Bataan Death March

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bataan Death March began on the 9th of April 1942, the same morning that Major General Edward P. King surrendered the largest force in American military history on Philippine soil. Before King handed over his sword, he told his troops something he wanted them to hold onto for the rest of their lives: "You men remember this. You did not surrender. You had no alternative but to obey my order."

  What followed was one of the worst atrocities of World War II. Between around 72,000 and 78,000 Filipino and American prisoners were forced to march more than 100 kilometers through jungle heat to a prison camp called O'Donnell. Thousands died on the way. Thousands more died after arriving.

  This documentary asks how it happened, who gave the orders, what the survivors endured hour by hour, and how the men responsible were eventually brought to account. One of them was executed in 1946. Another vanished into Laos in 1961 and was never seen again.

• 2. A Defense Already Doomed

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  General Douglas MacArthur assumed command of Allied forces in the Philippines in July 1941, and his first significant decision was to reject the existing war plan as defeatist. The plan, known as War Plan Orange 3, called for a fighting withdrawal to the Bataan Peninsula if the Japanese prevailed. MacArthur preferred an aggressive coastal defense of the entire archipelago instead.

  That choice unraveled fast. General Masaharu Homma's 14th Army came ashore at Lingayen Gulf on the morning of the 22nd of December 1941, and by nightfall the Japanese had secured most of their objectives. The following afternoon, General Jonathan Wainwright called MacArthur's Manila headquarters and said further defense of the Lingayen beaches was "impracticable."

  MacArthur reversed course and returned to War Plan Orange 3, but the aggressive coastal defense plan had already shaped how supplies were distributed. The withdrawal to Bataan brought with it soldiers and civilians who were short on food, ammunition, and medicine. On the 26th of December, Manila was declared an open city. The Battle of Bataan began on the 7th of January 1942 and ground on for three months.

  When King surrendered on April 9th, he did so against his superior's wishes, accepting personal responsibility for the decision. He faced an impossible arithmetic: Homma's forces had captured almost twice the number of prisoners they expected, and there was nowhere near enough mechanized transport to move more than 60,000 starved and sick prisoners alongside some 38,000 weakened civilian noncombatants.

• 3. The First Hours

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  Prisoners gathered in the towns of Mariveles and Bagac immediately after the surrender. Guards ordered them to empty their pockets and lay their possessions in front of them. American Lieutenant Kermit Lay described what happened in the rice paddies: guards took jewelry, did a lot of slapping, and when the shakedown was finished, three men were taken behind a rice shack and shot. Lay watched. The men beside those three said they had been carrying Japanese souvenirs, which guards interpreted as proof they had looted dead Japanese soldiers.

  Word spread fast among the prisoners. Anyone holding Japanese money or mementos had to conceal or destroy it immediately. The logic of survival was already replacing the logic of warfare.

  Prisoners from Mariveles set out on the 10th of April, those from Bagac on the 11th, both columns converging at Pilar before heading north toward the San Fernando railhead. Groups of 100 men each were assigned four guards. In the first hours there were isolated moments of decency. Some Japanese officers and English-speaking soldiers shared food and cigarettes. One prisoner who had been a star football player at Notre Dame had his class ring taken, then returned by a Japanese officer who had attended USC, had watched him play, and remembered him. Such moments were brief. What followed was unrelenting.

• 4. Sun Treatment and the Road North

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  Dysentery spread through the columns as they moved. Prisoners received little food or water along the way. Guards devised a form of torture the prisoners called the "sun treatment": men were forced to sit in open sunlight without helmets or any head covering. Anyone who asked for water was shot dead. Some prisoners were ordered to strip naked. Others were held within sight of clear, cool water and forbidden to drink.

  American soldier Bert Bank witnessed a guard trying to remove a ring from another prisoner's finger. When the ring would not come off, the guard drew a machete and severed the man's wrist. Bank tried to help the man and looked back to see a Japanese guard push a bayonet through the wounded prisoner's stomach.

  Trucks drove over men who fell. Guards killed those too weak to keep walking, though in some cases trucks also picked up men too exhausted to continue. Prisoners were randomly stabbed with bayonets or beaten without cause.

