The Incomplete Story of 21 U.S. Army Scouts From Bangued, Abra in the Philippines
There is a story I've come across here in Bangued, Abra in northern Luzon of 21 young men from the town who served as Filipino Scouts with the U.S. Army during World War Two. The story is recounted in a newspaper story that is linked here. Much of the source material for the story comes from a book written in English by a local author: The Pain of Bliss by Vesta Bourbon Banez. The book was published in the Philippines in 2008. The one copy in the U.S. is at the San Francisco Public Library. I hope to find a copy somewhere before I leave here, because it will help me with this story and the bombing of the town by the Americans that happened later.
The basics of the story that gets cloudy in the details is that on November 16th 1943, these 21 young men who had served with U.S. forces were rounded up and brought to the Japanese. Their identities may have been uncovered by secret police or by locals ratting them out. They were brought to a structure near the Sinalang Bridge in Angad Barangay where they were tied inside and the structure was burned. At one point, there was a memorial that has since been lost. There should be a memorial again if only to tell the untold story in full for history. Those are the basic facts and there are some conflicting details, but it is far from a complete story.
The newspaper story reports that five of the soldiers were listed as missing in action. It may have been that in the confusion around the surrender of U.S. forces in 1942 they escaped and made it back to their home to live, only to be discovered later. Since their deaths were never recorded by U.S. forces, they are still MIA (Missing in Action) and this is a story that cold lead to some closure of those cases. I looked up a few of the names and they are indeed still MIA.
My first question is was this event reported as a war crime and recorded by the Americans? If so, there should be a record somewhere in U.S. archives. It may be that it was recorded, but the names were never connected with the event.What happened to the remains? Were they buried in some fashion? Are there Japanese records that might corroborate the story or was this a sort of "off the books" atrocity? it is hard to imagine that a story that seems to have been widely known locally at the time (it seems to have been forgotten) and the men honored that it wouldn't have been recorded. The first step is to dig into U.S. records which may lead to other records and names that will shed more light on the story of American soldiers (and they were Americans in service if not in citizenship) that seem to have been forgotten.
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