CHAPTER 15
(JANUARY 1945)
HQ 6TH ARMY
TANAUAN, LEYTE
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
9 JANUARY 1945
MacArthur had landed at Leyte following the great Battle of Leyte Gulf, and it was as if only he had landed: His photograph and “I have returned” was front-page news around the world. Yet lost in the shadow of that headline was the fact that the 6th Army had also landed. General Walter Krueger commanded the 6th Army, tasked with engaging the 250,000 Japanese on the island of Luzon. But first, General Krueger needed a plan to liberate the POW camps on the Bataan Peninsula, where American prisoners—those who had somehow survived the Bataan Death March and the slave labor details—had been kept since 1942.
Krueger had been told about the existence of Camp Cabanatuan as the 6th Army planned their invasion of the Philippines and subsequent push across Luzon toward Manila. He realized that when they marched through the region there was a likelihood that the Japanese would execute the last 500 surviving American POWs.
When Bataan had surrendered in 1942, the Imperial Army took at least 76,000 prisoners. Most of the U.S. and Filipino troops had fought valiantly. Having already suffered defeat by jungle diseases, abandoned by their leaders, and without supplies, rations, ammunition, or fuel, in the end they had no choice but to surrender.
A Japanese execution order was issued in Manila, which caused many of the atrocities suffered by American and Filipino prisoners in the Bataan Death March and their subsequent imprisonment. The execution order read:
Every troop that fought against our Army on Bataan should be wiped out thoroughly, whether he surrendered or not; and any American captive who is unable to continue marching all the way to the concentration camp should be put to death in an area 200 meters off the highway.
One out of every six of those who were part of the Death March died in those first weeks following the surrender, either from sickness or Japanese brutality or a combination of the two. Atrocities took place before and after they arrived at Camp O’Donnell, a processing center where the Japanese decided what to do with their prisoners—whether to keep them there, move them to other POW camps, or ship them out on “hell ships” to Japan, where they would work them as slave laborers until the end of the war.
Initially, more than 54,000 souls started out on the Death March, and the road to their POW internment was littered with American and Filipino corpses—one dead body every ten to fi fteen feet along the way. The prisoners who survived the sixty-five-mile trek from Mariveles to San Fernando suffered from heat and disease. Many survived only to be tortured and killed at Camp O’Donnell, Camp Cabanatuan, and other prison camps.
At Camp O’Donnell, 54,000 POWs were crammed into an area smaller than one square mile. When Corregidor fell a month after Bataan, Imperial Army general Masaharu Homma had an additional 26,000 POWs to deal with after General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered his troops.
Without medical attention, the POWs were left to fend for themselves or die. The prisoners got no bedding and sanitation was almost nonexistent—a single water spigot served thousands. Medical attention, medicine, and supplies were also lacking. The Japanese usually confiscated whatever supplies were sent through the Red Cross before the packages reached the POWs.
By May 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, Camp O’Donnell was overwhelmed. On 1 June transfers began from Camp O’Donnell to Cabanatuan, Palawan, or other Japanese POW camps. Camp Palawan was the most notorious place for atrocities. Prisoners there were often beaten unconscious with clubs for trying to steal a tiny amount of rice. Any POWs with compassion who tried to alleviate the pain and suffering of their comrades by bringing them a few morsels of their own meager rations were severely punished, often beaten senseless by the guards.
The prisoners were forced to work in every camp. They were assigned to bury their dead, carry water, collect firewood, and work in the kitchen or on farm detail. The Japanese told them, “No work, no food.” If they could move, they worked, usually at burial detail.
This detail was quite toxic and hazardous. The decaying corpses piled up faster than the weakened prisoners could bury them. As a consequence, a number of diseases spread throughout the POW camps. There was another terrible consequence of the backlog of the burial details: The rotting bodies made the camps reek of death twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not even the light evening breezes or a drenching tropical rain could take that smell away.
In June 1942, a POW known simply as “Captain Wilson” somehow finagled a bag of cement from a prison guard and built a cross inside Camp O’Donnell, near the mass graves, to commemorate the heroes on Bataan. The words he etched into the cross were:
In Memory of the American Dead, O’Donnell War Personnel Enclosure 1942 will forever remind everyone of the sacrifice of life the brave Bataan veterans gave for our freedom.
