Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [110]
On the Japanese side, they were actually reducing their forces. With no idea of how many men were opposing them, the Japanese pulled out one of Homma’s divisions for the leap into the East Indies. They were still ready to go, however, and on the 15th of January they opened heavy attacks against the Allied line in the middle of the peninsula. The Americans were pushed back, counterattacked, and after a week’s bitter fighting in the jungle-choked country, held their position. It did them little good; with the troops exhausted and few supplies coming up, they had to fall back and take up another line farther down the peninsula.
They stopped on a line running from Bagac to Orion, and here MacArthur intended to fight it out to the end. In vain the Japanese butted against it for two weeks in late January and early February, then they settled down to regroup and pull themselves together. The Americans and Filipinos did the same, but there was now heavy wastage caused by exhaustion and malnutrition. Their rations were cut to thirty ounces of food a day in early January and to fifteen in April. Supplies were not getting through. MacArthur himself was ordered out late in February and left on March 12, he and his family and staff going south on PT-boats, then flying to Australia. Many of the troops, though they accepted the logic of it all, felt bitterly betrayed, and MacArthur’s famous “I shall return” had a hollow ring to those who were not allowed to leave.
Homma, losing face over the delays, was ready again by April 3. After an intense bombardment he crashed through the center of the Bagac-Orion Line, and found almost nothing ahead of him. The reeling Americans and Filipinos were done; they never again put together a coherent position on Bataan, and on the night of the 8th the Luzon Force surrendered. Homma had gambled on a complete surrender of the entire archipelago, and was furious when he failed to get it. The survivors of the peninsula were sent off to prison camps in what became known as the “Bataan Death March.”
In part, the infamous death march occurred because the Japanese had no idea that 76,000 Americans and Filipinos plus another 26,000 civilians were crowded onto the end of Bataan; they expected about 25,000; what provisions they had made to escort prisoners north the hundred-odd miles to camps were soon swamped by numbers. But that was only part of the cause; the other was the attitude of the Japanese. A Japanese warrior expected to die for his Emperor; surrender, to him, was so shameful that it was virtually inconceivable, and there was no such thing as an honorable capitulation. A man who surrendered was utterly without honor, unworthy of respect or humane treatment. Enemies should not surrender, they should have the grace to die. When they did not, the Japanese often killed them. The route of the march soon became lined with bayoneted, shot, and beheaded men. Those who fell out, suffering from exhaustion, dysentery, malnutrition, wounds, were clubbed or bayoneted. Estimates are that 3,000 to 10,000 of the men who started the Death March died on the way. Japanese soldiers expected little mercy from an enemy; after Bataan they would get little.
There remained a number of scattered forces in the rest of the Philippines, especially on the southern island of Mindanao,