World War II Day by Day

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.

The 80-Mile Bataan Death March Began on 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.

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.)

The Bataan Death March and Prisoner of War Camps