The fall of Bataan

At about 12.30 p.m. on 9 April 1942, in a house at an agricultural experiment station near the village of Lamao on the east coast of the Bataan peninsula, Major General Edward King laid his pistol on the table. The Japanese Colonel Motoo Nakayama, operations officer of the 14th Army, had earlier demanded his sword, but King had left it in Manila at the start of the war. Following their general’s example, his officers placed their pistols on the table too. So ended the defence of Bataan, which had lasted since January. Luzon Force, some 75,000–78,000 American and Filipino soldiers, went into captivity. It was the largest surrender in the history of the United States Army. On Manila Bay only Corregidor still held out.

The decision

By the evening of 8 April General George Parker’s II Corps had ceased to exist. In six days of the final Japanese offensive Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army had broken the line, taken Mount Samat and shattered successive lines of defence on the San Vicente, Mamala and Alangan rivers. Brigadier General Clifford Bluemel was falling back to the Lamao River with some 1,300 Americans and Philippine Scouts, the last organised units in the east. Between the Japanese and the southern tip of the peninsula, crammed with men, stood only Colonel Charles Sage’s anti-aircraft artillery brigade, which had been ordered to destroy its guns and fight as infantry. Behind it lay two field hospitals with about 12,000 sick and wounded, already within range of Japanese light artillery. In the west General Albert Jones’s I Corps was still intact, but it was withdrawing to avoid being outflanked.

King, a gunner who had commanded Luzon Force since 21 March, was bound by his orders. In February President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had forbidden any surrender in the Philippines, and Douglas MacArthur, from Australia, had directed that if food ran out the troops should not surrender but strike at the Japanese base at Olongapo. On 7 April Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, commander of all forces in the Philippines, had sent King two direct orders through his chief of staff: under no circumstances to surrender, and to counter-attack. As late as 11.30 p.m. on 8 April he sent Bataan an order for I Corps to attack towards Olongapo, which Jones was in no position to carry out.

At about 11 p.m. King, with his chief of staff, Brigadier General Arnold Funk, and his operations officer, Colonel James Collier, weighed every possibility. Each time they came back to the same question: would the Japanese reach the heights above Mariveles, which dominated the tip of the peninsula and Corregidor, any more slowly if they met resistance? They concluded that the Japanese would get there by the evening of 9 April whatever the defenders did. At midnight King called his staff together and announced that he had decided to open negotiations with the Japanese. He made it clear that he was not asking for advice, for this “shameful decision” was his alone. “I have not communicated with General Wainwright,” he said, “because I do not want him to be compelled to assume any part of the responsibility.” In his view further resistance would only mean the needless deaths of his men. According to those present, when he left the room there was not a dry eye.

A night of fire

The last night on Bataan was a night of destruction. From midnight, on headquarters’ orders, dumps, workshops and stores were blown up, and the Chemical Warfare Service had already begun pouring its stocks into the bay that afternoon. At about 9.30 p.m. a strong earthquake shook the peninsula. An hour later the navy began destroying its installations at Mariveles: the floating dock Dewey, the tug Napa, the minesweeper Bittern and the old submarine tender USS Canopus, which went up in a column of fire. At two in the morning the TNT and ammunition dumps blew up; they stood right next to Field Hospital No. 1 and King’s headquarters. Shells and coloured flares lit up the sky over the peninsula. One officer wrote that no Fourth of July display could match it either for noise or for cost. Fragments rained down like hail, and the blast knocked over the headquarters building.

That night about 2,000 men managed to cross to Corregidor in boats and barges, among them some 300 soldiers of the American 31st Infantry Regiment, sailors, some of the troopers of the 26th Cavalry of the Philippine Scouts and Filipino soldiers. The 45th Regiment of the Philippine Scouts, which Wainwright wanted on the island, did not reach Mariveles in time. Most of the army nurses were saved. A group from Hospital No. 2 was held up on the road by the exploding dumps, and the barge left without them. The nurses crossed only after dawn, in a motor launch that General Funk had secured for them, and despite being strafed by an aircraft they reached the island. The last aircraft took off from Bataan’s airstrips – a few fighters and an amphibian – carrying south, among others, Carlos Romulo, a Filipino journalist and officer on MacArthur’s staff.

The envoys

At about 3.30 a.m. on 9 April two volunteers, both cavalrymen, set out from King’s headquarters: Colonel Everett C. Williams and Major Marshall Hurt. They were to ask the Japanese commander for a meeting with the general and, if he refused, to discuss terms themselves. King’s instructions contained four requests: that account be taken of the huge number of sick and wounded in the hospitals; that the staff of Luzon Force be allowed to gather its scattered units itself and lead them into captivity; that consideration be given to the state of the starving soldiers, who could not march any great distance; and that the thousands of civilian refugees be cared for. Through a crowd of retreating soldiers, “huddled, demoralised, beaten”, they travelled by car, by motorcycle and finally by jeep. At dawn, behind the last American tanks, they drove into enemy-held ground. About thirty Japanese rushed at them with bayonets. The bedsheet they were waving in place of a white flag, and a Japanese officer who appeared in time, saved their lives. They were taken to Major General Kameichirō Nagano, whose force was advancing along the east road. Nagano agreed to meet King at the experiment station near Lamao.

