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The Battle of Luzon was a land battle fought as part of the Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II by the Allied forces of the U.S., its colony the Philippines, and allies against forces of the Empire of Japan. The battle resulted in a U.S. and Filipino victory.<br/><br/> The Allies had taken control of all strategically and economically important locations of Luzon by March 1945, although pockets of Japanese resistance held out in the mountains until the unconditional surrender of Japan.
The Battle of Bataan represented the most intense phase of Imperial Japan's invasion of the Philippines during World War II. In January 1942, forces of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy invaded Luzon along with several islands in the Philippine Archipelago after the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.<br/><br/> The commander-in-chief of all Filipino and American forces in the islands, General Douglas MacArthur, consolidated all of his Luzon-based units on the Bataan Peninsula to fight against the Japanese invaders. By this time, the Japanese controlled nearly all of Southeast Asia. The Bataan peninsula and the island of Corregidor were the only remaining Allied strongholds in the region. Despite a lack of supplies, Filipino and American forces managed to fight the Japanese for three months, engaging them initially in a fighting retreat southward.<br/><br/> As the combined Filipino and American forces made a last stand, the delay cost the Japanese valuable time and prohibited immediate victory across the Pacific. The surrender at Bataan was the largest in American and Filipino military histories, and was the largest United States surrender since the American Civil War's Battle of Harper's Ferry. Soon afterwards, Filipino and American prisoners of war were forced into the Bataan Death March.