Kagitingan: 84 Years After Bataan, the Valor Was Never Repaid
Kagitingan: 84 Years After Bataan, the Valor Was Never Repaid
On April 9, 1942, Filipino and American soldiers surrendered Bataan after 99 days of heroic resistance. The march that followed was an atrocity. The 1946 Rescission Act was a betrayal. On this 84th Araw ng Kagitingan, we remember both.
Growing up in Marikina in the early 1970s, I knew the word kagitingan before I knew its weight. My Lolo Marciano — born in Ligao, Albay, a Bicolano who had lived through the Japanese occupation — didn't talk much about the war. Very few of his generation did. But it was there in the silences. In the way he'd pause when the topic came up. In the way Lola Rosita would change the subject. When you're nine years old, you don't ask why. You just absorb it.
It wasn't until I was older — reading Jose Rizal, then military history, then the legal small print of American policy — that I understood what April 9th really meant. Not just the sacrifice. The sacrifice, I could honor. What took longer to process was the betrayal that followed it. Today, on the 84th Araw ng Kagitingan, both truths need to be on the table: the extraordinary courage of the men and women who held Bataan, and the extraordinary breach of faith that erased them from American history four years later.
Of the roughly 76,000 to 78,000 Allied troops surrendered at Bataan on April 9, 1942, approximately 64,000 to 66,000 were Filipino soldiers — over 85% of the force. The story of Bataan is, at its core, a Filipino story. Yet for decades, those fighters were legally denied the veteran status that American law had promised them.
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Kagitingan — Ka-gi-ti-ngan
Valor; heroism; the quality of standing firm in the face of overwhelming force. It is the root of Araw ng Kagitingan — Day of Valor. In Filipino culture, kagitingan is not recklessness; it is the disciplined courage of those who know the cost and act anyway.
The Fall of Bataan: What Actually Happened
To understand April 9, you have to go back to January 6, 1942 — the date intense fighting began on the Bataan Peninsula, a finger of land that juts south from Luzon into Manila Bay. The Japanese Imperial Army, fresh from its attack on Pearl Harbor, had swept through the Philippines in December 1941. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding Allied forces, ordered a fighting withdrawal into Bataan, betting on a fortified defense until U.S. reinforcements arrived.
Those reinforcements never came.
For 99 days, Filipino and American soldiers — many already sick with malaria, beriberi, and dengue fever, surviving on half-rations that shrank further as the siege tightened — held their ground. By April 1942, troops had lost an estimated 30% of their body weight. Only about half were considered combat-effective. MacArthur himself had been ordered to Australia by President Roosevelt in March, issuing his famous promise: "I shall return." What he left behind were men who had no such option.
On April 9, 1942, Major General Edward P. King Jr. made the decision that had been coming for weeks. Facing the near-total collapse of his forces, he surrendered approximately 76,000 to 78,000 Allied troops to General Masaharu Homma — the largest surrender in American military history, and the largest in Philippine history. King said afterward that he acted to prevent "the greatest slaughter in history." What came next was a slaughter anyway.
The Death March: An Atrocity by Any Measure
The Bataan Death March is not a metaphor. It was a forced march of 65 to 70 miles through the Philippine summer heat — from Mariveles and Bagac at the southern tip of Bataan, northward to the rail head at San Fernando, Pampanga, then crammed into boxcars to Camp O'Donnell in Capas, Tarlac. Prisoners walked with no food, little or no water, and no medical care. Those who fell were bayoneted, beheaded, or left to die where they collapsed.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 men died during the march itself. At Camp O'Donnell, an estimated 26,000 more Filipino POWs died from disease and abuse before the camp closed in January 1943. General Homma was later tried and executed in 1946 for war crimes connected to the march — small justice, arriving four years too late.
— Maj. Gen. Edward P. King Jr., on the surrender at Bataan
The Angels of Bataan: The Nurses the History Books Forgot
Among the least-told stories of the Bataan campaign are the Filipino and American military nurses who served in the jungle field hospitals of Bataan and Corregidor. They are remembered — when they are remembered at all — as the "Angels of Bataan." They worked under open skies, beneath camouflage netting strung between trees, as Japanese bombers flew overhead. They treated malaria with depleted quinine supplies, performed surgeries with inadequate instruments, and cared for thousands of men with almost no resources.
When Bataan fell, they didn't go home. They were taken prisoner. This year's commemoration at San Francisco National Cemetery on April 11, 2026 — the 84th Bataan Commemoration organized by the Bataan Legacy Historical Society — centers specifically on the Angels: the Filipino and American nurses who endured the siege, the capture, and the prison camps, and who came home changed forever, or didn't come home at all.
If you're in the Bay Area, go. Bring your kids.
