The country's first-ever missile-capable frigate, the BRP Jose Rizal, will undergo historic sea trials this month.

World War II was quickly coming to an end. Manila was a jungle of wreckage. Office buildings, churches, homes, hotels, factories and docks lay in ruin. In other parts of the country, people poked through similar scenes of destruction, looking for food or belongings or the remains of family members killed by either the retreating Japanese or the bombardment of the advancing Americans.

Jose Rizal was born a frail, sickly child. To compensate for his small size, he devoted himself to a regimen of exercise and body-building. He had a private pastime he called higante(giant), in which he would stand on tiptoe and stretch his body, legs and arms. He studied arnis de mano (stickfighting), dumog (wrestling), suntukan (boxing) and fencing (foil and rapier), which became lifelong disciplines to him.

Roiling thuds from warship mortars, swishing sounds from fighter planes, the wailings and myriads of deaths probably depict the actual scene of blood-spattered battle in summer of 1942. All of it reverberates to my mind while my passenger ship passes through the waters of Corregidor. Taking a quick video on the site, I can imagine how frightening it was: Below a pale grey sky, a huge black smoke perhaps darkened it, old Japanese warships abounded—outmoded planes dropping off bombs—and the...