On Corregidor Wainwright learned of all this only at six in the morning. At three he had still been speaking to King on the telephone, but King had said nothing of his decision. Shaken, he shouted at the officer who brought the news: “Go back and tell him not to do it!” It was too late: the envoys were already with the Japanese, and there was no communication with King. Wainwright reported to MacArthur that King had sent a flag of truce to the Japanese “without my knowledge or approval”, and added that physical exhaustion and sickness due to a long period of insufficient food was the real cause of this terrible disaster. He never condemned King afterwards. He wrote that the decision King had been forced to take required “extraordinary courage and strength of character”.

Unconditionally

At about nine, in his last clean uniform, King drove out to the meeting. He said later that he felt like General Robert E. Lee, who on the same day 77 years earlier, before meeting Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, would rather have “died a thousand deaths”. Despite the white flags, Japanese aircraft attacked his two jeeps every few hundred metres, and three kilometres of road took two hours. At eleven King stood before Nagano, who declared that he had no authority and told him to wait for Homma’s representative. Soon Colonel Nakayama arrived in a gleaming Cadillac.

The conversation began with a misunderstanding. “You are General Wainwright?” Nakayama asked. Homma believed that the envoys had come on behalf of the entire command in the Philippines. When King explained that he spoke only for the forces on Bataan, he was told that the Japanese would not accept a surrender without Wainwright and without all the forces in the archipelago. King asked for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the air raids, for permission for his soldiers to march into captivity under their own officers, and for the sick and exhausted to ride in the lorries he had kept for the purpose. He promised to deliver his men to any place Homma named. Several times he asked for an assurance that the prisoners would be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Nakayama rejected everything: the airmen had their orders until noon, and negotiations for a ceasefire in a limited area were “absolutely impossible”. If the forces on Bataan wished to surrender, they must do so by units, “voluntarily and unconditionally”. At about 12.30 p.m. King, knowing that every minute of delay was costing his men their lives, agreed to unconditional surrender.

No document was drawn up. To the end of his life King believed that he had surrendered his entire force to Homma’s representative. The Japanese considered that the negotiations had failed and that each unit and each soldier was surrendering individually. King, Williams and two aides were held as hostages to guarantee that resistance would cease. Colonel Collier and Major Hurt went back to King’s headquarters with a Japanese officer, calling on all the soldiers they passed to come down to the east road, lay down their arms and await orders. The news spread slowly. In the west, in I Corps, units laid down their arms as word of the surrender reached them, and then as the Japanese columns did, over the following hours and days. Some of the soldiers, above all Filipinos, escaped into the mountains.

The numbers

Exactly how many men went into captivity is not known. King himself and the American official history speak of 78,000 soldiers of Luzon Force, of whom about 2,000 escaped to Corregidor; other historians give some 75,000–76,000 prisoners, including about 12,000 Americans and more than 60,000 Filipinos of the Philippine Army and the Philippine Scouts. On top of that there were 20,000–26,000 civilian refugees. The previous record in the history of the American army had been the surrender of some 12,500 Union soldiers at Harpers Ferry in 1862 during the Civil War. Within the Pacific war as a whole the figure was comparable to the surrender of the British forces at Singapore in February.

The Japanese, whose plans had underestimated the number of defenders, had prepared for 25,000 prisoners at most. As early as 9 and 10 April they began moving the starving and sick men off the peninsula, on foot from Mariveles and Bagac to San Fernando, then by rail wagon and on foot again to Camp O’Donnell. This Bataan Death March, during which prisoners were beaten, denied water and killed, cost thousands of lives.

On the same day Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s carrier aircraft attacked Trincomalee in Ceylon. That evening the Filipino station Voice of Freedom broadcast from the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor a message that began with the words “Bataan has fallen”. It ended with the sentence: “Bataan has fallen, but the spirit that made it stand – a beacon to all the liberty-loving peoples of the world – cannot fall!”

Place in the war

The surrender on Bataan ended the longest resistance the Allies had put up against the Japanese in the first months of the Pacific war. An army made up mostly of Filipino recruits, without air cover, without reinforcements and without food, had tied down the 14th Army for three months, while Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies fell. The military value of this delay is disputed. Some American writers, such as MacArthur’s intelligence chief Charles Willoughby, held that the defence of Bataan upset the Japanese timetable. Others, such as the Australian historian Gavin Long, point out that instead of waiting for Luzon the Japanese had earlier moved forces from the Philippines to Java and completed the conquest of the Dutch East Indies ahead of schedule. What is certain is that Bataan became a symbol: for Americans, of the courage of soldiers left to fend for themselves; for Filipinos, of a common struggle, which made 9 April the Day of Valour, one of their national holidays.

After the fall of Bataan the Japanese set up heavy guns at the southern tip of the peninsula and began pounding Corregidor mercilessly. The next day they landed on Cebu, and in the following weeks on other islands of the central and southern Philippines. On the night of 5–6 May their infantry landed on Corregidor, and on 6 May Wainwright surrendered and was obliged to pass on the order to lay down arms to all the forces in the archipelago. King survived more than three years of captivity in Taiwan and Manchuria and lived to be liberated in 1945. Homma lost his command in August 1942, and in 1946 an American tribunal in Manila sentenced him to death for the crimes of his troops, above all during the Death March. MacArthur, who had promised to return, landed in the Philippines in October 1944. Bataan was retaken in February 1945. Of all the prisoners of Bataan only some returned home: thousands died on the march, at Camp O’Donnell and in the following years in camps in the Philippines and Japan and aboard the ships that carried prisoners north.