Hello, and thank you for listening to the history of World War II podcast, Episode 324,

the second battle of Baton.

Just before General Homo pulled back his men of the 14th Army in mid-February to await

for supplies and reinforcements, he knew he was in trouble.

After all, Guam, Wake Island and Hong Kong had been captured.

Singapore and the Duchess Indies were currently being threatened, and all this was being done

with just ten divisions, that is, 200,000 men of the Imperial Japanese forces.

However, the men of the Philippines were still defiant.

Where the locals and the soft Americans were holed up in the jungles of South Baton,

still offering resistance, though they had been on half-rations since early January.

Many within Homo's camp kept saying yes, but the Americans were not the Chinese, who those

in Tokyo did not take seriously.

But Homo would have liked to point out that though China had been invaded and attacked

for the last couple of years, it had still not fallen either.

Not that this would have helped Homo with his critics.

Indeed, the General's deadline of 50 days, which had ended on January 26th, had come and

gone, but the resistors were still there.

Worse, one of Homo's political enemies was Tojo himself, his country's Prime Minister

and War Minister, and as the American newspapers wrote of the Empire's ever-growing list of

conquests, which included the taking of Manella, they never failed to mention that the war

in Baton was not over.

This irritated Tojo, why?

...