The Bataan Death March

On 9 April 1942, after a three-month siege, the American and Filipino forces on the Bataan peninsula surrendered. Some 76,000 soldiers, about 12,000 of them Americans, became prisoners of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s Japanese 14th Army. Over the following days and weeks the Japanese drove them on foot from the southern tip of the peninsula to San Fernando in Pampanga province, carried them from there, packed into goods wagons, to Capas, and from Capas marched them on foot again to the prison camp at O’Donnell. The starving, sick prisoners walked in the tropical heat with almost no water or food, while the guards beat them, robbed them and killed those who could not keep up. The march has gone down in history as the Bataan Death March and is one of the best-known crimes committed by the Japanese army in the Pacific war.

War chronologies usually record both the fall of Bataan and the start of the Death March under 9 April. In the United States and the Philippines the day of the surrender is generally taken as the beginning of the march, but it should be added that on 9 April the prisoners were only being gathered and robbed at assembly points. The main columns set off from the Mariveles area on 10 April and from the Bagac area on the west coast of the peninsula on 11 April, and further groups of men coming down from the mountains and out of the jungle went on setting off for many days afterwards.

Prisoners no one expected

The defenders of Bataan had been worn down long before the surrender. From January, when the siege began, they had received half, and then an ever smaller share, of normal rations, and by the end of March many of them were eating fewer than a thousand calories a day. Malaria, dysentery, beriberi and scurvy were rife, and quinine was running out. When the Japanese opened their final offensive on 3 April, a large proportion of the soldiers were unfit to fight. The field hospitals in the south of the peninsula held well over ten thousand sick and wounded. About 2,000 men managed to cross by boat to the island of Corregidor on the night of 8–9 April; the rest remained on the peninsula.

Homma’s staff had drawn up a plan for evacuating prisoners before the final offensive. It assumed that in the first stage the prisoners would walk unaided, in a single day, to Balanga in the middle of the peninsula, where the first food distribution point and a field hospital were to be set up. From Balanga they were to be taken by lorry to San Fernando, and from San Fernando by rail. The plan, however, rested on false assumptions. Japanese intelligence put the defenders’ strength at around 25,000, and in any case at no more than 50,000 men, and the staff expected healthy prisoners able to march at the pace of Japanese infantry. There were too few lorries, and those there were served chiefly to move ammunition and equipment south for the assault on Corregidor. The surrender also came sooner than expected: the preparations for the evacuation were not due to be complete until around 20 April.

General Homma’s attention was wholly fixed on Corregidor, the last American fortress at the entrance to Manila Bay, and he left the matter of the prisoners to his subordinates. Colonel Toshimitsu Takatsu was responsible for gathering them and bringing them to Balanga, and Major General Yoshikata Kawane, head of the 14th Army’s transport services, for moving them onward. According to later findings, the two acted without coordination. On top of all this came the Japanese army’s attitude to prisoners. The Japanese soldier was brought up to believe that surrender was a disgrace, and the 1941 field code forbade him to be taken prisoner. Japan had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war but had not ratified it, and early in 1942 it declared only that it would apply it “mutatis mutandis”. In practice the army had made no preparations for having tens of thousands of prisoners to feed.

The road to San Fernando

The looting began at the assembly points. Japanese soldiers, themselves poorly supplied after months of fighting, took the prisoners’ money, watches, wedding rings, canteens, blankets and often their boots and hats as well. Doctors were stripped of medicines and dressings. Anyone found carrying Japanese coins or souvenirs risked death, since these were assumed to have been taken from dead Japanese. According to survivors’ accounts, several officers were shot or beheaded for this in the very first hours of captivity.

From Mariveles at the tip of the peninsula, columns of a hundred or more marched first east to Cabcaben, then north along the east coast through Lamao, Limay, Orion, Pilar, Balanga, Abucay and Orani to Hermosa, and from there through Layac and Lubao to San Fernando. Prisoners from the western part of the peninsula were led from Bagac along the lateral road to Pilar, where they joined the main route. The stretch from Mariveles to San Fernando measured about 100–106 kilometres. The road, largely gravel, had been churned up by heavy vehicles, and April is the hottest and driest month of the year on Luzon.

