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In 1945, during World War II, American forces began landing on the shores of Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines as the Battle of Luzon got underway, resulting in an Allied victory over Imperial Japanese forces.

She was a hostage, a prisoner of war, because my grandfather, Major Diego Sipin, was a wanted guerrilla fighter and one of the heroes of the Battle of Bessang Pass. She was held in a garrison in Agoo, La Union, Philippines, a seaside town on the Lingayen Gulf hit right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, for more than six months during the war.

On November 6th, General Wheaton set sail from Manila for Lingayen Gulf, with 2500 men of the 13th Regular and 33d Volunteer Infantry, and a platoon of the 6th Artillery, convoyed by the ships of the navy, and next day the expedition was successfully landed at San Fabian, “with effective assistance from the naval convoy against spirited resistance,” says Secretary of War Root, in his annual report for 1899.

In the course of our travels with the army in the earlier chapters of this book, we first followed its northern advance, from Manila over the great central plain drained by the Rio Grande and crossed by the railroad connecting Manila Bay with Lingayen Gulf; its further advance from the northern borders of the plain over the mountains of Central Luzon; and its march from the central mountains to the northern sea, at the extreme northern end of the archipelago.

Between the China Sea and the coast range which forms the western boundary of the central plain of Luzon, there is a long strip of territory—a west wing of the plain, as it were—about 125 miles long, with an average width of not more than twenty miles, stretching from Manila Bay to Lingayen Gulf.