Japanese occupation of the Philippines

General Douglas MacArthur was ordered out, leaving his men at Corregidor on the night of 11 March 1942 for Australia, 4,000 km away.

A highly effective guerrilla campaign by Philippine resistance forces controlled sixty percent of the islands, mostly forested and mountainous areas.

[6] Under the pressure of superior numbers, the defending forces withdrew to the Bataan Peninsula and to the island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay.

[9] The Philippine defense continued until the final surrender of US-Philippine forces on the Bataan Peninsula on April 10, 1942, and on Corregidor on May 6, 1942.

[10] Thousands of men, weakened by disease and malnutrition and treated harshly by their captors, died before reaching their destination.

[24][25]Throughout the Philippines more than a thousand Filipinos, composed of mothers, girls, and gay men, some as young as 10, were imprisoned, forcibly taken as "comfort women", and kept in sexual slavery for Japanese military personnel during the occupation.

[26] [27][28][29] Each of the Japanese military installations in the Philippines during the occupation had a location where the women were held, which they called a "comfort station".

[31] The Filipinos that were forced to sexual slavery by the Japanese were kidnapped from the population and were routinely gang-raped, tortured, and humiliated.

[32][33][34] Decades after the war, victims of Japan's colonial sex slave system initiated for their documented slavery to be inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register; however, Japan's government blocked the inscription to defend itself from its own war crimes by using its monetary contributions to threaten UNESCO.

In those cases, the "wartime friends" of the doctors who exposed their own acts tried to prevent the historical stories from coming out to the public in a bid to defend Japanese war crimes.

The United States afterwards received human experimentation data from Japan, as exchange for MacArthur's actions which protected Japanese war criminals from legal persecution.

The commanders of these groups made contact with one another, argued about who was in charge of what territory, and began to formulate plans to assist the return of American forces to the islands.

[52] Several islands in the Visayas region had guerrilla forces led by Filipino officers, such as Colonel Macario Peralta in Panay,[52][53] Major Ismael Ingeniero in Bohol,[52][54] and Captain Salvador Abcede in Negros.

[52][55] The island of Mindanao, being farthest from the center of Japanese occupation, had 38,000 guerrillas who were eventually consolidated under the command of American civil engineer Colonel Wendell Fertig.

[52] Fertig's guerrillas included many American and Filipino troops who had been part of the force on Mindanao under Major General William F. Sharp.

Many of the American and Filipino officers refused to surrender, since they reasoned that Wainwright, now a prisoner who could be considered under duress, had no authority to issue orders to Sharp.

[56] One resistance group in the Central Luzon area was known as the Hukbalahap (Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon), or the People's Anti-Japanese Army, organized in early 1942 under the leadership of Luis Taruc, a communist party member since 1939.

[59][60] Lack of equipment, rough terrain and undeveloped infrastructure made coordination of these groups nearly impossible, and for several months in 1942, all contact was lost with the Philippine resistance forces.

Communications were restored in November 1942 when the reformed Philippine 61st Division on Panay island, led by Colonel Macario Peralta, was able to establish radio contact with the USAFFE command in Australia.

Colonel Wendell Fertig organized such a group on Mindanao that not only effectively resisted the Japanese, but formed a complete government that often operated in the open throughout the island.

The Japanese Imperial General Staff decided to make the Philippines their final line of defense, and to stop the American advance towards Japan.

[51] MacArthur's Allied forces landed on the island of Leyte on 20 October 1944, accompanied by Osmeña, who had succeeded to the commonwealth presidency upon the death of Quezon on 1 August 1944.

Landings then followed on the island of Mindoro and around Lingayen Gulf on the west side of Luzon, and the push toward Manila was initiated.

Fighting was fierce, particularly in the mountains of northern Luzon, where Japanese troops had retreated, and in Manila, where they put up a last-ditch resistance.