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Monthly Remembrance

    
A monthly reflection on a time in military history.

The Bataan Death March

     The day following the Japanese bombing of the U.S.naval base at Pearl Harbor, Japan’s invasion of the Philippines began.  In less than a month, the Japanese had  captured the capital of the Philippines, Manila, and the American and Filipino defenders were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. For  the next three months, despite the lack of naval and air support, the combined U.S.- Filipino army stood their ground.  On April 9, with his forces crippled by starvation    and disease, U.S. General Edward King Jr. sadly surrendered the approximately 76,000 troops he commanded at Bataan.
     
     It was on the following day, the 10th of April 1942, in this remembered event in the Pacific theater of World War III that the Bataan Death March began as American and  Filipino prisoners were forced to march to a camp near San Fernando.  Of the approximate 76,000 Allied POWs, 12000 were Americans.  All were forced to walk 65-miles under a blazing sun without food or water to the POW camp, resulting in more than 5,000 American deaths.
     
     For the force march, men were divided into groups of about 100 for the 6-day journey.  Thousands of troops died because of the brutality of their captors, who starved and beat them, bayoneting those too weak.  Survivors were taken by rail from San Fernando to prisoner-of-wars camps, where thousands more died from disease, mistreatment and starvation.
    
       American military forces avenged its defeat in the Philippines with the invasion of the island of Leyte in October 1944.  Two years earlier General Douglas MacArthur famously promised to return to the Philippines and in February 1945 made good on his word.  The combined forces of the Americans and Filipinos recaptured the Bataan Peninsula, liberating Manila in early March.
    
      After the war, an American military tribunal tried the Japanese commander of the Philippines invasion, Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu.  He was held responsible for the death march, a war crime, and was executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.

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