The film "Back to Battan" starts and ends with the January 30, 1945 US/Filipino raid on the infamous Cabanatuan Japanese prison camp on Luzon Island as the allied troops rout the Japanese defenders, that number some 2,000 to 5,000 men, at the cost of only 4 killed and 21 wounded with not even a single US/Filipino POW being lost in the battle. The movie then goes back some three years to the spring of 1942 during the darkest days of the Japanese advance on Battan. US Col. Madden, John Wayne, and his men are fighting for their lives holding back wave after wave of suicidal Japanese Banzai attacks as the lights slowly go out for the American and Philippine forces. With the US general in command of the Philippines Douglas MacArthur being called back to Australia to regroup the battered and defeated US Army for another shot at the invincible army navy and air force of the Empire of Japan things look very bleak for the American and Filipino troops still left on the islands.
The film almost entirely concentrates on the guerrilla war conducted by Col. Joe Madden and Capt. Andres Bonifacio (Anthony Quinn), the grandson of the late 19th and early 20th century Filipino patriot and freedom fighter Andres Bonifacio the first. The guerrilla war lasted for two and a half years made it possible for the successful allied invasion of Latye in the fall of 1944. There's also Anders' girlfriend pretty Filipino radio personality Dolici Dalgado, Fely Franquelli, who's the Tokyo Rose of Minlia. Dolici is mouthing off on the radio Japanese propaganda to the Philippine people but in reality is working for US, which her boyfriend Andres who's totally unaware of it. Dolici puts secret code words into her commentaries to alert the US and allied, Philippine, troops where the Japanese Army is making it's next move.
One of the better WWII Hollywood war movies with John Wayne needing help from the locals and also being berated and pushed around by who I at first thought was the leader of the allied troops on the Islands,she sure as hell acted like she was, history teacher Bertha Barnes, Beulah Bondi. There's also a number of really exciting battle sequences between the US/Filipino troops and Japanese forces that didn't come across phony and overly one-sided, like in the battles of Battan and the Island fortress of Corrigidor,where the "Japs" actually won, like in most WWII movies coming out of Hollywood at that time.
There were two scenes in the movie "Back to Battan" that really moved me and that had very little to do with any fighting. The first when high school Principle J. Bello, Vladimir Sokoloff, refuses to pull down the American flag on the orders of Japanese officer Captain Abner Biberman and then was hanged in it's place. The second scene was when 15 year-old Philippine high-school student Maximo Cuerca, Duckie Louie, was forced to betray, after being tortured by the Japanese, his fellow freedom fighters and American allies. Maximo gave up his life taking the lives of his Japanese tormentors with him by forcing the truck he was on, by grabbing the steering wheel, to go off an embankment killing everyone on board in order to warn Col. Madden's men that they were soon to be ambushed.
The real heavy fighting was saved for last with the return to the Philippines of the American forces under the leadership of "I Shall Return" General Douglas MacArthur in the invasion and battle of Latye Gulf in October 1944. The invasion that culminated, in the movie, with the liberation of the Cabantuan POW Prison Camp in late January of 1945. We see, as the movie ends, a number of actual US POW's not actors in the film from some half dozen different states, Texas Alabama Kansas Tennessee Illinois and even Brooklyn New York. All these POW's who were just liberated are seen ecstatically marching to the trumping and heart-lifting tune of "California Here I Come".
