Ferdinand Marcos Biography

Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr. was a Filipino politician who served as President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He ruled under martial law from 1972 until 1981.

At the age of 18, Marcos is thought to have assassinated Julio Nalundasan, a political opponent of his father, Mariano Marcos. Both were arrested and held until they were released by Supreme Court Justice José P. Laurel. Marcos served during World War II. As part of his election campaign, he would later claim to have been "the most decorated war hero in the Philippines", although in fact he received only three medals. Prior to Marcos 's presidency, he served as a member of the Philippine House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and of the Philippine Senate from 1959

The 14th Army began its invasion with a landing on Batan Island, 120 miles off the north coast of Luzon on the same day, by selected naval infantry units. Landings on Camiguin Island and at Vigan, Aparri, and Gonzaga in northern Luzon followed two days later. Marcos would be one of the 78,000 Filipino and American troops who surrendered at Bataan on April 9, 1942, four months after the Japanese initiated their invasion of the Philippines. He is one of the participants who survived the Bataan Death March that followed the surrender. In 1962, Marcos would claim to be the "most decorated war hero of the Philippines" by garnering almost every medal and decoration that the Filipino and American governments could give to a soldier. In 1986, research by historian Alfred W. McCoy into United States Army records showed most of Marcos 's medals to be fraudulent. According to Ricardo Jose, former chairman of the Department of History of the University of the Philippines, Marcos 's claims in his self-commissioned autobiography Marcos of the Philippines that Gen. Douglas MacArthur pinned on him the Distinguished Service Cross medal for delaying Japanese at Bataan for 3 months was highly improbable. In fact, his father Mariano Marcos was a known Japanese collaborator who was executed by Filipino guerillas in April 1945, and the younger Marcos was accused by some guerrillas of being a collaborator as well.

He also claimed to have led a 9,000-man guerrilla force called Ang Mahárlika in northern Luzon during World War II, although his account of events was later cast into doubt after a United States military investigation exposed many of his claims as either false or inaccurate. Meanwhile, Marcos claimed that he was able to get the United States Adjutant General to recognize 3,500 individual claims of soldiers then