipinos have had our fair share of it, including its horrors, to be cowed by backyard bully China into relinquishing what is rightfully ours — the West Philippine Sea.

There’s no deluding ourselves though that with Uncle Sam seemingly in our corner anew just like in World War 2, that there would not be a heavy price to pay for our freedom.