The veterans' efforts to get compensation from Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Nippon Steel, have been dismissed by the Supreme Court and opposed by the U.S. government based on the interpretation of 1951 peace treaty with Japan. The Japanese army forced more than 10,000 Americans on an 85-mile march in the spring of 1942, which became known as the Bataan Death March. Soldiers were beaten, bayoneted and, in some cases, buried alive. Nearly 1,000 died on the march, and, among those remaining, soldiers died at the rate of one an hour for the next two months. Those who survived spent months in prison camps. Many were made slave laborers in Japanese plants for three and a half years. At the end of the war, they came home almost unnoticed, wrote Hatch and Sen.