Sgt. 1st Class Dan Figuracion was recently laid to rest at Mountain View Funeral Home.

His passing marks the end of an era.

A decorated World War II veteran who served with the 26th Regiment Cavalry in the Philippines, Figuracion and other Philippine Scouts conducted the last horse-mounted charge against an enemy force in the Army's history.

Because of their cavalry charge against Japanese tanks and mechanized infantry soldiers, they were able to prevent the Japanese forces from taking over a city and held them at bay until reinforcements arrived.

Also worth noting is that Figuracion had previously survived the Bataan Death March.

Shortly after the attack on the American Navy at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines.

Within a month, the Japanese captured Manila, the country's capital, forcing American and Filipino forces on Luzon to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the field marshal of the Philippine Army as well as its military advisor, told American troops that help "was on the way from the United States," and that "thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched."

That help and relief never came.

Despite MacArthur's empty words and the lack of Naval and air support, American and Filipino forces held out for 99 days.  In the end, with his forces crippled by starvation and disease, Gen. Edward King surrendered in early April 1942.

Starting in Mariveles at the southern tip of Bataan, about 66,000 Filipino and 10,000 American prisoners of war began a forced 66-mile march to San Fernando.

During the march, Japanese soldiers beat, shot, bayoneted and, in many cases, beheaded their captives.

Some 2,500 Filipinos and 500 Americans died.  Upon arrival at San Fernando, the surviving prisoners were packed into rail cars.

They were in a hell on rails.

The cars were constructed to hold 40 men; more than 100 were packed into them.  The heat, combined with disease and starvation, killed more soldiers.

After the train ride and another short march, the sick, starving and brutalized captives arrived at Camp O'Donnell, a former Philippine army training post.

While imprisoned at O'Donnell, another 26,000 Filipino soldiers and some 1,500 American soldiers perished of starvation and disease.

In all, of the 22,000 Americans captured by Japanese forces on the Bataan Peninsula, approximately 15,000 returned to the United States.

Secrecy surrounded the Bataan Death March for several years due to a fear that the Japanese would retaliate against their captives if news of their treatment of them became public.

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt's administration released details of the march to reinforce the fighting spirit of a war-weary America.

At the end of World War II, Lt. Gen. Homma Masaharu, the Japanese commander of the invasion forces in the Philippines, was charged with ordering the Bataan Death March and the abuse inflicted on the survivors at Camp O'Donnell.

Tried and convicted by an American military commission in Manila in early 1946, Masaharu was executed by firing squad April 3, 1946.

In the following years, the men who fought in the Philippines formed the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor to demand reparations from Japan and better treatment by the American government.

In the 1980s, the United States officially recognized the suffering and sacrifice of these veterans, awarding them the Bronze Star and eventually classifying them as 100-percent disabled for government pensions.