The Palawan massacre

On 14 December 1944, at a prisoner-of-war camp near Puerto Princesa on the Philippine island of Palawan, Japanese soldiers murdered 139 American prisoners of war. On the pretext of an air-raid alert the men were driven into narrow earth shelters, which were then doused with petrol and set on fire. Those who escaped the flames were killed with rifles, a machine gun and bayonets – in the camp, on the beach at the foot of the cliff and in the waters of the bay. Eleven survived. The crime, whose perpetrators tried to make it look like the result of an American air raid, became one of the best-documented murders of prisoners in the Pacific War – above all thanks to the accounts of the survivors.

Many chronologies of the war carry under this date the statement that “the Japanese defenders of Palawan killed more than a hundred American prisoners”. It is essentially in line with the facts. It need only be made clear that the perpetrators were not the island’s entire garrison, but above all soldiers of the 131st Airfield Battalion, subordinate to the 2nd Air Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, together with the camp staff. According to the most frequently cited studies, 139 men died; the older literature sometimes gave the figure of 145.

Camp 10-A at Puerto Princesa

The prisoners on Palawan were soldiers captured in the spring of 1942 – after the surrender of Corregidor and the fall of the Bataan peninsula. They included soldiers of the army and the Army Air Forces, sailors and Marines, among them men of the 4th Marine Regiment, which had defended Corregidor. Many of them had earlier gone through the Bataan Death March and the camps on Luzon.

In the summer of 1942 the Japanese picked some 300 American prisoners from the camp at Cabanatuan (346 including those added in Manila) and shipped them to Palawan aboard the Sanko Maru. According to some accounts they were landed at Puerto Princesa on 1 August 1942, according to others on 12 August. They were quartered in the dilapidated barracks of the pre-war Philippine Constabulary, known as Camp 10-A or the Palawan Barracks. The camp lay at the edge of a cliff more than ten metres high, below which stretched a coral beach and the waters of Puerto Princesa Bay.

The prisoners were to build a military airfield for the Japanese. They worked without heavy equipment – with picks, shovels, hammers and wheelbarrows – clearing jungle and breaking up coral. Rations were usually limited to rice and sweet-potato soup; malaria, pellagra and beriberi were rife, and the camp doctors received practically no medicines. The guards beat the prisoners for the slightest offence. Several escapes were attempted – some succeeded, and recaptured escapers were killed. According to available estimates, some 50 prisoners died during more than two years of construction; the Japanese made up the losses by bringing in new men from Luzon.

The fate of the Palawan prisoners was similar to that of thousands of other Americans and Filipinos in Japanese camps in the archipelago. The American public learned of conditions in these camps in January 1944, when the accounts of the participants in the April 1943 escape from the Davao Penal Colony were published.

Air raids and shelters

By August 1944 the airfield was essentially complete. On 8 September the camp commandant, Captain Hitoshi Kinoshita, was replaced by Lieutenant Yoshikazu Sato, and with him came a new staff that was, according to the prisoners’ accounts, even more brutal. At the end of September some 150 prisoners were sent back to Manila; 150 Americans remained on Palawan – four officers and 146 NCOs and enlisted men. According to some accounts, the head of the prisoner-of-war camps in the Philippines then ordered that they too be evacuated, but for unexplained reasons the order was not carried out.

On 19 October, on the eve of the landing on Leyte, American aircraft bombed the airfield at Puerto Princesa for the first time. From then on the raids were frequent, and the prisoners were forced to fill in the bomb craters. The Japanese agreed to the barrack roofs being marked to show that this was a prisoner-of-war camp, and the airmen spared the camp buildings. In November the Japanese ordered the prisoners to dig air-raid shelters inside the camp: three long trenches (designated A, B and C) about one and a half metres deep, covered with coconut-palm logs, planks and earth, and several smaller pits. The entrances were so narrow that one had to crawl in, and inside one sat hunched up. The prisoners building shelter C secretly dug a second exit from it – a narrow tunnel leading beyond the barbed-wire fence, towards the cliff. This tunnel later saved several of them.

