What was bataan

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History Talk. Printer Friendly Version. By Peter Mansoor Although Americans today may take the tactical and operational brilliance of their military forces for granted, such has not always been the case.

Route of the Bataan Death March. Photo from National Guard The troops immediately went on half rations; by the end of the fighting four months later they were on quarter rations. Photo from National Archives Japanese cultural attitudes made matters much worse. RSS Feed. Email alerts. Read Article. Featured Book Review. Read Book Review. Privacy Policy. Log In. College of Arts and Sciences. General Edward King Jr. The surrendered Filipinos and Americans soon were rounded up by the Japanese and forced to march some 65 miles from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula, to San Fernando.

The men were divided into groups of approximately , and the march typically took each group around five days to complete. The exact figures are unknown, but it is believed that thousands of troops died because of the brutality of their captors, who starved and beat the marchers, and bayoneted those too weak to walk.

Survivors were taken by rail from San Fernando to prisoner-of-war camps, where thousands more died from disease, mistreatment and starvation. America avenged its defeat in the Philippines with the invasion of the island of Leyte in October General Douglas MacArthur , who in had famously promised to return to the Philippines, made good on his word.

In February , U. After the war, an American military tribunal tried Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, commander of the Japanese invasion forces in the Philippines. He was held responsible for the death march, a war crime, and was executed by firing squad on April 3, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. General Douglas Hirohito was emperor of Japan from until his death in He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. Therefore, the recently surrendered American troops could be treated as less than human, and consequently were. If you had to defecate, you died. If you had a malaria attack, you died.

It made no different what it was; either they cut your head off, they shot you, or they bayonetted you. But you died, if you fell down. The Japanese soldiers who accompanied the march tortured and murdered freely. From using bayonets to prolong death to pushing bodies in front of tank paths, the Japanese would even force prisoners to stand to attention in the midday sun until some would drop of heat exhaustion. Along with death by torture, many men died of dysentery. Many artesian wells lined the path of the march, but any prisoner who tried to approach was killed.

Desperation would lead men to resort to drinking whatever they could find. The carabao would sit in there and bathe. We would see that and spread the scum along the side and just drink the water. The result was dysentery, real bad dysentery.

Following the end of the march, the prisoners were packed into hot steel boxcars with barely enough room to breathe. During this mile ride, men continued to die from heat and exhaustion. The camp diet was lugao , a watery rice gruel that contained fish heads, vegetables, and usually inch-long weevils. Some POWs ate the weevils for their protein value. The prisoners supplemented their diet with prison stew, which they made from anything edible that they stole, such as turnips, or rats.

Rogers and Bartlit describe how patients lay there and waited to die, because there was little to no medicine. One prisoner described having his appendix removed with a sharpened spoon and no anesthetic. Escaping from the prison might have appeared to be an option, because the fence was just a couple strands of barbed wire.

However, the nearest safe zone was 9, miles away in Australia. In addition, the Japanese implemented a system of death squads, where they created groups of ten men. If one man tried to escape, they all would be killed. Punishments and sadistic acts continued in the prison as well.

Then, they would jump on the stomach. This punishment nearly always resulted in death. The prison camps in the Philippines were not the end for the dwindling number of survivors of the death march and other POWs. A small canteen and bucket of rice would be occasionally lowered into the cramped hold, and these rations would be auctioned off every time a man died.

These journeys would take about a month, despite the short distance between the Philippines and mainland Japan, China, and Korea.