At 7:55 on the morning of December 7, 1941, the first of two waves of Japanese carrier aircraft struck Pearl Harbor. The attack cost the Japanese only 29 planes. American deaths numbered roughly 2,400, with another 1,200 wounded, and more than half of the US military aircraft on the ground were damaged or destroyed. The following day, Japan launched its invasion of the Philippines, and by May 8, 1942, American and Filipino forces there surrendered.
A month before that surrender, on April 9, the Imperial Japanese Army began forcing approximately 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war on a 65-mile march characterized by severe abuse and wanton killing. It became known as the Bataan Death March and claimed more than 18,000 lives. The man held responsible for this atrocity, who would come to be called the Beast of Bataan, was Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma. Homma was born on November 27, 1887, in Sado, Japan.
He graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1907 and from the Army Staff College in 1910. Unusual among Japanese officers of his generation, he spoke fluent English, studied at Oxford, and served eight years as a military attaché in Britain. His appreciation for Western culture, his paintings, and his poetry earned him the nickname the Poet Shogun. In 1918, he served with British forces in France and was awarded the Military Cross.
His career continued to rise through the interwar years. He served again as military attaché to the United Kingdom from 1930 to 1932, joined a Japanese delegation to the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932, and commanded the 1st Infantry Regiment and later the 32nd Infantry Brigade. In 1937, he was appointed aide-de-camp to Prince Chichibu, brother of Emperor Hirohito. Together they toured Western Europe, attending the coronation of King George VI and then traveling to Germany, where they attended the Nuremberg Rally and met Adolf Hitler.
Promoted to lieutenant general in July 1938, Homma commanded the 27th Division in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, leading negotiations with the British over the blockade of foreign concessions in Tientsin. The war in China was brutal. After the fall of Nanjing in December 1937, as many as 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers were killed over two months, though chaos and mass graves made an accurate count impossible. Homma himself publicly warned that unless peace was achieved immediately, the situation would be disastrous.
When war came to the Pacific in December 1941, Homma was given command of the Japanese 14th Army, more than 43,000 men tasked with invading and occupying the Philippines. His orders to his troops were strikingly different from the conduct that would later define the campaign. He told them to treat Filipinos not as enemies but as friends and to respect their customs and religion. On one occasion, he halted his column to demand tighter formation, suspecting that soldiers in the rear were looting and raping.
His lenient approach toward Filipino civilians brought him into conflict with his superior, General Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Army, who sent unfavorable reports about him to Tokyo. Within his own command, a small group of insubordinate officers issued secret orders in his name, including one to execute Philippine Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos and another to kill former Speaker Manuel Roxas. Homma learned of these orders in time to stop them. On January 7, 1942, the Battle of Bataan began.
It was the most intense phase of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of US and Filipino forces in the islands, consolidated his Luzon-based units on the Bataan Peninsula. By then, Japan controlled nearly all of Southeast Asia, and Bataan and the island of Corregidor were the only remaining Allied strongholds. Despite severe shortages of supplies, American and Filipino forces held out for three months, initially conducting a fighting retreat southward before making a final stand.
The delay cost the Japanese valuable time and prevented an immediate victory across the Pacific. On April 9, 1942, the American surrender at Bataan became the largest in United States history, with 76,000 soldiers surrendering altogether. Homma and his staff had expected far fewer captives and were confronted with nearly twice as many. More than 60,000 starved, sick, and debilitated prisoners, along with over 38,000 equally weakened civilian noncombatants, had to be moved north.
Homma wanted to relocate them out of the way of the final assault on Corregidor, but there was not enough motorized transport for the wounded and sick. The result was that more than 60,000 Filipino and 15,000 American prisoners were forced to march. At the start, there were rare instances of kindness from some Japanese officers and English-speaking soldiers who shared food and cigarettes and allowed prisoners to keep personal possessions. That quickly gave way to unrelenting brutality.
Prisoners received little food or water, and many died. They were beaten and tortured. A common torment called the sun treatment forced men to sit in direct heat without helmets. Anyone who asked for water was shot dead.
Some prisoners were stripped naked or made to sit within sight of cool, fresh water. Trucks ran over men who fell, and cleanup crews killed those too weak to continue, though some trucks did pick up the exhausted. Prisoners were randomly stabbed with bayonets. The Japanese provided no medical care, so American medics treated the sick and wounded with few or no supplies.
Part of the march took place in brutally hot, unventilated metal boxcars on trains. At least 100 prisoners were pushed into each car, with no sanitation and no room to sit or fall. Staff Sergeant Earl Larson later recalled that they were packed so tightly they could not sit down, and when the door was shut, anyone who passed out simply could not fall. If someone needed the toilet, they went where they stood.
Death tolls vary by source, with estimates of between 5,000 and 18,000 Filipino deaths and between 500 and 650 American deaths. Roughly 10,000 to 12,000 men escaped the march and formed guerrilla units in the mountains, tying down occupying Japanese forces. The total distance, from Mariveles to San Fernando and from Capas to Camp O’Donnell, is reported variously as between 60 and 69. 6 miles.
An Allied military commission later judged the march a Japanese war crime. Despite the Japanese victory, Homma’s worsening relationship with the Chief of the Imperial Army General Staff, Hajime Sugiyama, led to his removal from command shortly after the fall of Corregidor. From then on, he commanded the 14th Army in name only. In March 1942, MacArthur, his family, and his staff escaped Corregidor for Australia, where he became Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area.
Upon arrival, he promised, “I shall return. ” After more than two years of fighting, he kept that promise. Japanese forces in the Philippines were ordered to surrender on August 15, 1945, following the atomic bombings of Japan and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. By that time, Homma was retired and living in semi-seclusion.
Imperial General Headquarters had judged him insufficiently aggressive in war and too lenient with Filipinos in peace, and in August 1943, he was forced into retirement. In mid-September 1945, American occupation authorities arrested him and extradited him to the Philippines. He was tried in Manila by an American tribunal on 48 counts of violating the international rules of war relating to atrocities committed by troops under his command during the Bataan Death March. General MacArthur, the man Homma had beaten on the battlefield, selected the venue, the defense, the prosecution, the jury, and the rules of evidence.
In his defense, Homma claimed he had been so preoccupied with plans for the Corregidor assault that he had forgotten about the prisoners’ treatment, believing his officers were handling the matter. He said he did not learn of the atrocities until after the war, though his headquarters stood only 500 feet from the march route. He told the court, “I came to know for the first time in court of the atrocities, and I am ashamed of myself that these atrocities have happened. ”
On February 11, 1946, Homma was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death.
He was originally to be hanged, but at the request of his second wife, Fujiko, the sentence was carried out by firing squad. She visited MacArthur to urge a careful review of the case, but MacArthur affirmed the sentence. In his written review, MacArthur declared that if this defendant did not deserve his judicial fate, no man in jurisdictional history ever did, calling the mass destruction of helpless men incapable of further contribution to the war effort among the most heinous crimes possible, and warning that a failure to punish such acts would threaten the very fabric of world society. On April 3, 1946, Masaharu Homma was executed by firing squad at Los Baños in the Philippines.
He was 58 years old.