McCoy into United States Army records showed that most of Marcos's medals were fraudulent. According to Dr. Ricardo T. Jose, former chair 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. Marcos claimed he received the medal from MacArthur in 1945, but the latter, following his retreat to Bataan, then to Australia, was only able to return to the Philippines in 1944, when his troops landed in Leyte. The following year, after the surrender of Japan, MacArthur was installed as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces and was tasked with demobilizing Japan and framing its constitution, allowing little to no time to meet Marcos. No archival sources or published works related to MacArthur allude to him personally pinning the medal on Marcos as well. Jose further said that if Marcos did indeed single-handedly delay the advances of the Japanese, he would have likely been bestowed with the Medal of Honor, as was the case with Jose Calugas, whose actions in 1942 impeded Japanese forces by two days. Indeed, as of August 2021, searching through the list of recipients of the Medal of Honor, Purple Heart, and Silver Star yields no result for Ferdinand Marcos. John Sharkey of The Washington Post found records that Marcos was on the list of those that were released due to either "having severe health problems and those whose families have cooperated with the Japanese military authorities." Since Marcos's name did not appear in the 1942 Manila Tribune list of ailing prisoners that were released by the Japanese, Sharkey believed that Marcos may have been freed due to his connections with his father. Mariano Marcos was known to have collaborated with Japanese authorities, and at the end of the war was caught by Filipino guerrillas and was tied to four water buffalos and was quartered. His remains were also displayed in public by the guerrillas. Ferdinand Marcos in turn had strong affiliations with the Japanese-sponsored President Jose P. Laurel. There are accounts of Marcos being a member of Presidential Security Group. It was Laurel who single-handedly penned the reversal of the conviction of the young Marcos's case over the murder of Julio Nalundasan. American guerrillas who operated in the Ilocos