The Rescission Act: The Betrayal We Don't Talk About Enough
When the United States asked Filipinos to fight under the American flag in 1941, it was with explicit promises of military benefits equal to those of American soldiers — promises made by President Roosevelt and General MacArthur. Filipino soldiers and their families carried those promises through three years of Japanese occupation, through the liberation, through the rebuilding. On July 26, 1946, Congress passed the Rescission Act. With a single vote, it declared that Filipino service in WWII did not constitute "active military service" under U.S. law. Pensions: rescinded. Veterans' hospitals: inaccessible. The GI Bill: not applicable. The promise: broken. Men like my Lolo Marciano's brother Pascual — a guerrilla who was taken by Japanese soldiers from his family's home in Manila and never seen again — were among those the Rescission Act declared had never really served at all.
The Rescission Act of 1946 is the wound beneath the parade. Every year on Araw ng Kagitingan, Filipino Americans honor the valor of Bataan — and then, if we're honest, we sit with the knowledge that the U.S. government spent decades pretending those soldiers weren't really soldiers at all.
It took until 2009 — sixty-three years — for partial rectification, when the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation Fund (FVEC) was signed into law under President Obama, providing one-time payments of $15,000 (for U.S. citizens) and $9,000 (for non-citizens) to surviving Filipino WWII veterans. It was welcome. It was not enough. And by 2009, the vast majority of the men who had earned it were already gone.
In 2016, Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal — the highest civilian honor — to Filipino WWII veterans. A deserved recognition. But let's be clear about the timeline: valor in 1942, betrayal in 1946, partial compensation in 2009, gold medal in 2016. The lag between sacrifice and acknowledgment is itself a story about power and who gets written out of it.
Why Araw ng Kagitingan Matters to the Diaspora
For Filipino Americans, April 9th isn't just a Philippine national holiday. It is an annual reckoning. The Filipino soldiers of Bataan were not defending a foreign country on behalf of a distant alliance — they were defending their home, under a colonial government that had promised them a path to independence and equal citizenship. The failure to honor that promise is part of the foundational story of the Filipino-American relationship.
There is a unique thread in the diaspora that connects Bataan to immigration. Many Filipino families who came to the United States in the 1970s and beyond carried the memory of the occupation — grandparents who lived through it, parents who grew up in its shadow. When those families arrived in America, they arrived in a country that had, on paper, betrayed their ancestors. They came anyway. That is its own kind of kagitingan.
Today, the Bataan Legacy Historical Society continues to keep the flame. Filipino American Service Group, Inc. (FASGI) advocates for the handful of surviving veterans still living in the U.S. And in Maywood, Illinois — a small Chicago suburb and home of the 192nd Tank Battalion, one of the first U.S. units to fight at Bataan — the town holds its own annual Bataan Day commemoration, a local tradition that has run for decades. Maywood is mostly African American and Latino today. The fact that this town still marks Bataan Day is a quiet, powerful thing.
84 Years Later: What We Owe
I think about my Lolo Marciano on days like today. He was from Ligao, Albay — Bicol — the same region that sent thousands of men to fight in Bataan. He never told me war stories directly. Very few of his generation did. But my dad did — some of them passed down by Lolo Marciano's mother, my Lola Inay, Valeriana Presenta Perseveranda.
One story has stayed with me. Lolo Marciano's younger brother, Pascual, was a guerrilla during the Japanese occupation. One day, Japanese soldiers came to the family house in Manila and arrested Pascual Perseveranda. He was 20 years old, maybe early 20s. The family never saw him again. Lola Inay carried that story of her son. My dad carried it after her. Now I carry it here.
My Lolo never spoke of what he lived through. But I know now that the silence was its own testimony — and that the stories that did survive, passed from Lola Inay to my father to me, are the reason any of this gets written at all.
What we owe the defenders of Bataan is not sentimentality. It's specificity. We owe them the exact story — the 99 days, the surrender, the march, the camp, the dead, the survivors, the nurses in the jungle hospitals, the veterans waiting decades for a pension that came too late or never at all. And we owe the generation of Fil-Am kids growing up right now the knowledge that their great-grandparents' generation fought in one of the most brutal campaigns of World War II, that they were promised something, and that the promise was broken, and that Filipinos still showed up in America anyway, and built communities, and raised families, and are still here.
That is the full story of kagitingan. Not just the valor on the battlefield. The valor that came after.
Mabuhay ang mga bayani ng Bataan. Huwag nating kalimutan.
(Long live the heroes of Bataan. Let us never forget.)
Sources
- USO — Surrender at Bataan: One of the Worst Atrocities in Modern Warfare
- EBSCO Military History — Bataan Death March
- National Today — Bataan Day
- Tatler Asia — Everything That Happened on Araw ng Kagitingan
- Duty to Country — The Rescission Act of 1946 Explainer
- Inquirer US Bureau — 84th Bataan Commemoration in San Francisco Honors WWII Nurses
- Inquirer.net — On Day of Valor, House Speaker Dy Reminds that PH Earned Freedom with Sacrifices
- Wikiquote — Maj. Gen. Edward P. King Jr.
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