U.S. and Filipino Holdouts Enter Captivity After Japanese Victory in Battle of Corregidor

LAST U.S. HOLDOUTS SURRENDER TO JAPANESE

Manila, Occupied Philippines • May 6, 1942

On Monday, December 8, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the Philippines, a largely self-governing U.S. possession, formally known as the Commonwealth of the Philippines. (December 8, Manila and Japanese time, was Sunday, December 7, east of the International Date Line, the day Japanese carrier-based planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a set of interlocked assaults on U.S. military assets in the Pacific region.) The combined U.S.-Filipino force led by 61‑year-old Gen. Douglas MacArthur could not check the Japanese invaders (close to 70 percent of MacArthur’s army consisted of raw Filipino recruits), and so the men withdrew onto the Bataan Peninsula, across the bay from the Philippine capital Manila, where they held out until April 1942. Nearly 80,000 U.S. and Filipino troops went into Japanese captivity, many of them murdered or dying from exhaustion, dehydration, exposure, and the brutal treatment by their captors on the subsequent four-day, 80‑mile “death march” out of Bataan to inland prison camps. Those who survived the march were doomed to live in deplorable conditions, some as slave laborers in Japan.

After a four-month ordeal, the last-ditch U.S. stronghold, the tadpole-shaped “rock” of Corregidor in Manila Bay, surrendered its booty of 14,000 Americans and Filipinos, among them 19 generals, on this date, May 6, 1942. The bitter, drawn-out fight in the Philippines, so infuriating to the invaders, inflicted heavy losses on both sides and forced Japan to commit more troops and equipment than planned to capture an objective far less important to their ambitions of securing the great mineral resources of British Malaya, overwhelmed in mid-January 1942, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), which surrendered on March 9, 1942.

In the months preceding the outbreak of hostilities, Japanese expansionists and policymakers had counted on the anticipated successes of their early military operations in Southeast Asia to nudge the Western colonial powers to sue for peace after hostilities had broken out. When that didn’t happen, the sanguine appraisal of how Japan was going to win the Pacific War it had started morphed into anxiety and later despair. Fully 80 percent of Japanese troops remained tied down in a ground war in China that Japan had started in 1937 (Second Sino-Japanese War). The rest of the army and the Imperial Japanese Navy now had to contend with a massive buildup of a revived U.S. Pacific Fleet, as well as converging attacks by U.S. and British Commonwealth forces from one retaken Pacific island after another. In the end, the bushidō spirit (“warrior spirit”) that the Japanese fell back on as their fortunes turned bleaker by the month could not trump the Allies’ superior strength in financial resources, armaments, and fighting men, a combination that secured the Allies victory over Japan in September 1945.

Some of the most vicious fighting anywhere in World War II was waged across the Philippines. Nearly 80,000 Americans and Filipinos were taken prisoner on the Bataan Peninsula, the name of which is forever linked with the notorious “death march.” During the three years that Japan occupied the archipelago, 130,000 American and Filipinos died. POWs in Japanese prison camps were 10 times more likely to die in captivity as those in German camps. When U.S. troops returned to retake the islands beginning in October 1944, they preferred not to take any enemy prisoners at all. Drawing heavily on firsthand accounts, Gerald Astor gives voice to the Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen who participated in this gruesome period of military history in Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them. Astor’s dramatic narrative brought home to me that the physical and emotional costs of defeating the Japanese in the Pacific were as high, and probably higher, as those incurred in defeating Nazism in Europe.—Norm Haskett

The 80-Mile Bataan Death March Began on April 9, 1942

Bataan death march: Bataan surrender, April 9, 1942

Left: In a staged photograph by a Japanese cameraman, American and Filipino troops are shown surrendering to Japanese invaders on Bataan Peninsula. The three-month Battle of Bataan (January 7 to April 9, 1942) resulted in the largest surrender in American and Filipino military history, and was the largest U.S. surrender since the American Civil War. After a 77‑day residence on the fortress island of Corregidor (formally named Fort Mills), Gen. MacArthur, his family, and a small group of staff officers escaped Japanese capture, evacuated on March 11, 1942, aboard a fast torpedo boat. Six harrowing days later the very symbol of U.S. resistance to Japanese aggression landed safely on Australian soil. Shortly after arriving MacArthur gave a speech in which he famously vowed “I shall return” to the Philippines. On April 1, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, for his actions in the Philippines and three and a half months later, on June 18, appointed him Supreme Allied Commander, South West Pacific Area (SWPA). Twenty-eight months later, on October 20, 1944, at Palo, Leyte, the four-star general made good on his promise to return.

Right: Route taken during the aptly named Bataan Death March. Section from San Fernando to Capas was by rail, and from there to Camp O’Donnell 9 miles further by foot or truck. Another POW camp was located near Cabanatuan City, where as many as 8,000 American and other Allied POWs and civilians were imprisoned.

Bataan death march: Camp O’Donnell burial detail

Left: U.S. soldiers, their hands tied behind their backs, rest on the Bataan Death March to their prison camp at Cabanatuan. Approximately 2,500–10,000 Filipino and 100–650 American prisoners of war died from thirst, wounds, disease, and their captors’ savage mistreatment, including executing stragglers, before they reached Camp O’Donnell.

Right: American and Filipino POWs, using improvised litters, carry the bodies of their comrades who died shortly after their arrival at Camp O’Donnell. Survivors of the march continued to die at a rate of 30–50 per day. Rosedith Van Hoorebeck Hawkins, a U.S. Army nurse with the Thirty-Fifth General Hospital, described the survivors of the camp’s liberation in 1945 this way: “The boys who’d been in the Bataan Death March came to us, and I’m telling you they were a mess. . . . They couldn’t eat so we just gave them liquids and soft foods. . . . Almost all of them had lost a foot or arm or leg. They’d had no medical threatment and had healed very badly.” (Quoted in Diane Burke Fessler, No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II, p. 55.)