The order

According to the account of one of the survivors, Douglas Bogue, a guard told the prisoners that they would be killed if the Americans landed on Palawan. Most did not believe him. Meanwhile the fighting for the Philippines had entered a new phase: the Battle of Leyte was drawing to a close, and in mid-December an invasion convoy sailed from Leyte Gulf bound across the Sulu Sea for the island of Mindoro. Japanese reconnaissance spotted it on the way, and when the ships turned west the Japanese command concluded that their objective might be Palawan and warned the garrison there.

The sequence of events in the chain of command was reconstructed after the war from documents and testimony; it is given here in the version found in commonly cited accounts. On 12 December the commander of the 131st Battalion, Captain Nagayoshi Kojima, asked the commander of the 2nd Air Division, General Seiichi Terada, by radio how the prisoners were to be dealt with in the event of a landing. Terada, after consulting the commander of the 4th Air Army, General Kyōji Tominaga, replied that when the enemy landed, the prisoners – “if they show a hostile attitude” – were to be “disposed of” at a suitable moment. Kojima received the signal on the evening of 13 December and that same night, with his officers, drew up a plan to kill the prisoners. In 1944 the Japanese military authorities had also issued general guidelines to prevent prisoners from being recovered by the advancing Allies – in post-war trials these were treated as the background to such crimes, although their exact content and scope remain a matter of debate among historians.

In reality there was no landing. American troops landed on Mindoro on 15 December, several hundred kilometres further north, and did not reach Palawan until the end of February 1945.

14 December

At about two o’clock in the morning of 14 December the prisoners were woken and marched out to work on the airfield. They noticed that there were more guards than usual and that they were visibly nervous. At around eleven o’clock Lieutenant Sato – according to the survivors’ accounts – told them that their work was over and ordered them back to the camp. Some of the prisoners took this as a sign that an American landing, and liberation, was imminent.

At about noon two American P-38 Lightning fighters flew over the camp. An alert was sounded and the prisoners were ordered into the shelters. When the aircraft had gone, they were not allowed to leave – a large bombing raid was supposedly on its way. At around two in the afternoon the alert was sounded again and the guards hurriedly herded the men back into the cramped trenches. Shortly afterwards, at about 2.30 p.m., according to the witnesses’ testimony, 50–60 Japanese soldiers ran into the camp with buckets and cans of petrol and with torches. They doused the entrances to the shelters and set them alight, and threw grenades inside. Shelter A was attacked first, then B and C. A machine gun set up on the veranda of the main camp building fired on those who scrambled out of the burning trenches; others were killed with rifles, bayonets and rifle butts.

In their testimony the survivors described individual scenes that later entered the literature on the crime. The camp doctor, Dr Carl Mango, his own clothes on fire, came out of the shelter towards the Japanese, calling on them to stop, and was shot. Some prisoners threw themselves at the guards with their bare hands; according to some studies, several Japanese may have been killed in the struggle.

From shelter C, the last to be attacked, some prisoners got out through the secret tunnel, while others broke through the barbed wire. Some 30–40 men ran or tumbled down the cliff to the beach. Some tried to swim across the bay, but the swimmers were fired on from a barge cruising off the shore and from the edge of the cliff. Then the Japanese went down to the beach and for several hours searched the rocks and undergrowth. According to the accounts of survivors, among them Glenn McDole and Eugene Nielsen, wounded men who were caught were finished off with bayonets, doused with petrol and set alight. The killing went on until dusk.

In the evening the bodies were collected and thrown into the trenches, which were set on fire again and blown up with grenades and dynamite. The aim – as historians assume – was to make it appear that the prisoners had died in an American air raid. In the diary of an unidentified Japanese soldier, found after the liberation of the island, an entry dated 15 December recorded that because of a “sudden change in the situation” 150 prisoners had been executed, and that escapers found that morning had been shot.

