Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Bataan march victims honored
On 75th anniversary, veterans and survivors mark occasion with 21-gun battery salute and ceremony.
SAN FRANCISCO — Ramon Regalado was starving and sick with malaria when he slipped away from his Japanese captors during the 1942 Bataan Death March in the Philippines, escaping a brutal trudge through steamy jungle that killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of Filipinos who fought for the U.S. during World War II.
On Saturday, military officials and a dwindling number of World War II veterans and survivors, including Regalado, marked the march’s 75th anniversary with a 21-gun battery salute and a ceremony at the Presidio Officers’ Club.
They honored the soldiers who died on the march and those who made it to a prisoner of war camp only to die there. They also commemorated the mostly Filipino soldiers who held off Japanese forces for three months without supplies of food or ammunition before a U.S. Army major surrendered 75,000 troops to Japan on April 9, 1942.
More than 250,000 Filipino soldiers served in World War II, when the Philippines were a U.S. territory. But after the war ended, President Harry S. Truman signed laws that stripped away promises of benefits and citizenship for Filipino veterans.
Only recently have they won back some concessions and acknowledgment, including the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.
About 18,000 Filipino veterans of World War II are living in the United States.
Tens of thousands of Filipino and U.S. troops were forced on the 65-mile march, and Cecilia Gaerlan, executive director of the Bataan Legacy Historical Society, said as many as 650 Americans and 10,000 Filipinos died in stifling heat and at the hands of Japanese soldiers.
More than 80 percent of those forced on the march were Filipino.
After they arrived at a prison camp set up at Camp O’Donnell, she said, an additional 1,600 Americans and 20,000 Filipinos died from dysentery, starvation and disease.
Gaerlan grew up knowing that her father, Luis Gaerlan Jr., had been in a wartime march in which a lot of people had died. But he rarely spoke about it or he would re-enact it with rat-a-tat-tat sound effects for the guns that made her laugh.
She started researching the march in 2011 and tried to elicit more details from her father. He broke down crying and told her how some men were so desperate that they killed themselves. Others wrote goodbye letters to their relatives.
“And he said he was starting to write his farewell letter, because a lot of men did that, and I asked him, ‘Well, were you going to take your own life?’ ” she said. “He didn’t answer.”
Gaerlan’s father died in 2014 at age 94.
She successfully lobbied California last year to mandate teaching details of the march in high schools. She also collects veterans’ stories, including those of 99year-old Regalado, who lives in a San Francisco suburb.
Regalado, who was tended to by a farmer after his escape, credits his survival and long life to his high morale. While being cared for by the farmer, he recalls telling himself: “I’m not going to die.”