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Insight Horizon Media

What happened to the 77 nurses captured in the Philippines?

Author

Rachel Hickman

Published Mar 21, 2026

What happened to the 77 nurses captured in the Philippines?

In July, the nurses were put into Santo Tomas Internment Camp (STIC) in Manila. Santo Tomas became a POW city of roughly 6,000 people. The American nurse POWs were not just waiting to be liberated, they were fighting to survive and to ensure the survival of others. All 77 survived until liberation by American forces.

How many American POWs died in the Philippines?

About 1,500 American and 22,000 Filipino prisoners of war died at Camp O’Donnell from starvation, disease and the brutal treatment received at the hands of the captors.

How many Americans were captured in the Philippines?

In all, of the some 22,000 Americans (soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines) captured by Japanese forces on the Bataan Peninsula, only about 15,000 returned to the United States, a death rate of more than 30 percent.

Is Corregidor part of Bataan?

Corregidor Island, rocky island, strategically located at the entrance of Manila Bay, just south of Bataan province, Luzon, Philippines. It is a national shrine commemorating the battle fought there by U.S. and Filipino forces against overwhelming numbers of Japanese during World War II.

What happened to the army nurses after Corregidor fell in 1942?

When Bataan and Corregidor fell, 11 navy nurses, 66 army nurses, and 1 nurse-anesthetist were captured and imprisoned in and around Manila. They continued to serve as a nursing unit while prisoners of war. After years of hardship, they were finally liberated in February 1945.

How many Filipinos died in ww2?

527,000 Filipinos
The Philippines had suffered great loss of life and tremendous physical destruction by the time the war was over. An estimated 527,000 Filipinos, both military and civilians, had been killed from all causes; of these between 131,000 and 164,000 were killed in seventy-two war crime events.

How did the Japanese military treat prisoners of war in the Philippines?

The outstanding infraction of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of Prisoners of War was the announced policy of the Japanese that they would treat the soldiers captured in the Philippines Islands as captives rather than as prisoners of war.

Why did the Japanese want the Philippines?

For the Japanese, the Philippines were strategically important for several reasons. It would also provide a Japanese base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies, and it would secure lines of supply and communication between the Japanese home islands and their conquered territories.

Was the Philippines colonized by Japan?

The Japanese occupation of the Philippines occurred between 1942 and 1945, when Imperial Japan occupied the Commonwealth of the Philippines during World War II. A highly effective guerilla campaign by Philippine resistance forces controlled sixty percent of the islands, mostly jungle and mountain areas.

What is the nickname of the Philippines?

Pearl of the Orient
Pearl of the Orient/Pearl of the Orient Seas (Spanish: Perla de oriente/Perla del mar de oriente) is the sobriquet of the Philippines.

Where is corridor in Philippines?

The Lingayen–Lucena corridor is the part of Luzon in the Philippines, between Lingayen (in Pangasinan) to Lucena, comprising the province of Pangasinan, and the regions of Central Luzon, Metro Manila, and Calabarzon, where national elections are claimed to be won. The corridor comprises about 40% of the vote.

How many Bataan Death March survivors are still alive?

There were 987 survivors. As of 2012, of the veterans of the 200th and 515th who survived the Bataan Death March 69 were still alive. As of March 2017, only four of these veterans remained.