Wilson later died when he was transferred to a prison “hell ship” headed for Japan.
The Americans who survived the Bataan Death March often said that the ones who died along the way were the lucky ones. The “survivors” were already half-dead by the time they arrived at Camp O’Donnell, and hundreds more died in the following weeks. Every one of the men who arrived at O’Donnell had at least one serious health problem, and most had two or three: malaria, malnutrition, dysentery, beriberi, or diphtheria.
Over the next three years, the American POWs suffered and died under the iron fist of the Japanese army. More than 8,000 Americans passed through the barbed-wire gates of Camp Cabanatuan. One-third of them died there, most of beriberi, a terrible and painful thiamine deficiency disease that causes swelling in the arms and legs. The victim eventually drowns in his own pus.
Each day that dawned over the jungles of Bataan was agonizingly similar. The Japanese anthem was played over a loudspeaker and the prisoners were forced to stand at attention and salute their captors. The men struggled to survive on 200 grains of worm-infested rice each day, and to cope with the harsh work details assigned to them. Beatings were random and frequent.
The only thing that kept the POWs alive on the Death March and through the additional horrors was hope. They hoped they wouldn’t starve, hoped they wouldn’t die of disease, and hoped that they’d have the strength to put one foot in front of the other and live one day after the other.
But three horrific years is a long time to hope. And after three years in a Japanese prison camp, even some of their loved ones back home had lost hope. And now the question was: Could these surviving POWs manage to cling to their hope for a little while longer?
6TH RANGER BATTALION
U.S. 6TH ARMY FORCE
LINGAYEN GULF, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
15 JANUARY 1945
Perhaps the American POWs would have had more hope if they had known that the Battle of Leyte Gulf in late October 1944 had demolished the Japanese hopes of ever completely destroying the American fleet. Without aircraft, and with fewer ships, the Japanese had to adopt new tactics to deal with the Americans. The only effective new tactic was the kamikaze attack. In November, seven suicide attacks struck seven Task Force 38 aircraft carriers, resulting in great damage, along with the killing of 300 Americans and the wounding of hundreds more.
During the same period, the 7th Fleet incurred thirteen kamikaze attacks, damaging all thirteen ships and sinking one of them. However, the American air superiority in aircraft and skilled pilots allowed the U.S. Navy, and Task Force 38 in particular, to keep its planes in the air over Luzon around the clock, attacking Japanese airplanes on the ground and destroying hundreds of bombers and fighter planes.
On 15 December, soldiers from the 6th Army landed on the island of Mindanao, southwest across the gulf from Leyte. They secured dry, flat areas that could be used for airstrips and stiffened their offensive actions against the Japanese with land-based planes to support the coming invasion of Luzon in the north.
Also in December, a massacre happened on the island of Palawan, where American prisoners were burned alive by their Japanese guards. It was reported that POWs had been put into rude shelters. A group of Japanese soldiers entered the compound armed with guns, bayonets, grenades, and dynamite, and then they attacked the prisoners in the shelters. They tossed gasoline onto the American POWs and incinerated them while they were still alive.
Explosions couldn’t drown out the screams of dying American POWs. If any escaped the massacre, machine gun fire cut them down. Altogether, 151 prisoners were slaughtered. News of this terrible atrocity reached the 6th Army headquarters and underscored the urgency to rescue the POWs at Cabanatuan.
On 9 January 1945, the American invasion of Luzon was launched. It occurred at Lingayen Gulf, the same spot where the Japanese had invaded exactly three years earlier. Troops from the 6th Army, with support from MacArthur’s 7th Fleet, led the assault. There were no Japanese naval forces in the area to challenge the invasion. Most of the enemy soldiers on Luzon had fled inland, to the north, and into the mountains, where they’d make a final stand. The 6th Army invasion force had virtually no opposition.
The only resistance to the American invasion was continuing attacks from kamikaze pilots, which were terribly effective. Suicidal Japanese pilots damaged more than forty U.S. ships, almost half of them seriously, and sank five of them. Nearly 800 Americans were killed in the kamikaze attacks and 1,400 were wounded.
