The pace was inhuman under a hot sun, without food or water, difficult even for soldiers in good condition, deadly for malnourished and sick POWs. Reports from survivors tell of brutal guards who shot or bayonetted anyone who fell behind.
#Men of war assault squad 1 reduced captrue points code
Some guards treated their captives reasonably well, while others tortured the POWs or murdered them outright as punishment for surrender, considered dishonorable by the Japanese military code of conduct.įor those who marched to camp, the only constant presence was death. Some groups received more food or time to rest others received less. Although some prisoners traveled in trucks or cars and suffered little, most were forced to march up to 65 miles on foot and received little food, water, or medical aid. Treatment of the Allied prisoners was inconsistent. To make matters worse, the Japanese forces, which had been reinforced and now numbered 81,000 men, were chronically short of food and medical supplies for their own needs, let alone for those of their prisoners. The surrender happened more than three weeks earlier when little had been prepared.
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The fall of Bataan was expected at the end of April, with the food, medical services, and transportation scheduled accordingly. The surrendering army, however, was twice as large, reduced to starvation rations, and so wracked with disease that, according to an Army doctor, they were “patients rather than prisoners.” In fact, Homma’s evacuation order specified that Japanese troops were to treat all POWs “in a friendly way.” But the plan was doomed to failure for several reasons:Ībout 40,000 relatively healthy and well-fed captives were expected. The Japanese evacuation plan generally conformed to the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention for the treatment of POWs. Most prisoners would go to San Fernando on foot because the Japanese had few vehicles left after the fighting. The plan included several stops for food and medical treatment. The prisoners were to finish with a nine-mile walk to Camp O’Donnell. and Filipino prisoners would move thirty-one miles to San Fernando, where they would board trains and ride to a rail station twenty-five miles away. Masaharu Homma, a Japanese commander, issued orders to remove any Allied POWs captured on Bataan to the town of Balanga, where they would assemble and receive food. This was then the beginning of a shameful chapter in the history of war, the Bataan Death March. troops in the Philippines, surrendered his approximately 75,000 troops at Bataan as tens of thousands of Filipinos and Americans, the largest American army ever to surrender, on April 9, 1942.
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Sick with malaria, dengue fever, and other diseases, living on monkey meat and a few grains of rice, and without air cover or naval support, the Allied force of Filipinos and Americans resisted the Japanese attackers for more than three months even though crippled by starvation rations and epidemics of malaria, dysentery, and various diseases. The Battle of Bataan began on January 1, 1942, and almost immediately, the defenders were on half rations. MacArthur had planned badly for the withdrawal and had left tons of rice, ammunition, and other stores behind him. This thumb-like piece of land on the west-central coast of Luzon, across the bay from Manila, measured some 30 miles long and 15 miles wide, with a range of mountains down the middle. At the landing beaches, the Japanese soldiers quickly overcame these defenders and pushed them back and back again until MacArthur was forced to execute a planned withdrawal to the jungle redoubt of the Bataan Peninsula. In fact, his force consisted of tens of thousands of ill-trained and ill-equipped Filipino reservists and some 22,000 American troops who were, in effect, a mixture of “spit-and-polish” garrison soldiers with no combat experience, artillerymen, a small group of plane-less pilots and ground crews, and sailors whose ships happened to be in port when Japanese forces bombed Manila and its naval yards. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of all Allied forces in the Pacific, cabled Washington, D.C., that he was ready to repel this main invasion force with 130,000 troops of his own.įor whatever reason, MacArthur’s claim that many troops were in error. After the initial air attacks, 43,000 men of the Imperial Japanese 14th Army went ashore on December 22 at two points on the main Philippine island of Luzon.
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Manila, the capital of the Philippines, sits on Manila Bay, one of the best deep-water ports in the Pacific Ocean, and it was, for the Japanese, a perfect resupply point for their planned conquest of the southern Pacific. Within hours of their December 7, 1941, attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese military began its assault on the Philippines, bombing airfields and bases, harbors and shipyards.