(Tribune News Service) — It’s time for another try at the gold.

Several members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation plan to renew a push to confer a collective Congressional Gold Medal on veterans who defended Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines during World War II, as well as several other battles with Imperial Japanese forces.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich and U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández are reintroducing the Defenders of Bataan, Corregidor and Attu Congressional Gold Medal Act, with co-sponsorship from Sen. Ben Ray Luján and Rep. Melanie Stansbury.

Japan’s invasion of the Bataan peninsula in late 1941 and early 1942 was a bloody period that left many dead and thousands of American and Filipino troops captured, subjected to the infamous 65-mile Bataan Death March which ended in captivity in prisoner-of-war camps for those who survived. The island of Corregidor fell less than a month after Bataan.

“This brave defense — alongside campaigns to defend the Midway Atoll, Wake Island, Guam, Java, Mindanao and the Aleutians — changed the momentum of the war, delaying the Japanese conquest of the Philippines and providing the Allied Forces with critical time to mount a campaign to liberate the Pacific,” Heinrich’s office said in a news release.

It was a brutal chapter of the war that had a major and lasting impact on New Mexico, which had more than 1,800 soldiers from the state’s 200th Coast Artillery Regiment in the Philippines at the beginning of the conflict. More than 800 of them didn’t survive.

“These brave Americans endured unfathomably harrowing conditions during the Bataan Death March and years of captivity in prisoner of war camps,” Heinrich said in a statement. “The courage and sacrifices of so many Americans who bravely defended the Pacific ultimately made Allied victory possible.”

Efforts to give those soldiers the Congressional Gold Medal go back to the era of now-retired U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, said Jan Thompson, president of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, who chalked those earlier bills’ failures up to “so much politics.”

Heinrich’s support for the measure goes to 2009, when he was in the House of Representatives, said spokesperson Caty Payette. He last introduced the bill in 2021.

This year’s measure seeks not only to give the Congressional Gold Medal to troops who fought at Bataan and Corregidor but also those who defended Midway, Wake, Guam, Java, Mindanao and the Aleutian Islands, the release says.

“We’re trying to honor anybody that had been a POW under Imperial Japan, because it was such a unique experience,” said Thompson, whose father, a U.S. Navy serviceman who served as a pharmacist mate, was held as a prisoner of war in the Philippines.

This year’s bill would also include the Saskinax people, an indigenous group living on the island of Attu who were captured by Japanese forces. Thompson said that group’s inclusion is new.

“We’d rather be inclusive than not,” she said.

Thompson said she believes there might only be a few Bataan and Corregidor battles survivors still living, who would be in their late 90s or early 100s. Her father, Robert Earl Thompson, died in 2012 at age 92.

Jan Thompson said she would like to think the legislation will pass this time.

“I’d like to be optimistic but I do understand that things are quite dysfunctional, which is a real shame,” she said. “It should be bipartisan. ... We are honoring the Greatest Generation.”

(c)2024 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.)

Visit at www.santafenewmexican.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.