Still, by January 1945, the tides of war in the Pacific were shifting more definitively. The successive recent victories by the Americans and Allied forces had pushed the Japanese back from their forward defensive perimeters, throwing Tokyo into a panic.
In addition to continuing kamikaze attacks, the order to execute all prisoners was emphasized once more to the commanders at the various garrisons. U.S. intelligence uncovered disturbing signs that the various Japanese camp commanders were making arrangements for mass killings of the American prisoners.
At Cabanatuan, the prison population had already been seriously reduced during the past three years. Of the original 9,000 POWs sent there, only 500 or so were still alive. None of the POWs knew that the Americans had already returned to the island to retake it.
The surviving POWs called themselves the “Ghosts of Bataan.” They already knew that escape was not an option—simply because there was no place for them to go. If any were lucky enough to get out of the prison camp, they would immediately come into contact with tens of thousands of their unforgiving enemies.
From 1942 to 1944, the war had raged in both the European and Pacific theaters, and there seemed to be some hope among the Americans that an end to the war was on the horizon. But that was still some time away. If it were even possible to rescue the POWs, it would have to be done soon—before the Ghosts of Bataan were dead.
It fell to General Krueger to decide what had to be done. The men had already suffered enough, and he had to do something to prevent a massacre at Cabanatuan. But what? How could anyone take enough soldiers forty miles behind the enemy lines to rescue POWs?
6TH RANGER BATTALION
VICINITY GUIMBA VILLAGE
LUZON, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
28 JANUARY 1945
The American command was aware of the “execute the prisoners” order and had graphic evidence of it on Palawan. Like General Krueger, the rest of the military leadership felt that these American POWs had been through enough suffering. There may even have been feelings of guilt and remorse among some of the politicians and war planners in Washington for having abandoned the men three years earlier.
Those in authority decided that they couldn’t let anything else happen to them. No more massacres could take place. Yet an unspoken fear troubled the Army planners. They were afraid that when they entered Cabanatuan, the prisoners could be caught in the crossfire of a battle between their liberators and the Japanese.
General Krueger turned to the 6th Army G-2, Colonel Horton Smith, who in turn pulled in a remarkable team drawn from the 6th Ranger Battalion, Filipino guerrillas, the Alamo Scouts, and Army intelligence and combat units. When the front lines of the 6th Army on Luzon were thirty to forty miles from Cabanatuan, Smith and his team quickly planned a mission to free the POWs.
Colonel Smith had organized the Alamo Scouts who worked with the Filipino guerrillas. They were led by Army Major Robert Lapham. Lapham, a survivor of the Bataan Death March himself, had escaped from the Japanese and had become a guerrilla, living and fighting with the Filipinos.
The rescue plan was devised, and the mission fell to a new breed of soldiers to carry it out. They called themselves the Rangers, and a unit of 121 volunteers was picked from the 6th Ranger Battalion. The assault commander was twenty-five-year-old Captain Robert Prince of Seattle. His commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, had personally selected him for the mission.
The Alamo Scouts went on ahead to do recon of the area, and the Rangers were to follow by truck to Guimba by the afternoon of 28 January. There they would rendezvous with the Scouts and guerrillas and get the latest intelligence before moving out across the open grasslands and flat forestland. General Krueger was counting on competent recon and meticulous planning for a mission he prayed would conclude with a swift, well-implemented attack and a safe rescue.
The Rangers represented a new kind of soldiering, created in World War II as an American answer to the British Commandos. The word “ranger” had a certain resonance and sounded like something masculine and American, like the legendary Texas Rangers. But the high command still wasn’t quite sure how to use the Rangers, or what their role would be.
The men of the 6th Ranger Battalion pulled off the daring rescue of U.S. POWs.
The 6th Ranger Battalion consisted of men who had been part of a pack-mule unit of the “old” army, and apart from their initial invasion action in the Philippines, they’d never fought in any combat situations. This would be their first real combat mission. General Krueger gave the assignment to Mucci, and Mucci told C Company commander Robert Prince to ask for volunteers. The volunteers would leave the next day.
Cabanatuan was a central POW camp. The camp population had dwindled to just a fraction of its original numbers. Only the weakest and sickest had remained behind. If any had any strength at all, they would have been sent off as slave laborers.
