In addition, the United States Veterans' Administration, helped by the Philippine Army, found in 1950 that some people who had claimed membership in Maharlika - pronounced mah-HAHR-lick-kuh - had actually been committing ''atrocities'' against Filipino civilians rather than fighting the Japanese and had engaged in what the V.A. called ''nefarious activity,'' including selling contraband to the enemy. The records include no direct evidence linking Mr. Marcos to those activities.

The records, many of which were classified secret until 1958, were on file at the Army records center in St. Louis until they were donated to the National Archives in Washington in November 1984. In 1983, a Filipino opposition figure asked for access to them a few weeks after the assassination in Manila that August of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., but the Army refused to let him see them.

Alfred W. McCoy, a historian, discovered the documents among hundreds of thousands of others several months ago while at the National Archives researching a book on World War II in the Philippines. Dr. McCoy was granted the access normally accorded to scholars, and when he came upon the the Maharlika files he was allowed to review and copy them along with others. Archives officials did not learn what the documents contained until after they were copied Richard J. Kessler, a scholar on the Philippines at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, said, ''Marcos's military record was one of the central factors in his developing a political power base.'' A War Hero at Home

In the Philippines, the 68-year-old Mr. Marcos is widely described as the nation's most decorated war hero. The Philippine Government says he won 32 medals for heroism during World War II, including two from the United States Army. Two of the medals were for his activities as a guerrilla leader, but the rest were for exploits before the United States surrender in 1942 or after the return of United States forces to Luzon, the main Philippine island, in 1945.

The validity of those medals has been challenged by Philippine and American journalists as well as others. In response, the Philippine Government has vigorously contended that they were properly earned and said the records validating them were destroyed in a fire. When the Philippine newspaper We Forum published an article in 1982 questioning Mr. Marcos's war record, Government authorities shut the paper down.

The issue of Mr. Marcos's medals is not addressed in the Army records.

Like thousands of other Filipinos, immediately after the war Mr. Marcos asked the Army to recognize his unit so that he and others could receive back pay and benefits. In his petitions, Mr. Marcos certified that his unit had engaged in numerous armed clashes with the Japanese, sabotage and intelligence gathering throughout a vast region of Luzon and had been the pre-eminent guerrilla force on the island.

In his submissions, he offered widely varying accounts of Maharlika's membership, from 300 men at one point to 8,300 at another. In the years since, Mr. Marcos has said Maharlika was a force of 8,200 men. Some Claims Recognized