On the morning of December 16, 1945, Lt. Robert Pelz steeled himself to meet a monster. A young Army lawyer not long out of Columbia Law School, Pelz was stationed in Manila, where he had been assigned to work on the trial of the most notorious Japanese war criminal of them all: Masaharu Homma, the general who had handed America a staggering military defeat—the surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the Philippine island of Luzon. Homma's trial was to begin on January 3, 1946, in less than a month.
Pelz dreaded the prospect of defending him. Widely referred to as the Beast of Bataan, Homma was the man thought responsible for the deaths of nearly 10,000 starving American and Filipino prisoners who were marched in sweltering heat from Bataan to squalid concentration camps in central Luzon. This catastrophic relocation of POWs had become universally known as the Bataan Death March.
Read Full Article »