The survivors

A dozen or so prisoners survived the first hours by hiding in a drain, in a small cave beneath the cliff, under a rubbish heap and in the undergrowth along the shore. After the Japanese had left, the less badly wounded swam across Puerto Princesa Bay at night, singly or in small groups; the last, Glenn McDole, did so on the night of 17–18 December. On the other side they reached the Iwahig Penal Colony, whose Filipino guards cooperated with the resistance, and the guerrillas. One of the survivors escaped deep into the jungle, where he was found by Filipinos. In all, eleven prisoners survived – the figure on which the literature on the subject agrees.

Filipino guerrillas guided the survivors to Brooke’s Point in the south of the island. From there, once radio contact had been established, they were evacuated by an American PBY Catalina flying boat: according to some accounts, six on 6 January 1945 and three more on 21 January. Thanks to their testimony, Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters knew the truth about what had happened on Palawan as early as the beginning of January 1945.

Cabanatuan and Los Baños

The Palawan massacre changed the assessment of risk in the American command. If the Japanese were prepared to murder prisoners at the mere news of an approaching landing, a similar fate could befall thousands of people in the camps on Luzon, where a landing was already a certainty. News of the crime also reached the camp at Cabanatuan by word of mouth, making the prisoners there fear for their lives.

On 30 January 1945 the 6th Ranger Battalion, supported by Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas, carried out the raid on Cabanatuan and freed more than 500 prisoners, most of them survivors of Bataan and Corregidor. On 23 February 1945 an airborne and amphibious operation in the raid on Los Baños freed more than two thousand interned civilians. In both cases – as historians stress – the haste stemmed largely from fear of a repetition of what had happened on Palawan. The massacre is depicted in the opening scenes of the American film The Great Raid (2005) about the Cabanatuan raid; the film wrongly attributes it to the Kempeitai rather than to regular troops.

Exhumation, protest and trials

On 28 February 1945 the US Eighth Army landed on Palawan. Many of the perpetrators of the massacre were killed in the fighting for the island or fled inland. In March soldiers of an American quartermaster company carried out an exhumation on the site of the camp and found the remains of 79 victims; the position of some of the bodies in the shelters indicated that these men had tried to dig their way out with their bare hands. According to some accounts, the United States government lodged a protest with the Japanese government through Switzerland, to which no reply had been received by the time of the surrender.

After the war the survivors, among them McDole and Bogue, helped to identify guards and officers. Captain Nagayoshi Kojima and several other direct perpetrators were never found. Thirty-three Japanese were detained, sixteen of whom stood trial from 2 August 1948 before an American military tribunal in Yokohama. Six were acquitted and ten convicted. General Seiichi Terada received life imprisonment, General Kizo Mikama 12 years and Lieutenant Colonel Mamoru Fushimi 10 years. Sergeant Taichi Deguchi of the local Kempeitai post was sentenced to death, but MacArthur commuted his sentence to 30 years’ imprisonment. The rank-and-file perpetrators received sentences of a few years, in some cases reduced by the time spent in custody. The crime was also cited in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in November 1948. By the end of 1958 all Japanese serving sentences for war crimes in the Pacific had been released.

The remains of 123 victims were buried on 14 February 1952 in a common grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri; the bodies of the remaining sixteen were never found. In Puerto Princesa, on the site of the former camp, there is today the Plaza Cuartel park with a memorial to the victims unveiled in 2009.

Place in the history of the war

The Palawan massacre was one of many crimes against prisoners committed by the Japanese military during the Pacific War – after the Wake Island massacre in 1943 and before the killings at Sandakan in Borneo in 1945. What sets it apart is its direct connection with the military situation: the prisoners were killed in the belief that liberation was near, so that they would not fall into the hands of the advancing Americans. For the Americans it became proof that advancing troops had to reach the prisoner-of-war camps as quickly as possible, which influenced the course of the fighting on Luzon in 1945. Together with the Bataan Death March, it is among the events that most firmly fixed in American memory the image of Japanese treatment of prisoners.