Philippine Scouts
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The Philippine Scouts were native Filipinos who served in the US Army's Philippine Department beginning in 1901, through World War II. These troops were generally enlisted and under the command of American officers, however, a handful of Filipinos received commissions from the United States Military Academy. Philippine Scout units are given a suffix of (PS), to distinguish them from other US Army units.
The first Scout companies were organized in 1901 to combat insurgents and bandit groups in the Philippine Islands. In 1919-20, the PS companies were grouped into regiments and redesignated the 43d, 45th, and 57th Infantry Regiments, plus the 24th and 25th Field Artillery Regiments, the 26th Cavalry Regiment (PS) and the 91st and 92nd Coast Artillery Regiments. Service and support formations were also organized as engineer, medical, quartermaster and military police units. The infantry and field artillery regiments were grouped together with the U.S. 31st Infantry Regiment to form the U.S. Army’s Philippine Division. At this point, the Scouts became the U.S. Army’s front line troops in the Pacific.
The Philippine Department assigned the Scouts to subdue the fierce and warlike Moro tribes on the island of Mindanao, and to establish tranquility throughout the islands. In the 1930s, Philippine Scouts, along with the 31st Infantry Regiment, saw action at Jolo, Palawan.
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[edit] Philippine Scouts and USAFFE
On July 26, 1941, in preparation for the coming war, President Roosevelt called General Douglas MacArthur back to active duty and put him in charge of a new military organization: The United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). MacArthur took command of all military forces in the Philippines except the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Fleet. The Philippine Division, Philippine Department and all other Philippine Scout units were included in USAFFE, as was the U.S. Army’s Far East Air Force. At the time of USAFFE's formation, the unit consisted of 22,532 troops, of which 11,972 were Philippine Scouts.
Of the 22,532 troops, 10,473 were members of the Philippine Division, itself containing 2,552 Americans and 7,921 Filipinos. All of the division's enlisted men, with the exception of the 31st Infantry Regiment and some of the military police and headquarters troops, were Philippine Scouts.
[edit] Filipino Officers within the Philippine Division, July 1941
In 1910, the U.S. Army began sending one outstanding Filipino soldier per year to West Point. By 1941 some of these men had risen to the rank of senior officers, and some had transferred to the Philippine Army when the Philippine Commonwealth began to build up its own forces in 1937. In July of 1941, there were fifteen Filipino Scout Officers within the Philippine Division. Two were in the Headquarters, two were amongst the Special Troops, three in the 45th Infantry Regiment (PS), one in the 57th Infantry Regiment (PS), five in the 24th Field Artillery Regiment (PS), one in the 12th Quartermaster Regiment (PS), and one in the 14th Engineer Regiment (PS).
[edit] The Philippine Scouts in World War II
On December 7, 1941 Imperial Japanese forces sank the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bombed the U.S. Army’s Far East Air Force at Clark Field in the Philippines, attacked British Hong Kong, and landed troops on the shores of British Malaya, simultaneously. Over the next three months the Japanese Army marched through Southeast Asia, and by March 1942 the Japanese had completely overrun every country and island in the western Pacific—except the Philippines.
On the Bataan Peninsula of Luzon Island, the Philippine Scouts, a few U.S Army National Guard units, and ten divisions of poorly equipped, almost untrained Philippine Army soldiers held out against the Japanese. Survivors of the Battle of Bataan, to a man, describe the Philippine Scouts as the backbone of the American defense there. President Franklin Roosevelt awarded the U.S. Army’s first three Congressional Medals of Honor of World War II to Philippine Scouts: to Sergeant Jose Calugas for action at Culis, Bataan on January 6, 1942, to Lieutenant Alexander Nininger for action near Abucay, Bataan on January 12, and to Lieutenant Willibald Bianchi for action near Bagac, Bataan on February 3, 1942.
In the midst of the Battle of Bataan, President Roosevelt had General Douglas MacArthur spirited out of the Philippines by PT boat and airplane. With the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor in shambles, and the Japanese Navy blockading the Philippines, there was no way to send food, medicine or reinforcements to Bataan. The Scouts and the other soldiers held out for more than four months without adequate food or medicine, while malaria, dysentery and malnutrition ravaged their ranks, and Japanese attacks drove them further down the Bataan Peninsula.
