Bataan Falls: The March of Death Begins

The surrender of approximately 76,000 American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942, was the largest capitulation in American military history. General Edward King Jr. surrendered the Bataan garrison to Japanese General Masaharu Homma after three months of fighting without adequate food, medicine, or ammunition. What followed was a forced march of 66 miles to Camp O'Donnell that killed between 6,000 and 18,000 prisoners through execution, starvation, disease, and exhaustion. The Bataan Death March became one of the defining war crimes of the Pacific theater. The defense of Bataan had been heroic and futile. General Douglas MacArthur's War Plan Orange called for a fighting retreat to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor, where American and Filipino forces would hold out until reinforcements arrived from Hawaii. The reinforcements never came. After Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet was crippled, and the war's early months produced an unbroken string of Japanese victories across Southeast Asia. President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur evacuated to Australia in March 1942, leaving General Jonathan Wainwright in overall command and King directing the Bataan garrison. The troops who surrendered were already in desperate condition. Rations had been cut to one-third of normal by January and further reduced as supplies dwindled. Malaria, dysentery, and beriberi were epidemic. Many soldiers could barely walk before the march began. Japanese forces, who had expected a garrison of 25,000 and instead received three times that number, had made no logistical preparations for feeding or transporting the prisoners. The march itself was conducted with systematic cruelty. Japanese guards bayoneted prisoners who fell behind or stopped to drink water. Groups of prisoners were executed arbitrarily. Filipino civilians who attempted to give food or water to the marchers were beaten or killed. The sun was brutal, temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the prisoners had no shade, no water, and no rest stops for stretches of 12 to 18 hours. Many who survived the march died within weeks at Camp O'Donnell, where conditions were equally lethal. General Homma was tried for war crimes by a U.S. military commission in Manila after the war and executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.