In the crowded waters that lie between the southeast coast of Asia and the continent of Austrilia floats a swarm of islands great and small. Sumatra ,Borneo and New Guinea are three of the largest, their names stirring the imagination with remembered tales of wild adventure. To the north of them the more than seven thousand islands of the Philippines are scattered in a lacy pattern that reaches almost to Formosa. And it is these palm-fringed isles that today still carry traces of their savage past while at the same time setting an example of modern democracy for the rest of Asia.
The flotilla of brilliant green islands extends over eleven hundred miles from north to south, and has a land area only slightly smaller than Italy -115,000 square miles .But more than six thousand of islets are so tiny that they are unnamed and uninhabited .Of the eleven good-sized Philippine Islands Luzon,(loo-zohn) to the north, Mindanao (min-da-nah-oh) far to the south ,Panay ( pah- NIGH),Leyte (Lay-teh) and Cebu (seh-Boo) are the best known. The sound of thier names carries echoes of the last war in the Pacific. For the Phillippine Islands have a strategic location, lying as they do across the water route from Japan to the rich Indies Australia, and these fair islands were one of the bitterest battleground of the World War II.