[edit] Prisoners of War
The Battle of Bataan ended on April 9, 1942, when Major General Edward King surrendered rather than see any more of his starving, diseased men slaughtered by the advancing enemy. At that point 70,000 men became Prisoners of War: about 16,000 Americans and 54,000 Filipinos. Almost all of the American Prisoners of War in the Pacific during World War II were the survivors of Bataan. Japanese soldiers marched the emaciated Scouts, Americans and Philippine Army men sixty-five miles up a highway to prison camp in the blistering heat on the Bataan Death March. The Japanese guards shot or bayoneted between 7,000 and 10,000 men who fell, attempted to escape, or stopped to quench their thirst at roadside spigots or puddles on the Death March.
At the prison camp, Camp O’Donnell, the Japanese crammed all 60,000 survivors into a Philippine Army camp designed to accommodate 10,000 men. There was little running water, sparse food, no medical care, and only slit trenches for sanitation. The heat was intolerable, flies covered the prisoner’s food, and malaria, dysentery, beriberi and a host of others diseases swept through the crowds of men. They began to die at the rate of four hundred per day.
From September through December 1942, the Japanese gradually paroled the surviving Filipino Scouts and other Filipino soldiers to their families and to the mayors of their hometowns. But by the time Camp O’Donnell closed in January 1943, after eight months of operation, 26,000 of the 50,000 Filipino Prisoners of War had died there.
The Japanese transferred the American prisoners to Cabanatuan, where conditions were marginally better. But as U.S. forces pulled closer to the Philippines in 1944, they evacuated the American prisoners to Japan and Manchuria, for use as slave laborers. Thousands of men were crammed into the dark holds of cargo ships so tightly that they could not sit or lay down. Again, food and water were scarce, sanitary facilities were non-existent, and the heat in the closed holds of the ships was unbearable. Men suffocated to death standing up. The Japanese ships were unmarked and some of them were torpedoed by American submarines. More of the men died of malnutrition and exposure in the work camps. By the time Japan surrendered and the U.S. Army liberated the Bataan Prisoners of War, two-thirds of the American prisoners had died in Japanese custody.
[edit] Liberation and the “New” Scouts
As MacArthur’s forces, supported by Filipino guerrillas, liberated the Philippine Islands, the surviving Philippine Scouts stepped forward and rejoined the U.S. Army. The Filipino guerrillas joined them, and the Army set up new Philippine Scout units, reconstituting the old Philippine Division as the 12th Infantry Division. Subordinate units included the 43rd, 44th and 45th Infantry Regiments (PS); 23rd, 24th and 88th Field Artillery (PS) Battalions; 56th Engineer Battalion (PS) and the 57th Infantry Regiment (PS). The “New Scouts” actively participated in combat against the Japanese Army in north Luzon, served as military police to restore order and help locate pockets of escaped Japanese in the south, and served as occupation forces on Okinawa. As planning for the invasion of Japan progressed, the Philippine Scouts were included in the invasion forces, and were selected to become part of the occupying force once Japan was defeated.
After the surrender of Japan in August 1945, the United States granted the Republic of the Philippines full independence on July 4, 1946. At that point the Filipino Scouts held a unique status in U.S. military history: they were soldiers in the regular U.S. Army, but now they were citizens of a foreign country. To solve the dilemma, the United States offered the Filipino Scouts full U.S. citizenship. Most of the surviving Scouts accepted, and the Army transferred them to other units to finish their military careers. In 1946, President Truman disbanded the Philippine Scouts as an official element of the United States Army, and all of their unit colors were retired.
[edit] Bibliography
- Olson, Col. John (ed.) (2002). The Philippine Scouts. Daly City, CA: Philippine Scouts Heritage Society.
- Olson, Col. John (1985). O’Donnell: Andersonville of the Pacific. San Antonio, Texas: privately printed.
- Knox, Donald (1981). Death March: The Survivors of Bataan. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
- Linn, Brian M. (1997). Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina press.
