“Bones of Contention: The Philippine Scouts and the Accounting for their Missing from World War II”

Speaker: Dr. Maureen Justiniano
Abstract: The Philippine Scouts, despite serving as both American colonial agents of pacification in the early 20th C Philippines and then later, a formidable U.S. Army elite ground force in the Pacific Theater during World War II, are often relegated to a mere footnote in the annals of modern U.S. history. The lack of understanding of the complex history and nature of this multifaceted organization has deprived these individuals of the recognition they deserved and their proper place in history, which is why it is more crucial than ever to focus on the accounting for their missing. However, such noble mission poses unique challenges that this paper will strive to address.

To appreciate the complexity of such endeavor and why the accounting for the missing Philippine Scouts is such a unique case, this paper first examines their background, particularly, their induction into the U.S. Army. Notably, this distinction placed the Philippine Scouts in a unique position during and after the war, when accounting efforts for the missing were well underway. The usual challenges of post-war recovery operations in the Philippines, such as loss of burial records and the destruction of graves owing to indiscriminate enemy bombings, are compounded by the incomplete records not only of those enlisted men who served in the Philippine Scouts but also in the Philippine Army, and the haphazard investigations by the American Graves Registration Services (AGRS), resulting in paucity of information. These challenges, along with the difficulty of finding and collecting DNA family reference samples, only make present-day accounting effort for missing Philippine Scouts a more daunting task to undertake.