Bataan Death March (1942): Allied Prisoners in the Philippines

The Bataan Death March was the forced transfer of American and Filipino prisoners of war on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in April 1942. After the surrender of about 76,000 troops on the Bataan Peninsula on 9 April 1942, Japanese forces marched them north under brutal conditions to Camp O’Donnell. Thousands died along the way from exhaustion, disease, thirst and killings by guards, and thousands more died in the camp, making the march one of the most notorious atrocities of the Pacific War.

Background: the defence of Bataan

Japan attacked the Philippines, then a US commonwealth preparing for independence, on 8 December 1941 (local time), only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese aircraft destroyed much of the US air force on the ground at Clark Field. On 22 December the main Japanese landings came at Lingayen Gulf under Lieutenant-General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Army.

General Douglas MacArthur, commanding US Army Forces in the Far East, fell back on a pre-war plan to withdraw to the mountainous Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor, while declaring Manila an open city. The withdrawal succeeded, but large stocks of food and medicine were left behind. Soon more than 80,000 soldiers and some 26,000 civilian refugees were crowded onto Bataan on half rations or less.

Most of the defenders were Filipino. Alongside the US Army’s Philippine Division, which included the highly regarded Philippine Scouts, were the hastily mobilised and poorly equipped divisions of the Philippine Army. In January and February 1942 they stopped Japanese attacks along the main defensive line and destroyed Japanese landings on the peninsula’s west coast in the Battle of the Points. Cut off from reinforcement, the defenders called themselves the “Battling Bastards of Bataan”, after a bitter verse that declared they had no mama, no papa and no Uncle Sam.

The defenders held out for three months, defeating early Japanese attacks. On President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s orders, MacArthur left Corregidor for Australia on 11–12 March 1942, promising on arrival that he would return. Starvation, malaria and dysentery steadily wore down the troops. When Japanese forces launched a final offensive on 3 April, the line collapsed. On 9 April 1942 Major-General Edward P. King Jr. surrendered the forces on Bataan, against his superiors’ orders, to avoid a massacre of his exhausted men.

The march

The Japanese had expected about 25,000 prisoners and had made plans and transport arrangements on that basis. Instead they faced roughly 76,000, of whom about 12,000 were American and 64,000 Filipino, many of them sick and starving. Estimates of the total vary from about 60,000 to 80,000.

Most prisoners began from Mariveles at the southern tip of the peninsula or from Bagac on the west coast and walked north along the main road to San Fernando, Pampanga, a distance of about 100 km (65 miles). They marched in columns in the tropical heat, often with little or no food or water. Men who drank from roadside wells or ditches risked being beaten or killed, and many caught dysentery from contaminated water.

Guards beat, bayoneted or shot prisoners who fell behind or could not continue, and some were deliberately killed. Treatment varied greatly between groups and guards: some columns were allowed water and rest, others were treated with extreme brutality. Filipino civilians along the road who tried to pass food or water to the prisoners were sometimes punished.

At San Fernando the prisoners were crammed into small metal railway boxcars, where some suffocated in the heat, for the journey to Capas in Tarlac. From there they walked the final 13 km (8 miles) to Camp O’Donnell, a half-built Philippine Army training camp. Most groups made the journey between about 10 April and late April.

Camp O’Donnell

Conditions at Camp O’Donnell were catastrophic. The camp had one or two water taps for thousands of men, almost no medicine, and crowded, unsanitary barracks. Malaria, dysentery and beriberi spread rapidly. Burial details worked every day to bury the dead.

An estimated 1,500 Americans and more than 20,000 Filipinos died at the camp within a few months. Filipino prisoners were gradually paroled from mid-1942, while Americans were moved to Cabanatuan and later many were shipped to Japan, Taiwan and Manchuria as forced labourers on crowded “hell ships”, on which thousands more died.

The death rate among the American prisoners was among the highest of any group of Allied prisoners in the war. Of roughly 20,000–25,000 Americans captured in the Philippines in 1942, around 40 percent did not survive captivity, a toll caused by starvation, untreated disease, forced labour and the sinking of unmarked prisoner transports by Allied submarines and aircraft.

By the numbers

Key people

Edward P. King Jr. made the agonising decision to surrender Bataan and shared captivity with his men until 1945. Masaharu Homma was the Japanese commander; he later claimed not to have known of the conditions, but a US military commission in Manila convicted him, and he was executed by firing squad on 3 April 1946. Jonathan Wainwright, who took over command in the Philippines after MacArthur’s departure, surrendered Corregidor on 6 May 1942 and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Consequences and how the world learned

The US government at first kept details secret. In April 1943 a group of ten American prisoners and two Filipino convicts escaped from a prison camp at Davao on Mindanao. Among them were Captain William Dyess and Lieutenant Commander Melvyn McCoy, whose accounts reached Washington. The story was released to the American public in January 1944 and caused widespread outrage.

Filipino guerrillas, supplied and supported by the US, continued resistance throughout the occupation. American forces returned to Leyte in October 1944, and in January 1945 a raid by US Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas freed more than 500 prisoners from the camp at Cabanatuan. The Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946, as recorded in the Philippine independence article.

Legacy

In the Philippines, 9 April is a national holiday, Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor), marked at the Dambana ng Kagitingan shrine on Mount Samat in Bataan. The Capas National Shrine stands on the site of Camp O’Donnell, and kilometre markers line the route of the march. In the United States the Bataan Memorial Death March, held since 1989 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, honours the many New Mexico National Guardsmen of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery who fought on Bataan.

In 2009 Japan’s ambassador to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, offered a formal apology to former American prisoners of Bataan and Corregidor at a gathering of their veterans’ association, and from 2010 the Japanese government invited groups of former prisoners to visit Japan.

Timeline

• 1941, 8 December: Japan attacks the Philippines.
• 1941, 22 December: Main Japanese landings at Lingayen Gulf.
• 1942, January: US and Filipino forces complete the withdrawal to Bataan.
• 1942, 11–12 March: MacArthur leaves Corregidor for Australia.
• 1942, 3 April: Final Japanese offensive on Bataan begins.
• 1942, 9 April: Major-General King surrenders the forces on Bataan; the march begins.
• 1942, 6 May: Corregidor surrenders.
• 1944, January: Accounts of the march are made public in the United States.
• 1946, 3 April: Homma is executed in the Philippines.

Why it matters

The Bataan Death March became a symbol of the suffering of prisoners of war in Asia and of the shared sacrifice of Filipino and American soldiers. It shaped how both nations remember the war, and it remains a central part of national memory in the Philippines, where most of the victims were Filipino.