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The Battle of Bataan, a peninsula in the Philippines, took place a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor and lasted for three months. After the surrender of the Allied forces, there were 75,000 prisoners the Japanese commander wanted out of his way, so he sent them on a death march. But that commander would eventually face justice.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 3, 1946--
General MacArthur fucked up. His shitty tactics hastened the fall of the Philippines and contributed to more death and brutality at the hands of the Japanese. MacArthur’s troops were poorly trained and equipped, and the American general underestimated the Japanese. He knew prior to the war how vulnerable the archipelago was to Japanese invasion, and didn’t prepare for it, plus arrogantly believed he could defend the region rather than making an earlier strategic retreat to Bataan and ensuring the peninsula was well supplied. But he tried to hold the beaches and instead had to make a hasty retreat. The American and Philippine soldiers, lacking food and medicine, were forced to surrender due to starvation and disease on April 9, 1942.
But not MacArthur. He noped out to Australia. The rest of those who surrendered, about 60,000 Filipino soldiers and 15,000 Americans, were sent on the Bataan Death March. The march was 66 miles long and lasted six days. The men were already sick and starving and given little in the way of food and water along the way. There was rampant brutality and random killings during the march. As many of 18,000 men died during it, most of them Filipino.
The march ended at Camp O’Donnell, which had been captured by the Japanese and turned into a temporary POW camp. In the few months the prisoners were housed there, over 20,000 more died from disease, starvation, and brutality.
At the end of the war, it was time for some motherfucking payback.
Except not really. I mean, Japan got the shit bombed out of it—and not just nuclear bombings—which killed a lot of civilians. But there were plenty of Japanese war criminals who skated because it was politically expedient for the Americans to do so because they wanted Japan as a Cold War ally against the Soviets. But this one guy got his.
His name was Lieutenant-General Masaharu Homma, and he was the Japanese military commander of the Philippines during the Battle of Bataan and the ensuing death march, and for several months afterward. The Allied soldiers referred to him as “The Beast of Bataan.” Despite this, the Japanese high command didn’t think he was aggressive enough, removed him from command, and eventually forced him into retirement in 1943.
A couple of weeks after the September 2, 1945, surrender of Japan Homma was arrested by Americans and extradited to the Philippines to stand trial for war crimes. He used the “I didn’t know my officers were being mean” defense, but it didn’t fly. He was found guilty and executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.
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