War veteran hid under woman's skirt to escape Bataan Death March

It may sound like a scene straight from the movies, but a Filipino war veteran has told a United States court that he escaped the Bataan Death March more than six decades ago by crawling under the wide skirt of an elderly woman. Bienvenido Arcilla, a World War II veteran now based in California, made this declaration in documents he submitted to the US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in Washington, DC, to compel the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) to pay his benefits as a war veteran. Arcilla has been filing claims before the DVA since 1950, which have been all dismissed due in part to his missing dog tags, the only proof that he was recruited to be part of the US military personnel in the Philippines. 16-year-old military recruit In his personal account, Arcilla said he was a third year student at Tarlac High School and had just turned 16 when Japan attacked Fort Stotsenberg and Clark Air Base in Pampanga. When Bamban town — his hometown — came under fire, he was forced to seek refuge in the nearby 26th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army headquarters at Fort Stotsenberg. While at Fort Stotsenberg, a certain Private Martinez recruited him as a soldier in the presence of Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, Arcilla narrated. Passing himself off as an 18-year-old recruit, Arcilla said he was inducted on Dec. 11, 1941 as a member of the Old Philippine Scouts of the U.S. Army and assigned as an orderly of Lt. Col. Joshua A. Stansell. It was Stansell, Arcilla recalled, who issued him the G.I. dog tags that consisted of two aluminum plates. “(The tags were) as big as our peso coins with serial number imprinted on them that started with ‘1030’," Arcilla said, but he could not recall the rest of the other four digits. When the U.S. Forces surrendered on April 9, 1942, Arcilla was one of the thousands who were ordered to walk to Mariveles in Bataan in the infamous Bataan Death March. The death march, now considered a Japanese war crime, was a 97-kilometer march of roughly 75,000 Filipino and American soldiers captured by the Japanese troops from Bataan to prison camps. The march resulted in severe physical abuse and murder of the soldiers, with the death toll estimated to be between six thousand and eleven thousand soldiers. On the sixth day of the march, when the group was in Lubao, Pampanga, the captive soldiers were told to squat on a pavement of a narrow road beside a big house bearing the signage “Lubao Iron Works." During this time, Arcilla went for a drink. With Japanese guards looking the other way and “large crowds of curios civilians" partially hiding him, Arcilla’s heart pounded fast in what he saw as a “great possibility of escape". Crawling under a woman’s skirt A group of bystanders taunted Arcilla, who was then “merely a boy". When he told them he was Kapampangan (a native of Pampanga), the group called forward an old woman standing a few paces away from Arcilla. With "a gallon-sized goiter" swinging under her wrinkled neck, the woman, wearing a wide and long skirt, looked emphatically at the young boy in a “tender age and pathetic condition". “She immediately asked me if I could quickly crawl under her skirt and escape with her," Arcilla said of the woman, now deceased, later identified as Victorina Manalese Lugue by her husband Lino Lugue of Barrio Sto. Tomas in Lubao town. When Arcilla saw a Japanese guard scanning his location, he darted from the marchers’ columns and crawled quickly under the old woman’s skirt. “For a few minutes, she stayed put while I heard footsteps converging in front of her. Afterwards, she slowly turned around and started to walk. Under her wide and long skirt, I followed her walk as I crawled underneath on all fours between her weak legs," Arcilla said Townsfolk provided him food and clothes, but his worn-out clothing were not returned to him, including his dog tags that were his only pieces of identity as a U.S. military soldier. Name missing from Missouri list The missing dog tags deprived Arcilla of his wartime benefits, despite affidavits by his fellow soldiers that they saw him on duty during the war and up to the surrender in Bataan. Another obstacle to his claims is the absence of his name on the Missouri list, the records of over 400,000 guerrillas of the United States Armed Forces of the Far East, being kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis in Missouri. Arcilla has no lawyer to help him, but he is assisted by advocate Fr. Prisco Entines, who has likewise filed several cases seeking benefits for other veterans. “I am hopeful that the court is going to take cognizance of this case as Mr. Arcilla is among the hundreds of veterans being deprived of their benefits (simply because) his name is not in the Missouri list," said Entines, a Catholic priest on leave. Himself an orphan of a war veteran, Entines has pursued his advocacy of helping fellow veterans. Arcilla's last residence in the Philippines was in Angeles City in Pampanga before moving to Los Angeles in California with his son who is a doctor. He became a naturalized US citizen as a special immigrant and was an employee at the US Air Force for 33 years until his retirement. - with Jerrie M. Abella/RJAB Jr./LBG, GMANews.TV