BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

The Filipino Veterans: Called Under the American Flag in 1941, Written Out of It in 1946

They were called into the service of the United States by name, by presidential order, in July 1941 — some 260,000 of them. They fought the Japanese occupation of their own country under an American commander and an American flag, and more than 57,000 of them died doing it. In 1946, Congress answered with a sentence: their service "shall not be deemed" to have been service in the armed forces of the United States. This page is the documented record of the service, the sentence, the partial remedies that followed across eighty years, and the account that remains open.

The service and the promise

In 1941 the Philippines was a Commonwealth of the United States, and Filipinos were U.S. nationals. On July 26, 1941, with war in the Pacific approaching, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the military order calling the organized military forces of the Philippine Commonwealth into the service of the armed forces of the United States. The Philippine Commonwealth Army was inducted into the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), under General Douglas MacArthur. The Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act, passed seventy-five years later, records the scale Congress itself eventually acknowledged: from July 1941 to December 1946, 260,000 Filipino and Filipino-American soldiers served and fought for the United States and the Philippines.

The understanding under which they served was not ambiguous. They were inducted as U.S. forces, paid and administered — however imperfectly — as U.S. forces, and the then Veterans Administration treated Commonwealth Army veterans as eligible for U.S. veterans’ benefits; the Congressional Research Service records that in 1945 General Omar Bradley, then head of the Veterans Administration, expressed the opinion to the Senate Appropriations Committee that the term “veterans” included these men. Advocates and the veterans themselves have always stated the promise in its full form: the same benefits as any other American soldier, and a path to U.S. citizenship.

Japan attacked the Philippines within hours of Pearl Harbor. Filipino and American forces fought the delaying campaign down the Bataan Peninsula and held Corregidor. When Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, the surrendered — the great majority of them Filipino — were forced on the Bataan Death March. Those who escaped capture formed guerrilla forces that resisted the occupation for three years, gathered intelligence for MacArthur’s headquarters, rescued downed American airmen, and fought in the liberation of 1944–45. The Smithsonian’s account of the Congressional Gold Medal puts the cost plainly: more than 57,000 were killed, and thousands more wounded or missing, defending what was then U.S. sovereign territory.

The promise made to these men is the one made to every soldier a president calls into service: serve under the flag, and the flag’s government stands behind the service. What follows is what that promise was worth, in law, after the war was won.

What happened — the Rescission Acts of 1946

The war ended in September 1945. Philippine independence was scheduled for July 4, 1946. In between, Congress passed two appropriations measures that carried a provision aimed at the men who had just fought under its flag.

The First Supplemental Surplus Appropriation Rescission Act (P.L. 79-301), enacted February 18, 1946, appropriated $200 million for the postwar Army of the Philippines — and attached the condition that defines this story. Service in the organized military forces of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, while those forces were in the service of the United States under the President’s July 26, 1941 order, “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or naval forces of the United States or any component thereof for the purposes of any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges, or benefits” by reason of that service. Two narrow exceptions survived: National Service Life Insurance contracts already in force, and pensions for service-connected disability or death — and even those were to be paid at the rate of one Philippine peso for each dollar, half value. Three months later, the Second Supplemental Surplus Appropriation Rescission Act (P.L. 79-391), enacted in May 1946, applied the same limitation to the New Philippine Scouts, men enlisted directly into the U.S. Army itself. The older Philippine Scouts — the “Old Scouts” who had served before October 1945 as regular U.S. Army soldiers — kept their status. Almost everyone else who had answered the 1941 call did not.