But because these POWs were virtually no use to the Japanese as laborers, it became more and more logical that the “execute the prisoners” order would be carried out—sooner rather than later—because now the American 6th Army was breathing down the necks of the Japanese.
6TH RANGER BATTALION
LUZON, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
29 JANUARY 1945
There were about 250,000 Japanese soldiers on the island of Luzon, preparing for a final confrontation against the 6th Army. The Japanese still controlled the roads, so they could complete their withdrawal to the north.
The enemy also had large concentrations of troops at Cabanatuan City, a small city four miles from the prison camp. The Filipino guerrillas and American intelligence found out that at least 8,000 Japanese troops were in the immediate vicinity of the POW camp, and perhaps as many as 300 Japanese soldiers were actually staying in barracks inside the prison compound itself.
In the course of planning for the mission, Major Bob Lapham tried to find out everything he could about the American prisoners. His intel confirmed the number of American prisoners still being held in the camp.
Major Lapham also made certain that the Rangers had maps and some aerial photographs. He was greatly disappointed when he was not allowed to join the Rangers for the raid, but his superiors felt that if he were to fall into Japanese hands, the results would be disastrous.
Lt. Colonel Mucci coordinated the two different units commanded by Filipino guerrilla officers Captain Juan Pajota and Captain Eduardo Joson. Both had been fighting the Japanese for years, and now they were offering their help to rescue POWs with the 121 American Rangers.
It was a real-life “Mission Impossible.” The Rangers had to slip behind enemy lines, cross at least thirty miles of hostile territory—while surrounded by 8,000 troops of the Imperial Army, who were stationed within four miles of the prison camp—and then get inside, neutralize the 300 soldiers guarding the camp, and, finally, rescue the prisoners. But that was still only half of it. The other half of the mission was to get the prisoners back safely—so they’d have to repeat the entire process in reverse.
The mission began at 0500 on 28 January 1945. Before the Rangers started out, fourteen Alamo Scouts and a band of some 200 Filipino guerrillas—who had been keeping track of enemy positions and troop movements—rendezvoused with the Rangers.
Captain Juan Pajota, the brilliant Filipino resistance leader, knew every square inch of the land and its dangers. Drawing diagrams in the dirt, Captain Bob Prince and Lt. Colonel Mucci rehearsed the plan with their officers and non-coms over and over again. The element of surprise was the key, and it was all set for the night of 29 January.
But last minute intel indicated that the Japanese were going to be on the move: Hundreds of trucks, tanks, armored vehicles, and troops would be right outside the prison camp. The enemy troops were on the retreat, and the Americans feared that before the Japanese left Cabanatuan they would carry out Tokyo’s order to kill all the prisoners.
Still, despite their intentions to get to Cabanatuan right away, trying to undertake the raid that night would be a meaningless suicide mission. Mucci took the matter upstairs and was given a twenty-four-hour delay for the Rangers. They would just have to pray that since the Japanese were on the move, they wouldn’t take the time or initiative to kill the prisoners before the Rangers got to them. The more likely scenario was that the prison commandant and guards would be assigned that responsibility, and that the Rangers would get to Cabanatuan in time to stop it.
Mucci and the Rangers began their trek to the prison camp with Captain Prince and a handful of Rangers bringing up the rear. They knew it would be an arduous mission. They spent the night at Balincarin, barely avoiding detection by the Japanese. The second night they reached the village of Platero, not far from the prison camp. The last major physical obstacle was the Pampanga River. The Americans held their weapons above their heads and half-waded, half-swam the river, hoping that all 121 of the Rangers would get across safely without being seen.
Now came the tricky part. From the nearby barrio of Platero—where the Rangers were hidden during the day by friendly Filipinos—and for the rest of the way to the prison camp itself, the Rangers had to crawl on their bellies to avoid detection by the Japanese. The land itself was unforgiving during this part of their efforts; the ground was barren and offered practically no cover. So the Rangers crawled, cradling their rifles, measuring their distance in inches, and as they wriggled across through the tall grass, time seemed to stop.
Then the Rangers could see the guard towers of the prison camp, and sometime later they were in sight of the barbed-wire fences. But the gaze of the watchtower guards covered the very area from which the Rangers were approaching the camp.
