For several generations, the rain-soaked soils of Mindanao Island have slowly swallowed the remains of scores of American and Filipino soldiers who vanished in the chaos and brutality of World War II.
Now, however, a flicker of deliverance has emerged: a groundbreaking partnership between a Virginia-based nonprofit organization and officials of the autonomous Muslim government that administers five provinces of the Philippines’ second-largest island. The hope is that the newfound cooperation will result in at least some of the long-lost soldiers receiving the military honors and formal burials they were denied.
“This is the first time since World War II that local authority, historical knowledge, and access to MIA burial sites are all aligned in these areas of Mindanao,” said Mike Henshaw, founder of the all-volunteer Asymmetric MIA Accounting Group. “It’s not a guarantee that the soldiers’ remains will be recovered, but it’s the first genuine opportunity in more than eight decades to find answers where none were previously possible.”
The partnership is the latest twist in a remarkable tale first reported by The War Horse in September. The story began unfolding in 2022 when Ben Hagans, a retired firefighter from Nevada who was born and raised on Mindanao, gave an eye-opening interview to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Two years later, POW/MIA researcher John Bear happened across the interview on the museum’s website while looking for clues to locate the burial site of Brig. Gen. Guy Fort, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer executed by enemy forces during World War II.
Hagans, now in his 90s, told the interviewer he had joined the Philippine Scouts, the legendary supplemental force to the U.S. Army, when he was 12. After being taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942, he was forced to watch his father’s good friend, Lt. Col. Robert Vesey, being bayoneted to death. Hagans revealed that Vesey had volunteered to take Fort’s place at the last minute after the Japanese decided to punish the general and two other U.S. soldiers in retaliation for the escape of four American POWs.
But it was only a temporary reprieve for Fort. He was executed by a firing squad in November 1942 after he rejected his Japanese captors’ demands to order Muslim Moro guerrillas to surrender and turn over their arms to the Japanese. Fort’s bravery and fortitude made him a hero to the Moros.
“He refused to betray the Moro people, and that is why the Japanese executed him. This was something amazing,” said Robert Alonto, who represents the province of Lanao del Sur on the Bangsamoro Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the autonomous Muslim government’s chief cultural agency. Alonto, a longtime government official whose family has deep roots in Mindanao, attended the late January meeting at which the partnership was forged.
The meeting was held in the northern Mindanao city of Cagayan de Oro. Other members of the delegation included three members of the Philippine government’s Congressional Committee on World War II in Mindanao. One of the committee members is Alonto’s son Ruh, a former vice president of the venerable Philippine National Historical Society.
Last spring, Hagans had provided Bear with intriguing clues to the location of the burial sites. So Bear enlisted the help of Henshaw, a U.S. Army combat veteran with two Bronze Stars and a track record of recovering MIA remains, to work with him to find the graves of Fort, Vesey, Capt. Albert Price, and 1st Sgt. John Chandler.
In January, Henshaw traveled to the Philippines to meet with officials of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. He said the Mindanao residents were not only eager to help him find the remains of the four American soldiers but were also willing to join forces with his group to attempt to locate the graves of dozens of other U.S. soldiers still listed as “unaccounted for” more than three-quarters of a century after their deaths.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the Pentagon agency charged with finding, identifying, and bringing service members home, says just under 81,000 U.S. military personnel remain “unaccounted for” from past conflicts. But about 42,000 of them were lost at sea or otherwise considered “nonrecoverable.”
The vast majority of the MIAs—71,792—are from World War II; 46,904 of them are in the Indo-Pacific and 10,466 are in the Philippines. Roughly 4,200 of the missing personnel are Filipinos who fought with the Philippine Scouts, part of the U.S. Army.
Mindanao, a critical staging base for the Japanese, was the scene of multiple battles at both the beginning and end of the war; and 180 U.S. soldiers and Philippine Scouts are still unaccounted for on Mindanao. At least 35 of them were last seen in what are now the five autonomous Muslim provinces, said Gregory Kupsky, the DPAA’s lead World War II historian for the Philippines.
When the Japanese invaded Mindanao in May 1942, some Allied soldiers “headed to the hinterland, essentially to fight a guerrilla war,” Kupsky said. “Some individuals were lost either in the last days of fighting before the surrender or in fights with rival guerrilla groups, particularly around Lake Lanao,” the area where the four U.S. soldiers were executed and buried in a Japanese prison camp.
At the war’s end, one of the fiercest battles in the Philippines was the Battle of Davao in the southern part of the island. It began in late April 1945 and lasted 45 days as Allied forces fought to liberate the archipelago nation from Japanese control.
Bear said he recently learned of the existence of a mass grave in a long-forgotten American cemetery in Davao. The grave, he said, reportedly contains the remains of more than 30 American, Filipino, and possibly Japanese soldiers.
Mindenao was also the location of a “death march” from Dansalan (now Marawi) to Iligan on the Fourth of July in 1942. The march has been overshadowed in history books by the much larger Bataan Death March in April 1942 on the island of Luzon. But both marches were savage.
Hagans was among the hundreds of American and Filipino prisoners who were forced to march 25 miles on a rocky, unpaved road through mountainous jungle terrain in one day. They were given no food or water and routinely shot or decapitated with swords if they couldn’t keep up.
“If it hadn’t been for the Filipino population, I don’t think anybody would have survived,” said Hagans, who attended last month’s meeting virtually. He told the Mindanao delegation he’ll never forget how villagers along the way gave the marchers water, bananas, and rice.
