2-612-015 - Keystone Archives/Heritage Images

Japanese soldiers celebrate victory, Bataan, Philippines, World War II, 1942. Japanese troops invaded the Philippines, then a commonwealth of the United States of America, in December 1941. They advanced across the largest island, Luzon, with the outnumbered American and Filipino troops retreating to the Bataan Peninsula and the island of Corregidor. The American commander, General Douglas MacArthur, was evacuated from Bataan on 12 March 1942, famously vowing to return, leaving the remaining defenders to fight on stubbornly until surrendering on 9 April. The survivors were subjected to a brutal forced march to prison camps known as the Bataan Death March, on which thousands of prisoners of war died. The march was judged to be a war crime by an Allied commission after the end of the war. Corregidor surrendered to the Japanese on 6 May.