But these remaining inmates, "the ghosts of Bataan," were the sick and the dying, the leftovers, the ones too weak to work. Most of the thousands of prisoners who passed through were sent to other Japanese work projects in the Philippines and Japan. Cabanatuan became the largest American POW camp in the Pacific. The prisoners were among the last of the twenty thousand American soldiers who had surrendered to the Japanese in April and May of 1942, and many were survivors of the Bataan Death March, which had claimed the lives of more than a thousand Americans. As MacArthur's troops advanced south toward Manila, Army officials learned that approximately five hundred American prisoners of war were still being held at a Japanese work camp in Cabanatuan in the central Luzon plain. forces was one of the largest land invasions of World War II. The storming of the island of Luzon by U. In early January 1945, General Douglas MacArthur unleashed hell on the Philippines.
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