The appearance by Hagans was a highlight of the meeting. The 96-year-old apologized for no longer being able to speak the four Moro dialects he once knew fluently, but said he still knows how to speak Cebuano, the lingua franca of northern Mindanao. And to the delegation’s delight, he rattled off a few words and phrases.
Recovering World War II remains from Marawi has been made more difficult because the city is still recovering from a 2017 uprising by Islamist extremists following a botched military operation by Philippine security forces to capture an ISIS-aligned militant leader.
The five-month revolt resulted in the deaths of more than 1,100 people, including at least 920 Islamist militants, 165 soldiers, and 47 civilians, according to the Philippine government. More than 350,000 people in the Marawi area were displaced, and thousands of families remain in temporary shelters.
Henshaw said the team he is assembling hopes to be in the Philippines by April 9 for the Day of Valor, a national day of remembrance honoring the bravery and sacrifice of Filipino and U.S. soldiers during World War II. The American team will also include members of TERRA Search Promise, a nonprofit MIA organization based in Virginia.
Rocky Gillette, the DPAA’s director of partnerships and innovation, said the agency has more than 125 partners—from private companies to nonprofit organizations to foreign governments. But Henshaw’s nonprofit and TERRA Search Promise aren’t currently partners.
“But we’re not going to hinder anybody from doing anything legal and permissible with the host nation because we recognize that at the end of the day if they’re successful, a family will potentially get some closure—and that’s a wonderful thing,” Gillette said.
The U.S. State Department has advised Americans not to travel to the Marawi area, and the DPAA severely restricts its staff from traveling there.
Gillette said he is worried about the safety of Henshaw and his crew because of occasional terrorist incidents in Marawi. “It would be a truly sad and regrettable thing if someone got hurt,” he said.
But Henshaw said his Muslim partners have assured him his crew will be safe. “We are not operating independently. This is a coordinated mission with regional authorities,” he said. “Every recovery effort carries some level of risk, whether in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere. The difference is how that risk is managed.”
“Every recovery effort carries some level of risk, whether in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere. The difference is how that risk is managed.”
— Mike Henshaw
January’s meeting in Mindanao was also attended virtually by Barbara Fox, a Southern California banker and real estate consultant whose stepfather, James Fort, was Gen. Fort’s son. She spoke of the Fort family’s decades-long frustrations to locate the general’s remains.
“We’ve searched and searched and searched,” said Fox, who offered to donate some of Fort’s diaries, personal photos, and artifacts to a Mindanao museum if they can be properly preserved.
Military historians say Fort’s decision to give American arms to the Moro guerrillas—and then refuse to order them to surrender—allowed the Moros to keep Japanese forces confined to certain regions of Mindanao. That made it easier for Allied forces to liberate the island in 1945.
Japanese troops were terrified of the Moro guerrillas, some of whom engaged in suicidal attacks in which they impaled themselves on the enemy’s bayonets to get close enough to kill Japanese soldiers with traditional bladed weapons such as the kampilan, barong, and kris. The guerrillas also provided critical intelligence to the Allies.
Gen. Fort has been compared to Daniel Boone, the fabled U.S. frontiersman who developed friendships with Native Americans built on mutual respect and survival. Similarly, Fort immersed himself in Moro, Manobo, and other indigenous cultures, and he gained exceptional wilderness and cartography skills. One of the numerous Philippine languages and dialects he spoke was Meranaw, one of the primary languages of Mindanao’s Moros.
Photos Guy Fort Took During His Travels on Mindanao
Born in Michigan in 1879 and raised in upstate New York, Fort spent most of the last four decades of his life in the Philippines as an officer in the Philippine Constabulary, a national police force established by the U.S. in the early 20th century when it colonized the Philippines. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines just hours after bombing Pearl Harbor, Fort was then called on to command the 81st Infantry Division of the Philippine Army under USAFFE (the United States Army Forces in the Far East).
“Guy had great respect for anyone who could stand on their own. He understood the Moros’ drive for autonomy and knew that they didn’t want to be ruled by Spain or the Philippines or the Japanese,” Fox told the Mindanao delegation.
Fort and the other three U.S. soldiers were executed at Camp Keithley, a former U.S. Army garrison that the Japanese turned into a POW camp. Part of the area is now a public park, including the spot where Hagans says the execution and burial of Vesey, Price, and Chandler took place near an obelisk monument honoring U.S. Army Pvt. Fernando Guy Keithley, a hero in the Philippine-American War.
“The monument is a great starting point that you wouldn’t get in a lot of other cases,” Kupsky said.
Fort was executed less than a mile away at a firing range. U.S. Army teams in the late ’40s failed to locate his remains. But Bear believes they were looking on the wrong side of the Agus River because of inaccuracies in a hand-drawn map.
Henshaw said an anonymous donor in California has pledged $24,000 to support the recovery operation, which will entail using ground-penetrating radar and digging archaeological test pits to determine whether a full excavation of the area is warranted. Henshaw said his organization is now seeking additional funds to expand its mission to other parts of Mindanao.
Ruh Alonto told The War Horse one of his key roles will be local coordination, which will include securing all the necessary government permits for the operation. And he says he’s already heard from fellow Moros who remember the exact location of the obelisk, which Ruh says was torn down in the 1970s.
“Local oral history and local knowledge,” Bear said, “are going to be the keys to pinpointing the location of these graves.”
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
