Bataan Death March

In April 1942, after the surrender of American and Filipino forces on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, the Imperial Japanese Army forced roughly 72,000 to 78,000 prisoners of war to march north to a prison camp at Capas, in Tarlac province. Starved and sick before they set out, the prisoners were beaten, denied water and killed when they fell behind. Thousands died on the way and thousands more in the camp. The march was later judged a Japanese war crime and became one of the best-known atrocities of the Pacific theatre of the Second World War.

Japanese troops of General Masaharu Homma's 14th Army landed at Lingayen Gulf on 22 December 1941. General Douglas MacArthur fell back on a pre-war plan to withdraw to Bataan and keep the entrance to Manila Bay, and moved his headquarters to the island fortress of Corregidor. The Battle of Bataan lasted from 7 January 1942 until 9 April, when Major General Edward P. King, against his orders, surrendered his exhausted and hungry army.

The Japanese had expected about half as many captives as they found. Besides more than 60,000 weakened prisoners, some 38,000 civilians had been caught up in the fighting, and there was far too little transport to move them all.

The prisoners, about 66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans, were gathered at Mariveles and Bagac and set off on 10 and 11 April in groups of about 100, each watched by a few guards. They converged at Pilar and marched north to the railhead at San Fernando. A few Japanese officers showed kindness, but brutality soon became the rule. Guards stole possessions and shot men found carrying Japanese money or souvenirs, assuming they had been taken from the dead. Prisoners who asked for water could be shot, and those who collapsed were bayoneted or left for "clean-up" squads. Some were forced to sit for hours in the full sun.

In the worst single atrocity, between about 350 and 400 surrendered Filipino officers and non-commissioned officers were executed at the Pantingan River, a killing attributed to Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who had secretly urged officers to kill prisoners against Homma's wishes.

At San Fernando the survivors were crammed, at least 100 at a time, into unventilated metal boxcars for the journey to Capas, and then walked the last 14 kilometres to Camp O'Donnell. The marching distance is given variously as roughly 97 to 112 kilometres.

How many died is uncertain. The historian Stanley Falk, working from unit strengths, estimated 600 to 650 American and 5,000 to 10,000 Filipino deaths on the march itself; other sources give 500 to 650 Americans and 5,000 to 18,000 Filipinos. Disease and hunger continued to kill hundreds a day at Camp O'Donnell, where, by some accounts, as many as 20,000 more Americans and Filipinos died.

The United States government made the march public only on 27 January 1944, using sworn statements from officers who had escaped, and the story was used to stir anger against Japan. After the war Homma was tried by an American military commission, convicted of allowing his troops to commit atrocities, and executed by firing squad on 3 April 1946. Two of his officers, Yoshitaka Kawane and Kurataro Hirano, were hanged in 1949. Tsuji escaped prosecution and disappeared in Laos in 1961.

In 2010 the Japanese foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, apologised to a group of former American prisoners. In the Philippines, 9 April is kept as the Day of Valor, and many monuments in the Philippines and the United States, especially in New Mexico, which lost many of its National Guardsmen, honour the dead.

Our 1938 map shows the Philippines under American rule and the Empire of Japan before the war, and the 1945 map shows the region at the war's end.