U.S. regains honor? or Bataan death march Part 2

The Filipino beneficiaries call their fight for compensation the “Second Death March.” In July 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered soldiers from the then-U.S. commonwealth to serve under MacArthur. Japan attacked the Philippines in December 1941, and eventually 470,000 islanders fought alongside Americans. The U.S. Veterans Administration in 1942 affirmed that Philippines soldiers were entitled to benefits. Those payments were taken away in 1946 by U.S. lawmakers, who argued the money was better spent rebuilding the Philippine economy for the 240,000 surviving servicemen. Faustino Baclig, 87, was one of about 78,000 American and Filipino soldiers on a forced march north from Bataan in April 1942. By the time it ended, as many as 11,000 POWs were dead -- from exhaustion, starvation, beatings and shootings, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. “The destruction, the deaths, the atrocities of the war are expected,” says Baclig, now a U.S. citizen who lives in Whittier, California. “But we never expected that our mother country would turn its back against us when victory is won.”