Araw Ng Kagitingan (Day of Valour)
After Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began. Within a month, the Japanese had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The American and Filipino defenders were forced to retreat to Bataan Peninsula. For the next three months, the combined American-Filipino army, under the command of U.S. General Jonathan Wainwright, held out impressively despite a lack of naval and air support. However, with his army crippled by starvation and disease, Wainwright began withdrawing as many troops as possible to the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay on April 7th. Two days later, on April 9th, Allied troops were trapped by the Japanese in Bataan and forced to surrender.
The surrendered Filipinos and Americans soon were rounded up by the Japanese and forced to march some 65 miles from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula, to a prison camp in San Fernando in the province of Pampanga. The men were divided into groups of approximately 100, and what became known as the Bataan Death March typically took each group around five days to complete. The exact figures are unknown, but it is believed that thousands of troops died because of the brutality of their captors, who starved and beat the marchers, and bayoneted those too weak to walk. Survivors were taken by rail from San Fernando to prisoner-of- war camps, where thousands more died from disease, mistreatment and starvation. Few survived to see the day of their liberation.
The surrender of Bataan hastened the fall of Corregidor. However, had it not been for the last ditch effort at Bataan, the Japanese might have quickly overrun all of the US bases in the Pacific. Bataan forced them to slow down, giving the allies valuable time to prepare and to gain an upper hand in ensuing confrontations, such as the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.
America avenged its defeat in the Philippines with the invasion of the island of Leyte in October 1944. General Douglas MacArthur, who in 1942 had famously promised to return to the Philippines, made good on his word. In February 1945, U.S.-Filipino forces recaptured the Bataan Peninsula, and Manila was liberated in early March.
After the war, an American military tribunal tried Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, commander of the Japanese invasion forces in the Philippines. He was held responsible for the death march, a war crime, and was executed by firing squad in 1946.
April 9th is designated as Araw Ng Kagitingan (The Day of Valour) in the Philippines, commemorating the heroes of Bataan, Corregidor, and Besang Pass. Araw ng Kagitingan is a non-working holiday in the Philippines. World War II veterans parade along parts of the Death March route in the Philippines on this day. The country’s president lays a wreath at the Mt Samat shrine, in the province of Bataan.
Source: history.com
