The Battle of Bataan
On January 7, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy invaded Luzon and other islands along the Archipelago of the Philippines after bombing the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. This was considering the most integral phase of Imperial Japan's invasion of the Philippines because it was one of the largest military surrenders by the United States since the American Civil War, which in whole, displayed the United States as having a weak side. Below, on the left, you can see the paths taken from northern Luzon into Bataan. On the right is clarification to where Bataan is in accordance to Luzon. Long story short, 140,000 soldiers including Americans and Filipinos surrendered at Bataan on April 9, 1942. This surrender ultimately led to more than 70,000 prisoners to suffer the march along the Bataan territory.
After watching that clip, you get the general sense of the horrors associated with the March. In case you couldn't pick up on everything or remember everything in the clip, here's a recap:
- Transfer of about 75,000 POWs including Filipinos and Americans
- Massed into towns of Bataan, Bagac, and Marieveles
- Marched more than 50 miles to San Fernando, Pampagna (rail head)
- Took rail head to Capas train station
- Marched 9 more miles to Camp O'Donnell (main camp) [others included Capas and Tarlac]
- About 50,000 made it to Camp O'Donnell
- About 20,000 Filipino and American POWs died in the camps
The maps below should help you get an idea as of where the camp and rail head locations are.
If Emperor Hirohito's attitude toward Chinese POWs and experimentation on POWs wasn't enough to convince you of the maltreatment the Japanese were capable of, there's quite more horrors to come. Before the march had started, prisoners were forced to turn over any items in their possession. If they had any Japanese money/souvenir/items however, the Japanese soldiers would immediately execute them, for they believed that the American or Filipino must've stolen the item from a dead Japanese soldier.
Few survivors recount instances of kindness by Japanese officers who spoke broken English. This would include sharing the occasional cigarette or permission to keep personal possessions but hidden away from other offices. Despite these small acts of kindness, maltreatment entailed.
The majority of captive were faced with the brutal treatment that comes with the ignorance towards the Geneva Convention. It was common for Japanese soldiers to steal from, beat, torture, or taunt the prisoners over the 50 mile walk. Some officers allowed their prisoners to suffer through something called "sun treatment" -- where the captive is forced to sit in direct sunlight without any helmet or head covering for a long period of time. If the prisoner requested for water, he would be shot dead. In crueler cases. the Japanese placed the prisoners in front of fresh, cool water, tempting them to move toward the water so that the Japanese could just shoot them. And if the brutality left prisoners unable to continue further, trucks and clean crews commonly drove over the weakened soldiers and leaving them for dead.
Even in a perfect scenario where a prisoner of war of the The Bataan Death March did not suffer the brutality of the Japanese, natural problems were rampant when the prisoners were forced to ride the Capas train. The boxcars had thick, metal walls that absorbed the heat, causing temperatures up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The overcrowded conditions in the boxcars mixed with the poor hygiene created a mass of potential disease, mainly dysentery. In the event that there was a spreading disease, the Japanese provided no medical care and restricted the intervention of the International Red Cross assistance.
Few survivors recount instances of kindness by Japanese officers who spoke broken English. This would include sharing the occasional cigarette or permission to keep personal possessions but hidden away from other offices. Despite these small acts of kindness, maltreatment entailed.
The majority of captive were faced with the brutal treatment that comes with the ignorance towards the Geneva Convention. It was common for Japanese soldiers to steal from, beat, torture, or taunt the prisoners over the 50 mile walk. Some officers allowed their prisoners to suffer through something called "sun treatment" -- where the captive is forced to sit in direct sunlight without any helmet or head covering for a long period of time. If the prisoner requested for water, he would be shot dead. In crueler cases. the Japanese placed the prisoners in front of fresh, cool water, tempting them to move toward the water so that the Japanese could just shoot them. And if the brutality left prisoners unable to continue further, trucks and clean crews commonly drove over the weakened soldiers and leaving them for dead.
Even in a perfect scenario where a prisoner of war of the The Bataan Death March did not suffer the brutality of the Japanese, natural problems were rampant when the prisoners were forced to ride the Capas train. The boxcars had thick, metal walls that absorbed the heat, causing temperatures up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The overcrowded conditions in the boxcars mixed with the poor hygiene created a mass of potential disease, mainly dysentery. In the event that there was a spreading disease, the Japanese provided no medical care and restricted the intervention of the International Red Cross assistance.