As thousands escaped the peninsula or were in field hospitals, it is uncertain how many people were on the march that started that same day. Those who did not flee were rounded up at the tip of Bataan and other locations along the peninsula for a sixty-five-mile merciless forced march in the tropical sun northward to a train station at San Fernando. There they were packed standing into small unventilated boxcars for the twenty-four-mile journey to Capas. Many died standing. The survivors made a final six-mile march to Camp O’Donnell, a makeshift POW camp with only one source of water. Thousands more died there of disease, starvation, and lack of medical care.

Yet it took two more months for the Japanese to subdue all the Philippines. General Masaharu Homma did not accept General Wainwright’s surrender of Corregidor and the other fortress islands in Manila Bay. Instead, he kept the men and women there as hostages until he received assurance on June 9, 1942, that all the USAFFE troops throughout the Philippines had surrendered. General Guy Fort, commander of the Lanao Force of the 81st Philippine Division in Mindanao, was one of the last to surrender. His refusal to betray his troops who had become guerillas earned him the Mindanao Death March and eventually a firing squad. He is the only American-born general to have been executed by the enemy.

In January 1946, 200 former POWs of Japan recuperating in the Fort Devens hospital formed the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. Notwithstanding their name, the organization was formed to memorialize the spirit of perseverance, faith, and optimism of

all American citizens - men and women who served at any time in the Armed Forces of the United States in the defense of the Philippine Islands between December 7, 1941 and May 10, 1942 inclusive and any man or woman who may have been attached to any unit of force of the Asiatic Fleet, Philippine Archipelago, Wake Island, Marianna Islands, Midway Island and Dutch East Indies.

Wainwright died five years to the day after he represented on the Missouri all the ordinary men and women who found uncommon courage in extraordinary circumstances to fight the impossible and endure the unimaginable for freedom from tyranny and oppression. Or in as Roosevelt said in 1942

…“sacrifice” is not exactly the proper word with which to describe this program of self-denial. When, at the end of this great struggle we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no sacrifice.”
 

Today, it is easy to forget or diminish this “sacrifice.” However, while accepting Japan’s surrender on the deck of the Missouri, MacArthur did not. He understood that his victory rested on the Americans who persevered in the face of overwhelming adversity. 

Now it is time for the U.S. Congress to go beyond MacArthur’s symbolism to recognize this critical contribution to winning the War by awarding this World War II group a Congressional Gold Medal. 

Mindy L. Kotler is director of Asia Policy Point, a nonprofit research center in Washington, DC that studies Japan and Northeast Asia. She is an adviser to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society and a descendant of a POW of Japan.

Image: Wikipedia.