SAN FRANCISCO — Ramon Regalado was starving and sick with malaria when he slipped away from his Japanese captors during the infamous 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, the former wartime machine-gun operator joined a dwindling band of veterans of the war in San Francisco’s Presidio to honor the soldiers who died on the march and those who made it to a prisoner-of-war camp only to die there.
They commemorated the mostly Filipino soldiers who held off Japanese forces in the Philippines for three months without supplies of food or ammunition before a U.S. Army major general surrendered 75,000 troops to Japan on April 9, 1942.
Few Americans are aware of the Filipinos who were starving as they relentlessly fended off the more powerful and well-supplied Japanese forces, said Cecilia Gaerlan, executive director of the Berkeley, Calif.,-based Bataan Legacy Historical Society organizing the event.
“Despite fighting without any air support and without any reinforcement, they disrupted the timetable of the Imperial Japanese army,” she said. “That was their major role, to perform a delaying action. And they did that beyond expectations.”
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 Truman signed laws that stripped away promises of benefits and citizenship for Filipino veterans.
Only recently have they won back some concessions and acknowledgment.
Tens of thousands of Filipino and U.S. troops were forced on the 65-mile march, and Gaerlan said as many as 650 Americans and 10,000 Filipinos died in stifling heat and at the hands of Japanese soldiers who shot, bayoneted or beat soldiers who fell or stopped for water. More than 80 percent of those forced on the march were Filipino.
After they arrived at a prison camp, she said, an additional 1,600 Americans and 20,000 Filipinos died from dysentery, starvation and disease.
Gaerlan’s father, Luis Gaerlan, Jr., who died in 2014, was a veteran of the march. She lobbied California last year to mandate teaching about the march in high schools. She also collects march veterans’ stories, including the memories of 99-year-old Regalado, who lives in El Cerrito, Calif.
When the war broke out, he was a member of the Philippine Scouts, a military branch of the U.S. Army for Filipino soldiers.
He and two other soldiers were assigned to feed horses during the march and slipped away when guards were not watching them, Regalado said.
A farmer took them in, even though the penalty for doing so was death. All were sick with malaria. Only Regalado survived.
He went on to join a guerrilla resistance movement against the Japanese and moved in 1950 to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Regalado credits his survival and long life to high morale.
While being cared for by the farmer, he recalls telling himself: “I’m not going to die.”