The legal mechanics matter, because they explain everything that followed. The Rescission Acts did not merely reduce a benefit. They redefined the service itself out of existence for benefits purposes — the provision is codified today at 38 U.S.C. § 107 — so that a man who had fought at Bataan under MacArthur’s command was, in the eyes of the benefits law, not a U.S. veteran at all. Full parity with the American soldier beside him — pensions, the G.I. Bill, health care, burial benefits — was extinguished, along with the expectation of citizenship that had accompanied the call to service. The Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project (FilVetREP), the veterans’ own national campaign organization, states the effect as its chairman, Major General Antonio Taguba (Ret.), put it: because of the Rescission Acts the veterans were “deprived of equal protection and equal treatment as U.S. nationals — rights enjoyed by their fellow American soldiers who fought the same battles in defense of the same United States flag.”

No other allied force that served under U.S. command in the Second World War was treated this way. That is not this page’s characterization; it is the consistent finding of the CRS reports, the congressional findings in later legislation, and eighty years of the veterans’ own testimony.

What the institution did afterward

What the institution did afterward, for the rest of the twentieth century, was mostly decline — in pieces, over decades, while the men aged. Partial measures came, each one narrower than the promise:

The men did not wait quietly for these increments, and the record of who carried this case is as important as the record of the law. The carriers were the veterans themselves. In the summer of 1997, elderly veterans and their allies marched on the White House, staged an encampment — “Equity Village” — at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, held a hunger strike, and chained themselves to the White House fence; students who had heard the veterans’ stories marched and were arrested alongside them, as the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project’s oral histories record. Almeda was among those who chained themselves to the fence. Around them grew the organizations that still carry the case: the American Coalition for Filipino Veterans, the National Alliance for Filipino Veterans Equity, and from 2013 FilVetREP, which organized the national campaign for the Congressional Gold Medal. In Congress, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii introduced Filipino veterans’ benefits legislation year after year — advocates count eighteen years of bills — and Representative Jackie Speier first introduced the Filipino Veterans Fairness Act in 2011 and in every Congress in which she served thereafter.

The largest single remedy came in 2009. Section 1002 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (P.L. 111-5), signed February 17, 2009, created the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation (FVEC) Fund: a one-time, lump-sum payment of $15,000 to eligible veterans who were U.S. citizens and $9,000 to those who were not, drawn on a $198 million appropriation, with a one-year filing window. The statute also recognized the service for what it was — but read the fine print, because the fine print is this story in miniature. Accepting the payment constituted, by the statute’s terms, “a complete release of any claim against the United States by reason of such service.” A surviving spouse could receive the payment only if the veteran had filed his claim before he died; a veteran who died waiting — in 1946, in 1980, in 2008 — left his widow nothing under the fund, and VA’s Board of Veterans’ Appeals has denied those widows’ claims on exactly that ground, noting it has no authority to grant relief the statute does not contain.

And the claims themselves turned on paper. Eligibility required verification of service by the U.S. Army, acting through the National Personnel Records Center and its recognized guerrilla rosters — records that were incomplete when they were made and then, in 1973, partially destroyed, when fire at the NPRC consumed millions of personnel files; the Army’s estimated loss for personnel discharged between November 1, 1912 and January 1, 1960 was 80 percent. VA received 42,755 FVEC applications. As of January 2019, by VA’s figures as reported in the legal and congressional record, 18,983 claims had been granted and 23,772 denied — more denials than grants, in a program meant to close the account, with roughly $56 million still sitting in the fund. FilVetREP’s researchers later located names missing from the NPRC’s records in the National Archives — Almeda’s among the cases vindicated on appeal, another veteran’s name found mislisted — and advocacy groups put the number who appealed on missing-record grounds at some 4,200.

Almeda’s case concentrates the whole record into one man. A 24-year-old teacher who joined the Commonwealth Army in 1941, he fought under USAFFE, took citizenship in the 1990s, chained himself to the White House fence in 1997, received VA health benefits in 2003 — and then spent nearly a decade seeking the $15,000 FVEC payment because the Army’s records could not verify the service everyone else could see. His service was finally recognized, and his payment approved, when he was 100 years old.