  At Balanga, overcrowding and filth made dysentery and other diseases spread faster. American medical personnel treated the sick with almost no supplies, because the Japanese provided none. When the columns reached San Fernando, at least 100 men were stuffed into each unventilated boxcar for a one-hour ride to Capas in heat reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Staff Sergeant Alf Larson described the cars as World War I-era, the men packed so tight that no one could sit, the doors shut. People who lost consciousness could not fall. People who needed to relieve themselves did so where they stood. People died in the cars.

  From Capas, the survivors walked the remaining 14 kilometers to Camp O'Donnell.

• 5. The Pantingan River Massacre

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  Colonel Masanobu Tsuji did not wait for the march to produce its death toll. Before the columns even formed, Tsuji ordered the summary execution of approximately 350 to 400 Filipino officers and non-commissioned officers at the Pantingan River. He gave the order after they had already surrendered.

  Tsuji was acting against General Homma's explicit wish that prisoners be transferred peacefully. He also issued clandestine orders to other Japanese officers to execute all American captives. Some officers ignored those orders. Others did not.

  Japan's official position was that it did not recognize the men as prisoners of war at all. That framing shaped how common soldiers treated the men in the columns. They had not surrendered; they had simply been captured. The distinction was lethal.

  Casualty estimates from the march itself vary widely. Stanley L. Falk, working from known troop numbers at the start of April minus those known to have escaped to Corregidor or stayed in hospitals, arrived at a conservative estimate of 600 to 650 American deaths and 5,000 to 10,000 Filipino deaths during the march. Other sources put the Filipino death toll as high as 18,000. Of an estimated 80,000 who began the march, only 54,000 reached Camp O'Donnell. Even after arrival, survivors continued dying at rates of up to several hundred per day, adding as many as 20,000 more deaths. Most of the dead were buried in mass graves behind the barbed wire.

• 6. Justice and Evasion

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  In September 1945, Allied troops arrested General Homma. He was indicted on 43 separate counts of war crimes. His defense rested on a straightforward claim: he did not learn of the high death toll until two months after the march ended, because his attention had been fixed on the assault on Corregidor. The commission found him guilty of permitting members of his command to commit brutal atrocities, but the verdict did not distinguish which of the 43 counts he was found guilty on. He was sentenced to death on the 26th of February 1946 and executed by firing squad outside Manila on the 3rd of April.

  Two of his subordinates, Major General Yoshitaka Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano, were tried separately by an American military commission in Yokohama in 1948, using evidence from the Homma trial. Both were sentenced to death by hanging and executed at Sugamo Prison on the 12th of June 1949.

  Masanobu Tsuji, who had directly ordered the killings at the Pantingan River and the clandestine execution orders targeting Americans, never stood trial. When the war ended he fled from Thailand to China. For years he worked for several foreign intelligence agencies. He disappeared in Laos in April 1961. He was declared dead seven years later.

  The American public did not learn about the march until the 27th of January 1944, when the government released sworn statements from officers who had escaped. Their accounts appeared shortly after in Life magazine. General George Marshall described what the Japanese had done as evidence of "the shallow advance from savagery," and warned that the future of Japan depended on whether its people could move beyond what he called their "aboriginal barbaric instincts."

• 7. Memory and Commemoration

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  New Mexico carried a particular weight after the march. Many of the American soldiers on Bataan came from that state, recruited into the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery of the National Guard. Those two units together numbered 1,816 men. Of them, 829 died in battle, in captivity, or immediately after liberation. The New Mexico Military Museum now occupies the armory where those soldiers were processed before shipping out to the Philippines in 1941. The old state capitol was renamed the Bataan Memorial Building.

  Every spring at the White Sands Missile Range, the Bataan Memorial Death March takes place over a marathon-length 26.2 miles. On the 19th of March 2017, more than 6,300 participants lined up for the 28th annual event, setting a new attendance record.

  On the 13th of September 2010, Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada met with six former American prisoners of war, including 90-year-old Lester Tenney and Robert Rosendahl, both survivors of the march. The six survivors, their families, and the families of two deceased soldiers were invited to Japan at the Japanese government's expense.

  In the Philippines, April 9th is the Day of Valor, a national holiday marking the day the march began. On the island of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory, Filipino workers, British Royal Marines, and United States sailors hold an annual memorial march each year. They leave from the marina by boat, land at Barton Point, and march south to the plantation ruins. The 2012 film documentary Never the Same: The Prisoner-of-War Experience, produced by Jan Thompson and narrated by Loretta Swit, reconstructed scenes of the camps and ships and drew on drawings and writings left by the prisoners themselves.