forced march

plural forced marches

1. governmentA movement on foot by soldiers or prisoners of war, who must, in order to satisfy a military requirement, travel at a speed or in adverse conditions that would normally tire them excessively.

   [M]any of their leaders could not yet wholly believe that Jackson and his army, making a forced march in the dead of winter, were at hand.

   1914, Joseph A. Altsheler, chapter 4, in The Scouts of Stonewall

   2 more examples

   I did not believe this possible because of the distance and the condition of the roads, which was bad; besides, troops after a forced march of twenty miles are not in a good condition for fighting the moment they get through.

   1885, Ulysses S. Grant, chapter 28, in Personal memoirs of U.S. Grant^(http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=surround&offset=327093481&tag=Grant,+Ulysses+S.+(Ulysses+Simpson),+1822-1885.:+Personal+memoirs+of+U.S.+Grant,+Volume+I,+1885&query=forced+march&id=GraPers)

   American and Filipino prisoners from the fall of Corregidor in 1942 were refused food and water on a six-day, 97-km forced march to their place of confinement at Camp O'Donnell.

   2001 June 24, Howard Chua-Eoan, “War of the Worlds”, in Time, retrieved 08 Aug 2013