of these officers were featured in a Life magazine article. The Bataan Death March and other Japanese actions were used to arouse fury in the United States. America would go on to avenge its defeat that occured in the Philippines during the Island of Leyte in October 1944. When General Douglas MacArthur famously promised to return to the Philippines, and he kept his word in February 1945, U.S. and Filipino forces went on to recapture the Bataan Peninsula, and shortly after the Capitol city of Manila was liberated in early March. General George Marshall made the following statement: Japanese In an attempt to counter the American propaganda value of the march, the Japanese had The Manila Times report that the prisoners were treated humanely and their death rate had to be attributed to the intransigence of the American commanders who did not surrender until the men were on the verge of death. War crimes trial In September 1945, General Masaharu Homma was arrested by Allied troops and indicted for war crimes. He was charged with 43 separate counts but the verdict did not distinguish among them, leaving some doubt over whether he was found guilty of them all. Homma was found guilty of permitting members of his command to commit "brutal atrocities and other high crimes". The general, who had been absorbed in his efforts to capture Corregidor after the fall of Bataan, claimed in his defense that he remained ignorant of the high death toll of the death march until two months after the event. Homma's verdict was predicated on the doctrine of respondeat superior, but with an added liability standard, since the latter could not be rebutted. On February 26, 1946, he was sentenced to death by firing squad, and was executed on April 3 outside Manila. Masanobu Tsuji, who had directly ordered the killing of POWs, fled to China from Thailand when the war ended to escape the British authorities. Two of Homma's subordinates, Major General Yoshitaka Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano, were prosecuted by an American military commission in Yokohama in 1948, using evidence presented at the Homma trial. They were sentenced to death by hanging, and executed at Sugamo Prison in June 12, 1949. Post-war commemorations, apologies, and memorials On September 13, 2010, Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada apologized to a group of six former American soldiers who had been held as prisoners of war