The columns usually marched by day, in heat above 30 degrees, and halts were often made in full sun with no shade at all. Survivors called these hours the “sun treatment”. There were artesian wells and streams along the road, but the guards generally did not let the prisoners near them. Men who broke ranks to fetch water were beaten, and many were killed. Men drank from ditches and roadside puddles, which spread dysentery. Food was handed out irregularly: some groups received a handful of rice once a day, others nothing for several days. The field hospital at Balanga was never set up, and the only help for the sick came from prisoner doctors who had no medicines. At night the prisoners were crammed into warehouses, schools and wire-fenced compounds, so tightly that they could not lie down, amid filth and the bodies of men who had died in earlier columns.

Worst of all was the violence. Guards, and soldiers of Japanese units passing the columns on their way south, beat the prisoners with rifle butts and sticks, threw stones at them and stabbed them with bayonets. Those who fell and could not get up were killed by soldiers following behind the columns. Survivors remembered roadsides strewn with bodies, and men run over by lorries. The Japanese halted some groups of prisoners beside the positions of their own artillery shelling Corregidor, exposing them to fire from the American guns on the island. There were also guards and officers who shared water and cigarettes with the prisoners, let them keep personal belongings or rest in the shade. This did not change the overall picture, which depended largely on which guards a given column happened to get.

The Filipino inhabitants of the villages along the road searched among the prisoners for their relatives and tried to pass them water, rice, sugar and fruit. The guards drove them off with rifle butts, and according to witnesses civilians were also killed for helping prisoners. Even so, with the help of local people, some Filipinos managed to slip away from the columns and vanish among the population.

The massacre on the Pantingan River

The worst single crime of the march was the massacre on the Pantingan River, at the foot of Mount Samat in the western part of the peninsula. On 12 April soldiers of the Japanese 65th Brigade stopped a column of prisoners there from the Filipino divisions, mainly from the 91st Division, which had surrendered in the Bagac area the day before. The privates were sent on, while the officers and NCOs were led aside, bound and killed: beheaded with swords or bayoneted. Some 300–400 men died. A few survived, among them the wounded Captain Pedro Felix, who testified after the war at Homma’s trial, and Lieutenant Manuel Yan, later chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Most historians hold that the instigator of the crime was Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, a General Staff officer who had earlier shared responsibility for the massacres of the Chinese in Singapore. In April he was with the 14th Army and, according to Japanese officers, passed on verbal instructions, invoking Imperial General Headquarters, that prisoners were to be shot because their surrender had not been formally accepted. Colonel Takeo Imai, commander of the 141st Infantry Regiment, recalled that he received such an order by telephone on 10 April, demanded written confirmation and released his own prisoners. Other commanders refused likewise. The Pantingan massacre is attributed to the 122nd Infantry Regiment of the 65th Brigade, whose command is said to have obtained confirmation of the order from the brigade commander, Lieutenant General Akira Nara. Homma, as he himself and his staff maintained after the war, knew nothing of these orders and never issued them. Tsuji never stood trial.

Wagons to Capas and Camp O’Donnell

The first columns reached San Fernando after several days’ march; others kept arriving over the next two weeks. In the town the prisoners often received their first hot meal in a long time, but crowded into a cockfighting arena, a school or an old factory, they went on dying of dysentery and exhaustion. From San Fernando they were carried by narrow-gauge railway to Capas in Tarlac province, about 40 kilometres away. As many as a hundred men were forced into closed goods wagons meant for a few dozen. The prisoners stood for hours in the stifling heat, without water and unable to relieve themselves, and those who died on the way remained standing among the living until the end of the journey. From Capas they walked a further dozen or so kilometres to O’Donnell. The last groups arrived there at the end of April, and a few stragglers even in May.

Camp O’Donnell, a former Filipino army base meant for at most a little over ten thousand men, took in more than 50,000 prisoners. The camp commandant, Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, according to prisoners’ accounts greeted them with a speech in which he declared that they were not prisoners of war but enemies of Japan. There was a single well for the whole camp, latrines were lacking and there were almost no medicines. The prisoners began to die in large numbers: at the peak, in the second half of May, more than 40 Americans and several hundred Filipinos died every day. By June, when most of the Americans were moved to the camp at Cabanatuan, about 1,500 Americans had died at O’Donnell, roughly one in six of those who had survived the march. Estimates of the Filipinos who died there range from well over ten thousand to more than 20,000. The Japanese released them gradually, mainly between September 1942 and January 1943, on their promise not to join the guerrillas.