Lt. Colonel Mucci was hoping that they wouldn’t have to wait long for the diversion that he’d ordered, code-named “Black Widow.” It happened within a minute or two of the plan—at about 1940 hours.
An American P-61 suddenly appeared in the skies near the prison camp, opposite the side where the Rangers approached. The pilot swooped in at 200 feet above the compound and zoomed past, making a few high loops. Then he cut an engine and restarted it, causing a loud backfire, the actions designed to alert whatever guards hadn’t sighted the plane initially. The P-61 made a few more noisy passes in the sky, just out of machine gun range, making certain that the Japanese knew that he was there—and distracting them from the fact that the Rangers were there, too.
The diversion worked perfectly. While everyone looked up at the American P-61, two Rangers ran up, shot and killed the gate guard, blew the lock off the front gate to the prison compound, and then threw open the gates. Simultaneously, C Company Rangers raced down the “main street” of the POW compound. Their weapons blazing, they took out Japanese guards with a merciless barrage of automatic fire. Another unit of the Rangers had surrounded the prison camp to prevent any Japanese inside from escaping or going for help.
The POWs heard the massive amount of gunfire and assumed it was the end. They heard rumors that the Japanese were on the move, and didn’t recognize the uniforms of the Rangers, so they feared the worst—that these were enemy troops come to kill them. The prisoners were reluctant to come out of hiding—which probably saved them from getting caught in the crossfire.
The POWs crouched in ditches and under the shacks; they hid wherever they could. They couldn’t believe that this was really a prison break—these were actually Americans. They thought it was a trick to lure the prisoners out so they could all be gunned down. It took some persuading on the part of the Rangers to get them to move toward the main gate.
While Krueger and Mucci were considering ideas and options, American soldiers John Cook and Ralph Rodriguez, Jr., Bataan Death March survivors and prisoners in the Cabanatuan POW camp, couldn’t believe that this was the hour of their liberation.
PRIVATE JOHN COOK, US ARMY
Camp Cabanatuan
Luzon, Philippine Islands
30 January 1945
I was sitting outside and leaned against the side of the mess hall. There were 512 of us in this place.
The Rangers cut the fence beneath the nearby Japanese guardhouse. Lieutenant Richardson fired the first shot, after which all hell broke loose.
The Rangers came up the road into camp from the outside, on the gravel road coming into camp. They had to get past quite a few Japanese there. They also had to deal with the guard tower.
We didn’t know what was happening. The first guy that burst into our quarters said, “Let’s go. You’re free!” I didn’t recognize the uniform. He had a funny cap on, and a green uniform. And he kept yelling, “Let’s go! Get out the main gate!”
I said, “Who in the hell are you?”
He said, “We’re Yanks!”
They wanted to put me on an oxcart, but I said, “Like hell! I walked into that damn place. I’ll walk out!”
I ran to the Pampanga River through the rice fields with them and I asked, “How deep is the water? I can’t swim.” And someone said, “It’s waist-deep. Get your butt in here and get across there. Don’t you hear the Jap tanks coming?”
From that moment on, I kept walking, all night long. And the next morning we were at the American lines.
CORPORAL RALPH RODRIGUEZ, JR., US ARMY
Camp Cabanatuan
Luzon, Philippine Islands
30 January 1945
Every evening, about seven o’clock, I’d type out my diary.
I started typing what I saw to the west of our camp; there were some flares way out there in the distance, and I’d been watching them, typing in the diary about the flares getting closer.
So, this night, I finished the typing the account and something about the new Japanese soldiers coming in and the other ones leaving. That was my last page, and I pulled it out from the typewriter. I had already written a lot but I wouldn’t put my name on it. The Japanese warned us that anybody caught with a diary would be shot.
I’d been hiding it for years and couldn’t allow it to be found. That’s how I had the diary that night we were rescued.
About twenty minutes later, when I’d put my diary away, suddenly, it was the time that somebody had to ring the time. Someone came out and instead of hitting the time bell in pairs (you know, ding-ding, ding-ding), he came in there and he hit it hard, fifteen times, as loud as he could.
