During the battle for the Philippines at the beginning of the war in the Pacific, Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur led his forces in an organized retreat to the Bataan Peninsula on the island of Luzon. Here, 67,500 Filipino troops (under MacArthur's command), together with 12,500 U.S. personnel and 26,000 civilians, made their last defensive stand against the Japanese onslaught in the hope and expectation of the imminent arrival of a U.S. relief force, which, in fact, never came.

After declaring the Philippine capital, Manila, an open city, MacArthur began the withdrawal to Bataan on December 24, 1941, and set up his headquarters at Corregidor, on the tip of the peninsula. On the face of it, at least as the Japanese saw it, the withdrawal to a narrow peninsula--25 miles long and 20 miles wide at its widest--was not only futile but a tactical error. The American and Filipino forces, after all, had entered a cul de sac, and the Japanese anticipated a quick and easy victory. What the Japanese commanders had not reckoned on was the rugged countryside, which made Bataan ideal defensive ground, and the fact that MacArthur had prepared for a siege by stockpiling ammunition, medical supplies, and provisions, though the latter were inadequate, and from the beginning the defenders were forced to subsist on meager half-rations.

The overall commander of the Japanese forces in the Philippines was Gen. Homma Masaharu. As he was about to launch his offensive against Bataan, he was compelled to withdraw his most experienced division for the invasion of the Dutch East Indies. This bothered Homma little, however, since he believed taking Bataan would require little effort. He assigned his Kimura Detachment and a raw unit, the 65th Brigade, to the task. They attacked on January 9, 1942, breaking through MacArthur's first line of defenders but becoming bogged down in the secondary line, to which two defending corps withdrew. Homma attempted a landing behind the American lines but was repulsed at heavy cost. After a month of fighting, on February 8, Homma aborted the offensive. He had lost 2,700 men killed and more than 4,000 wounded. The miserable jungle conditions had made another 13,000 too sick to fight. In effect, his entire attacking force had been neutralized.

On March 11, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to evacuate the Philippines with his family. With great reluctance, MacArthur left for Australia, and it fell to his second in command, Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, to resume the Bataan defense. Unless a relief force arrived, Wainwright knew his position was hopeless. Critically short on rations, his troops were near starvation. As the realization set in that no relief was to be sent, the morale of the debilitated defenders collapsed, and when Homma, reinforced, attacked again on April 3, 1942, the issue was a foregone conclusion. Ordered by MacArthur not to surrender, Wainwright mounted a counterattack, which, predictably, failed. Wainwright's front-line commander, Maj. Gen. Edward King, took it upon himself to order the surrender of his command rather than witness their fruitless slaughter. He capitulated to Homma on April 9. The fall of Bataan was complete--except for the infamous coda known as the Bataan Death March, the inhuman trek across 65 jungle miles from Mariveles to a prisoner of war camp at San Fernando.

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