How many died

The exact number of the march’s victims cannot be established. It is not even known precisely how many men went into captivity: some of the Filipino soldiers, perhaps as many as ten thousand or more, took off their uniforms and melted into the civilian population, and some escaped into the mountains. According to American figures about 54,000 prisoners reached O’Donnell, including about 9,300 Americans; Japanese figures are somewhat higher.

The historian Stanley Falk, author of the first full-length study of the march, subtracted from the strength of the forces on Bataan those killed in the last days of fighting, those who escaped to Corregidor, those left in hospitals and those who dispersed, and estimated the dead and killed on the march at 600–650 Americans and 5,000–10,000 Filipinos. Other authors’ estimates differ: Michael and Elizabeth Norman give about 500 Americans and about 2,500 Filipinos, Hampton Sides about 750 Americans and 5,000 Filipinos, and some Filipino sources as many as 18,000 Filipino dead. The number of civilians killed is unknown. If the dead of O’Donnell are added, the toll of the first months of captivity of the Bataan prisoners runs into tens of thousands.

Some historians attribute these deaths chiefly to chaos: overstretched logistics, an unforeseen number of prisoners and their poor condition. Most, however, stress that a shortage of lorries and food does not explain the ban on drawing water from wells, the killing of stragglers, the punishment of civilians for helping, or the Pantingan massacre. In an army with harsh discipline, brutality towards prisoners was so widespread that it cannot be put down solely to individual soldiers acting on their own. A third cause is seen in the attitude of senior commanders, who took no interest in the prisoners’ fate and punished no one for mistreating them.

How the world found out

For almost two years only the prisoners, their guards and the Filipinos knew about the march. In April 1943 a group of prisoners escaped from the camp at Davao on Mindanao. Three of them, including Captain William Dyess of the air force, a survivor of the march, reached the United States via Australia and gave detailed statements. The American government long held back their publication, fearing it would worsen the lot of the remaining prisoners and hamper the delivery of Red Cross parcels to them. Dyess was killed in a flying accident in December 1943. On 27 January 1944 the War and Navy Departments released the escapees’ accounts, and a few days later the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers published Dyess’s recollections. It was then that the name “Death March” came into general use. The news shocked American public opinion and intensified anti-Japanese feeling. Japanese propaganda replied that the prisoners had been treated humanely and that their deaths were the fault of the American commanders, who had delayed surrender too long.

Place in the war

The Death March closed the defence of Bataan, the longest chapter of the Philippines campaign. MacArthur, on leaving the Philippines in March, had handed command to General Jonathan Wainwright. On 6 May 1942 Corregidor surrendered, and with it all American forces in the Philippines. The prisoners from Bataan and Corregidor went to camps from which the Japanese shipped the strongest on the so-called hell ships to forced labour in Japan, Manchuria and Taiwan. Of some 22,000 Americans taken prisoner in the Philippines, about 15,000, roughly two-thirds, survived the war, according to American estimates. The march became one of the symbols of the fate of Allied prisoners in Japanese captivity. Similar marches of exhausted prisoners were repeated in 1945 on Borneo, where almost all the prisoners died in the Sandakan death marches.

After the war Homma was arrested and brought before an American military commission in Manila. On 11 February 1946 he was found guilty of permitting crimes by his subordinates, above all during the Death March and at Camp O’Donnell, and sentenced to death. He was shot on 3 April 1946. The verdict, based on a commander’s responsibility for the acts of his subordinates, remains contested: some see Homma as a commander who did not order the atrocities but neglected his duties, while others point out that his headquarters lay right beside the route of the march. General Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano were convicted by the tribunal in Yokohama and hanged in 1949. The O’Donnell commandant Tsuneyoshi received a life sentence. Masanobu Tsuji went into hiding and, once the search for him had ended, returned to Japan, where he became a writer and member of parliament. In 1961 he disappeared in Laos.

In the Philippines 9 April, the anniversary of the fall of Bataan, is a national holiday, the Day of Valour (Araw ng Kagitingan). The Shrine of Valour stands on Mount Samat, and a memorial at Capas marks the site of Camp O’Donnell. In the United States the memory of the march is especially alive in New Mexico, home to many of Bataan’s defenders, soldiers of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery (Anti-Aircraft) Regiments of the National Guard. In 2009 the Japanese ambassador in Washington apologised to American veterans of Bataan and Corregidor, and in 2010 the Japanese foreign minister Katsuya Okada repeated the apology in Tokyo to a group of former prisoners that included survivors of the march.