Well, for the last hour, there had been Rangers at the end of the building, hiding in a ditch but none of us saw them.
The other Rangers thought that somebody had been discovered. So they started shooting the Japs and I saw two Japs fall off the guardhouse.
And then, at the guardhouse, they dropped three hand grenades inside and that’s how it started.
I got shot at there but they hit a pipe, so I turned and kept on going. By this time, I’m the last man, or next to the last man, to leave the camp. And then suddenly I saw a shadow and heard somebody yell, “Any more Americans?” And these guys were big guys. They had cartridge belts draped over their shoulders and one or two handguns. And I don’t know what else.
I was afraid to say, “Here I am!” But this guy says, “Well, get out of here!” Then he jerked me up and I stood up, and I walked out. So that’s how I got introduced to the liberators.
6TH RANGER BATTALION
POW CAMP
CABANATUAN, LUZON
30 JANUARY 1945
The whole thing was all over in twenty minutes. There were 225 Japanese dead, while the Rangers suffered just two casualties. They rounded up the American POWs and tried to organize them into a military formation and complete the rescue by getting them back to friendly territory quickly and safely.
Before the Rangers had left on the mission, Captain Juan Pajota had suggested using caribou, ancient beasts of burden in the Philippines, to help move the weakened prisoners. So now, old wooden-wheeled oxcarts were waiting when the Rangers got the prisoners out of the POW camp and across the river.
But 1,000 Japanese soldiers, camped across the Pampanga River and alerted by the noises of battle, were stunned that Americans were attempting a rescue at Cabanatuan. The Japanese officers got their troops into formations and started to go after them.
However, the Filipino guerrillas were waiting for the Japanese at Cabu Bridge on the single road to Cabanatuan. And it was a perfect ambush. Captain Pajota’s 200 guerrillas and Captain Joson’s eighty men were set up in a “V” formation across the road and spread out across the area flanking it. The Japanese troops rolled into the ambush and it was a slaughter, despite the guerrillas’ nearly four-to-one disadvantage.
Meanwhile, the Rangers and the prisoners were going as fast as the ailing POWs could move or be carried, toward the river. With effort and time, they all made it across safely. Slowly, the dazed former captives emerged from the water and were herded into the waiting caribou carts. Others, who were able to walk, tagged along behind the ancient oxcarts stretching for almost two miles.
Over the next twenty-four hours, the Rangers—with the help of the guerrillas and friendly Filipino villagers—moved their odd-looking caravan back to the safety of the American lines, all the while dodging some 8,000 Imperial Japanese soldiers.
Led by Lt. Colonel Mucci, the first “Ghosts of Bataan” stumbled into American-held territory on the morning of 31 January 1945. It took two and a half hours for the procession of weak, weary, and wounded American POWs to pass. Their next stop would be an Army evacuation hospital, and after they’d recovered from their three-year ordeal, the last stop on this operation would be home to America.
Captain Bob Prince drew great satisfaction from that successful and remarkable raid on the Cabanatuan POW camp.
CAPTAIN ROBERT PRINCE, US ARMY
6th Rangers Rescue Raid
Vicinity Camp Cabanatuan
28–31 January 1945
We were on Leyte just a few weeks and then we embarked for Luzon, landing at Lingayen Gulf.
For a few weeks we acted as guard for the 6th Army headquarters. As missions arose we were sent out. At that time we hadn’t had much information on other actions that had taken place. We’d heard that a number of POWs had been moved to Japan and Manchuria as slave laborers.
On 28 January through the last day of the raid on 31 January, I was aware that there were many POWs but I had no idea where they were. I knew simply that we were there to rescue prisoners.
We had to study the layout of the prison camp, how we were to approach it, and what we would use for protection on our flanks. We had one guerrilla force that was to be our flank protection and another on the side where we knew there was an active battalion of Japanese soldiers camped.
The makeup of my unit consisted of all of C Company, and one platoon of F Company. Our mission, if we succeeded, would be a great thing because we were going to release our own men and that made it unique from almost any other mission in the war. Usually you were trying to kill the enemy.
Colonel Mucci insisted that there be nothing but volunteers, so I went out in front of my company and said, “I want all the people that want to go on this raid to take one step forward.” When I turned around they were in the same formation. Every one of ’em had stepped forward to volunteer.
