By the end of the war, only half the PTG’s men were alive. The Provisional Tank Group ceased to exist, and its men endured the Bataan Death March, the torture and starvation of POW camps, the hell ships that took them to Japan and Manchuria for slave labor, and the Palawan massacre (where prisoners were lit on fire by the Japanese). By April the situation had become untenable, and 15,000 Americans, along with 60,000 Filipinos, surrendered in one of the worst defeats in U.S. ![]() The next day, General MacArthur ordered the retreat to Bataan, and over the next two weeks, the PTG, proving itself indispensable, formed a blocking force to cover the retreat and dealt the enemy tanks such a defeat that the Japanese would be timid with their armor for the rest of the campaign.ĭuring January, February, and March 1942, the light tanks of the PTG patrolled Bataan’s beaches and, in a new role for tanks, encircled and destroyed Japanese penetrations and small amphibious landings these tactics would be used by other units later in the war. Sent north to meet the Japanese landings in Lingayen Gulf, the men of the group, still learning their way around an M3 tank, found themselves thrust into a critical role when the Philippine Army could not hold back the Japanese. ![]() One of the tankmen parked his half-track on a runway and shot down a Japanese Zero that day, but the group’s first tank-on-tank action – indeed the first American armor battle of World War II – would come two weeks later. ![]() The American Provisional Tank Group had been in the Philippines only three weeks when the Japanese attacked the islands hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor.
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