Apart from gunpowder, the other piece of high technology of the day that gave the invaders military superiority was armour plate, helmets, back and breastplates that protected vital organs. Lapu-Lapu and his men had only native Kampilan’s, Kalis and Daga’s, spears, broadswords, daggers and loin cloths along with their skill in the art of Kali and the Kun Tao way, a form of martial art. However, Lapu-Lapu may have been a primitive heathen in the eyes of the European invaders, but he had a warrior’s eye for tactics and a keen mind.
The spot that the boats from the Trinidad, Concepción, and Victoria headed for is no longer a sandy shore, Mangrove has long since choked off easy access from the sea, but it was here that Lapu-Lapu and his men lay in wait for the Spanish and their Portuguese leader.
When the Europeans jumped from their ships boats into water it came up to their chests in some cases. Both protected and hampered by helmets, arm and torso armour they had left off the plate that protected ham strings, knees and thighs because full armour and deep water are a bad combination for the wearer. Lapu-Lapu and his men attacked, unburdened by the heavy steel plate that weighed down their enemy wading ashore. Lapu-Lapu himself is said to have slain Magellan by stabbing him in both inner thighs before he could reach dry land and the first wave of invaders were routed, with the remainder forced to retire.
481 years later, on the afternoon of April 4th the invaders were Chinese and they also chose to land in the same bay, now named the Bay of Magellan. By landing there they had but a short haul to the joint civil and military airbase. Not much further away to the southwest lay the two road bridges spanning the Opon Channel, beyond that channel lay the larger island known as ‘The Princess of the South’, Cebu.
The only usable strip on Cebu for aircraft had been built by the Philippine Army Air Corps in 1941 at Lahug Field, Cebu City. It was overrun by heavily armed Japanese marines who’d been landed by seaplane in 1941, retaken by the Americans in 1945 before falling once more to Japanese in business suits in the mid-1990’s, who promptly built a shopping Mall and business park on the land. It may not have been conquest in accordance with the Bushido code, but it did far better on the stock markets.
A successful military occupation of Cebu as a base of operations required the use of all-weather tarmac runways, and Mactan had the only one.
With the Philippines Navy fully engaged off the islands of Luzon to the north and Palawan to the west in harassing other Chinese landings, it fell to the army to defend Cebu and Mactan.
The PRC had no paratroops available to seize the airport and so it had been left unmolested by their navy and air force as they needed it undamaged and operational almost immediately upon capture.
Colonel Lucio Villiarin was the commander of Philippine forces on Cebu and Mactan, an infantryman by trade and the son of a fisherman; he had spent almost his entire career fighting Muslim extremists on the southern islands. He knew he couldn’t keep the enemy from landing, he strongly doubted he could prevent the airfield from falling into their hands, but he was going to bleed them every yard of the way before withdrawing into the hills to fight on guerrilla style.
Once he had been informed that Chinese forces were heading for the Philippines he had set to work utilising whatever lay at hand, local shipping, and the construction teams at the airport who were expanding the airport facilities and buildings, and Cebu’s quarries and bottling plants.
Colonel Villiarin had few forces on Mactan; the barracks next to the airport at Benito Ebuen Air Base was empty and rigged for demolition. What he did have, aside from airbase defence troops, were OPs covering the shoreline all along the coast.
The colonel had read the situation well and had done his combat appreciation. The southeast shoreline was the territory of the tourist resorts with their palm trees and white sand beaches, all of it was suitable for a seaborne invasion, but the not-so pristine beaches to the north were equally ideal and far closer to the bridges and the airport.
All the airbases C-130 Hercules had left the previous day to move troops and supplies on Luzon, as had the smaller Caribou transports and helicopters. They had huge quantities of aviation fuel at the airport for the military aircraft and civil airliners, but the field was now bare of aircraft with the exception of a China Sea-Pacific Airlines A318-100 Airbus, grounded by an electrical fault.
A fleet of vehicles had carried barrels of aviation fuel to Cebu harbour where they had been loaded along with barrels of diesel fuel aboard the numerous rotting and rusting hulks that inhabit any port in the world. From there the hulks had been towed to designated sites and their sea cocks opened, once demolition engineers had finished preparing them.
Captain Timothy Yukomata of CSP Airlines had slept aboard the aircraft for the past two nights whilst he awaited the arrival of a technician to fix the fault on the aircraft. No technician had arrived and the manager of the airline office in Cebu had left the decision with him, whether or not to fly the aircraft to safety in Australia. He killed the time by listening into the local military radio traffic and watching the army engineers and civilian construction workers. As a hole was dug an angle grinder cut a shallow groove from it to the buildings and after half an hours’ activity in the hole, it and the grooves were sealed with poured concrete and then smoothed over.
He had been on the Sydney to Manila run although the aircraft had few passengers on the trip, mainly Filipinos anxious to return to their families or eager to fight. The airline was part owned by the Philippines government so it was not much of a surprise to Timothy that he was also carrying items described as ‘machine parts’ as freight. It was hardly an original ploy but they obviously sought to get as much ordinance to the island as they could, by any and all means before air traffic their ceased. Carry munitions and passengers was definitely a no-no under civil aviation rules, but he would bet good money that for the past few days every inch of space on all aircraft landing in the Philippines had been packed with similarly described cargo. When ATC had broadcast the news that Okinawa was being invaded and Luzon was under air attack, they had been only a half-hour from Manila, therefore in danger of being attacked. He had turned the aircraft around with the intention of landing his passengers at Davao on the second largest island in the Philippines, Mindanao. The engine fire warning light had prompted an emergency landing at the nearer Mactan International, even though it was patently obvious on the flight deck that the port engine was fine. Regulations stated that the aircraft could not be flown until the fault was rectified but there were no Airbus qualified maintenance crews at Mactan and they were ordered to wait for them to arrive from Australia. However, no civilian airliners landed at Mactan as it was now within the war zone and the passengers left the island by ship, along with the rest of the crew the next day. Timothy had contacted the local military command centre, desperate for news of Okinawa and he had gone bearing gifts, the freight that had been intended for Manila. In return for the ‘machine parts’, which incidentally turned out to be of the shoulder fired, armour-piercing variety, they had shown him US satellite photos. It took him a minute to realise that what he was looking at was not an old aerial photo of the Somme battlefield. Rocket artillery and fuel air munitions had obliterated his village from the map along with the neighbouring town of Naha, where their parents lived. He knew in his heart that his family had been home when the Chinese attack had begun, so he chose to remain with the aircraft and the solitude that the duty brought, left alone with his thoughts.
The PLAN landings were supposed to have taken place before dawn, but a problem had arisen with the engines of the older of the two amphibious assault vessels taking part. The shallow draft Yukan class landing ship had gotten underway again, taking station behind the smaller but deeper drafted Yuting class Xux. It was late morning before the assault ships and their escort of two frigates, a destroyer and three fast attack boats were sighted by a fishing boat, one of many acting as early warning pickets lying out of sight of the islands.