Araw ng Kagitingan - A Glimpse on World & Philippine History

Below is a contributed article of Dex Amoroso, my Facebook friend, on the Day of Valor or Araw ng Kagitingan which is held every 9th day of April. It is also called Bataan Day because the Death March starts on this day.

Araw ng Kagitingan 

by Dex Amoroso

Bataan Death March 

Araw ng Kagitingan is held to commemorate the Fall of Bataan, and the beginning of the Bataan Death March. The day is also called Bataan Day.

SOME FACT ON WORLD WAR II (1939-45) 

December 7, 1941 - Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. 

The next day - The Japanese invasion of the Philippines began. 

Within a month, the Japanese had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and the American and Filipino defenders of Luzon (the island on which Manila is located) were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. 

For the next three months, the combined US-Filipino army held out despite a lack of naval and air support. 

April 9, 1942, 77 years ago today, with his forces crippled by starvation and disease, U.S. General Edward King Jr., surrendered his approximately 75,000 troops at Bataan. 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 San Fernando. 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. 

3 years later... 

August 6, 1945 - The first Atomic Bomb was exploded in Hiroshima. An American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. 

3 days later... 

August 9, 1945 - The second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. 

August 15, 1945 - Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” 

Do you think the Bataan Death March and all the other war crimes committed by the Japanese justified US President Truman's decision of dropping the bomb on Japan?