Where it stands now

The recognition, when it came, came in gold. The Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act (P.L. 114-265) — S. 1555, sponsored by Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Tulsi Gabbard — was signed by President Obama on December 14, 2016. On October 25, 2017, in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol, the leaders of the House and Senate presented the medal collectively to the Filipino veterans of World War II. House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged the recognition was “long, long overdue.” The single gold medal went to the Smithsonian Institution for display and research; bronze replicas have been presented to surviving veterans and next of kin at ceremonies across the country ever since.

Almeda accepted on behalf of the Philippine Commonwealth Army. He was 100. “Many have passed away waiting for 75 years for this time to come,” he told the hall, and: “I have waited along with my Filipino and American soldiers for this moment to come.” At the same ceremony, VA Secretary David Shulkin announced that Almeda’s FVEC check — the $15,000 he had sought for nearly a decade — was finally his. The AP reported that the announcement drew gasps from the hundreds in attendance. The medal account and the money account closed for Celestino Almeda on the same morning, seventy-two years after the war. For the class as a whole, only one of them did.

Because the underlying law never moved. The Rescission Acts have never been repealed; 38 U.S.C. § 107 still declares the service not to have been U.S. service for most benefits purposes. Filipino veterans of World War II still do not receive pensions or benefits equal to those of the U.S. veterans who fought beside them. The FVEC fund paid a one-time sum to the men whose paperwork survived — and took a release of all further claims in exchange. The widows of men who died before the 2009 filing window opened remain outside it. And the surviving veterans are now, those who remain, around a hundred years old; every year the class the Fairness Act would help grows smaller in the most literal way.

What is live is the legislation. On November 12, 2025, Representatives Kevin Mullin, Ed Case, and James Moylan announced the reintroduction of the Filipino Veterans Fairness Act in the 119th Congress (H.R. 6013, introduced November 10, 2025, and referred to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs). The bill would amend § 107 to extend benefits — including, in Mullin’s summary, a need-based death pension for survivors — would direct VA to consider alternative documentation of service beyond the NPRC’s recognized guerrilla rosters, the precise hurdle that destroyed thousands of FVEC claims, and would nullify the ARRA provision that limited these veterans’ benefits. It is endorsed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It continues the bill Speier first carried in 2011 and Mullin first reintroduced in 2023. As of this writing it sits in committee, which is where every version since 1993 has died — and it is, nonetheless, a live, petitionable ask, the only vehicle on the record that would close the account in full.

The ledger

This page’s subjects are this section’s largest class and its longest-running open account: a debt acknowledged in gold, paid in part, and still owed in law. The medal is delivered. The parity is not.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The fight was carried on television, in documentary film, and finally in Emancipation Hall — so this page lets the record speak in its own medium. Six films: the medal ceremony in full, the VA’s account, the veterans’ own campaign film, the 2004 documentary, the Philippine Scouts’ story, and the fight as it stood in 2024.

The ceremony, in full. The House's official film of October 25, 2017 in Emancipation Hall: the Congressional Gold Medal presented to the Filipino veterans of World War II, seventy-one years after the Rescission Acts. (U.S. House of Representatives.)

The VA's minute. The Department of Veterans Affairs' own short film of the medal presentation — the institution recording the recognition it had withheld in benefits form. (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.)

Duty to country. FilVetREP's campaign film, made while the Gold Medal bill was still being fought for: the veterans tell the service, the rescission, and the demand in their own words. (Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project.)

Broken promises. The 2004 documentary on the equity fight as it stood five years before the FVEC fund — the veterans, the protests, and what had still not been paid. (Documentary film, 2004.)

The service itself. "Untold Triumph," the documentary history of America's Filipino soldiers in the Second World War — Bataan, the occupation, and the guerrilla war the benefits fight was about. (Documentary film.)

Still fighting, 2024. WUSA9's report, seven years after the medal: the surviving veterans and their families, and the benefits that recognition did not bring. (WUSA9, May 31, 2024.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.