The first Scout companies were organized by the U.S. in 1901 to combat the Philippine Revolutionary Army led at that time by General Emilio Aguinaldo.

[2] Batson's Macabebe companies saw combat against Aguinaldo's forces beginning in October 1899, after which they were reorganized into "The Squadron of Philippine Cavalry, U.S.

[7] 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).

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.

On December 7, 1941, (December 8, 1941, local time in Asia), Imperial Japanese forces attacked 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.

Early in the campaign, in January 1942, General MacArthur ordered that his forces be fed one-half daily rations because the USAFFE food-stocks on Bataan were insufficient for the planned six-month siege.

Nonetheless, 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.

In the midst of the Battle of Bataan, on March 11, 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur spirited out of the Philippines by PT boat and airplane.

The Battle of Bataan ended on April 9, 1942, when Major General Edward P. King, Jr., surrendered rather than see any more of his starving, diseased men slaughtered by the advancing enemy.

During the March, Japanese guards shot or bayoneted between 7,000 and 10,000 men who fell, attempted to escape, or just stopped to quench their thirst at roadside spigots or puddles.

They also beat and sometimes killed Filipino civilians who attempted to give food and water to the POWs, and at times flashed the "V" for "Victory" hand-gesture to the defeated soldiers along the length of the Death March.

There the POWs were forced into overcrowded "40 and 10" railroad cars, which only had enough room for them to sit down in shifts on the final leg of the trip to Capas, Tarlac province.

There, the Japanese commander greeted each new group of arrivals with the discouraging "Goddamn you to Hell" speech in his native language, and assured the men that they were "captives," not Prisoners of war, and would be treated as such.

The heat was intolerable, flies rose out of the latrines and covered the prisoner's food, and malaria, dysentery, beriberi and a host of other diseases swept through the crowds of men.

From September through December 1942, the Japanese gradually paroled the surviving Philippine Scouts and other Filipino soldiers to their families and to the mayors of their hometowns.

But as U.S. forces pulled closer to the Philippines in 1944, they evacuated the healthiest American prisoners to Japan and Manchuria, for use as slave laborers.

At that point the ethnically Filipino Philippine 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.

General Oscar Hilman, a native of Washington state and an armor officer who had started out as an enlisted man, earned his star in a long career in the Army National Guard.

Language similar to the aforementioned proposed legislation was inserted by the Senate into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[19] which was signed into law.

In 2012, a documentary film named Forgotten Soldiers was produced by Donald A. Pata, with the help of Associate Instructor Chris Schaefer of the University of Utah, and narrated by Lou Diamond Phillips.