Modern Era · Southeast Asia · War
1942
Bataan Death March
April 9, 1942
After American and Filipino forces surrendered on the Bataan peninsula, Japanese guards marched some seventy-five thousand prisoners sixty-six miles through tropical heat without food or water, bayoneting stragglers. Perhaps ten thousand died on the road. It would be a central memory of the Pacific war and, after 1945, the subject of war crime trials.