Old timers in Davao City still harbor a fading memory of a couple of places named ‘Clifford.’ Then, there was a movie house along Bonifacio Street, and there was a small plaza with the same name. Among ‘singer citizens’ (slang for seniors who love to croon ‘standard music’ during family get-togethers), only a handful can remember after whom these places were named.
Adding insult to the loss of memory was the move in the City Council way back in the 1960s when historical places and streets were retitled after minor figures whose contributions to Davao were as obscure as the significance of their names to our colonial past. Some of them did not even have pretty associations with the cunning colonizers.
Col. Thomas Edgar Clifford Jr., nicknamed Jock, was a legend among his peers in football at West Point; he got his nickname from a popular children’s character, ‘Jocko the Monkey.’ Born in Covington, Virginia in 1911, he graduated from The Greenbrier Military School in 1931, and thereafter appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point that year.
After completing military school in 1936, he married his high school darling and had a daughter by her. When the global war erupted following the Pearl Harbor bombing on Dec. 7, 1941, Clifford joined the 24th Infantry Division and reinforced the defenses on the north coast of Oahu before he was deployed to the South Pacific. His contingent was later sent to New Guinea in 1944. Installed as commander of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, he earned a Silver Star for the capture of the Japanese airdrome at Hollandia.
Col. Clifford’s unit was one of the assault divisions in the Philippine invasion. After a brief vacation with his family, he caught up with his unit by wangling passage on a fast navy transport bound for Leyte, but his ship torpedoed in mid-voyage. Rescued, he was thereafter given the leadership of a new unit, the 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry Regiment, in Leyte.
His Leyte campaign was marked with difficulties, especially the daily Japanese assaults and the need to engage in hand-to-hand combats. Depleted of food and running low in ammunition, his unit only got the much-needed resupply from airdrops, some of which landed in enemy hands; nevertheless, they persisted. As fresh troops were sent to man the muddy foxholes, the campaign was put into high gear. Nearly 1,000 Japanese soldiers died in the engagements. For the feat, he was awarded the presidential unit citation.
In the Mindanao campaign, Col. Clifford was assigned as head of the 19th Infantry Regiment, leading the final drive to free the city, negotiating some 192 kilometers before reaching Davao. But he did not live to see the liberation completed. On June 24, 1945, a day before Lt. General R. L. Eichelberger, 8th Army commander, declared the end of organized enemy resistance on Mindanao, he was mortally hit by Japanese mortar fire.
Col. Aubrey S. Neuman, another U.S. infantry officer, wrote an epithet about him: ‘No finer soldier ever wore the uniform of our army. No braver commander ever led his unit in battle. He was not only a skillful and gifted soldier, but the kind of military man we would all like to be.’
In recognition of his efforts to retake Davao from the Japanese juggernaut, the city residents honored him with a park, the ‘Clifford Square,’ a small plaza that is part of Freedom Park. Not too far removed from the park was a movie house that was also named in his memory: Clifford Theatre at Calle Bonifacio.
Save for Bolton Bridge (named after Davao district governor Edward Robert Bolton), Washington Street (in honor of the U.S. Capitol), and MacArthur Highway (after Gen. Douglas MacArthur), nearly all reminders of American legacy in Davao are either gone or forgotten.