We marched eight or ten miles inland from Lingayen Gulf on the road to Manila, and then we continued by truck on that road, about forty miles, to near Guimba. At that point the trucks discharged us and we spent the afternoon talking to the two guerrilla captains, Pajota and Joson. Major Lapham and the Alamo Scouts were also there. They’d prove to be instrumental in the success of this mission.
We started off about five in the afternoon. When we got to Rizal Road, the main road that the Japanese were using, we went under a culvert to get across the road past a Japanese tank.
We spent the first night at Balincarin and the second night in Platero, waiting for a concentration of Japanese to move out of the area. On the evening of the raid we waded the Pampanga River and crawled across this field.
Murphy and his F Company platoon were crawling up a dry riverbed, under the cover of the bank, until one of the tower guards spotted ’em and that started the whole thing.
Our men killed the man in the guard tower, opened the gate, and we went through. The second platoon out farther lined up, firing everything they had—BARs, tommy guns, rifles—at anything that moved in there. And in one case they took a bazooka and blew up a truck that some Jap was trying to move out of there.
Anyway, then all the firing stopped and we began moving the POWs out. We went out the same way we went in. We crossed the river and it was a good thing it was so low at that time of year. We had carts waiting, and during the night we picked up a lot more carts, thanks to the Filipino civilians.
There were two main highways that we crossed. We were told to approach them with Filipino guides out ahead of us and we had one place we had to stop while some traffic went by. And then, we’d go across two or three at time and run and hide in the jungle just off the road, so it took a while to get across those roads.
Mucci was at the head of the column and I had the rear—our flanks were covered by the guerrillas and they became a rear guard on our way out.
First Sergeant Anderson said, “I think that we should fire the flare, now that we’re through at the prison camp and moving out.” So Anderson shot a red flare, which not only alerted our people ahead of us, but signaled the guerrillas on each side of us that we were withdrawing.
And a medic came up and said, “This man’s wounded. We need to find Captain Jim Fisher (the medical officer).” And the wounded man on the ground said, “I’m Captain Fisher!”
Captain Fisher was taken to one of the Filipino villages where Dr. Liog, the Filipino doctor, tended to him. Then, one of the POWs, First Lieutenant Merle Musselman from Omaha, Nebraska, who’d spent three years in the prison camp, volunteered to stay and help take care of him. And I think that took a special bit of courage.
A British soldier who was deaf was in the POW camp latrine and couldn’t hear the firing, and missed us. He was found by Filipino civilians the next day and repatriated later.
There was enormous jubilation when we got back to American-held territory. MacArthur had been there and greeted the first ones across, and General Krueger had been there, and Lt. Colonel Mucci had already gone back to headquarters. That was the time-lag between the top of the column and the bottom.
But there were a lot of POWs who didn’t make it. Many would die before they could be rescued; others languished in prison camps like Cabanatuan until the war ended months later. Sergeant Richard Gordon had once been a prisoner at Cabanatuan, and survived the brutality there, but was sent to a slave labor installation in Japan until a month after the war ended.
SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY
Japanese POW Camp
Hydroelectric Dam Construction Site
4 September 1945
I was at Cabanatuan from 5 July until late October of ’42; most of my time taken up on burial detail because we had so many Americans to bury in that camp. In the first month I was there, something like 500 Americans died and then it escalated, it kept climbing, until it reached over 780 in the month of August.
That situation was unbearable. You’d go out in the morning on a detail to dig one mass grave that took many men. And then in the afternoon you’d come back out and carry these bodies from underneath the hospital out to the cemetery, and throw one body on top of another body. Then a different detail was ordered to cover them up. Many times they were not very well covered up either. And sometimes when it rained in that camp, the water would be discolored from blood mixed with it as it ran along the road.
Once a body rolled over as we carried it and landed on me, and then the skin broke and the gases escaped. The odor was unbelievable.
You couldn’t even recognize the corpse that you were burying. They were beyond recognition. You’d see a picture of the man, now an emaciated corpse so thin there was nothing but skin and bones . . . so it was hard to recognize somebody looking like that. I could’ve very easily buried friends and never knew it.
But I may not have been around to tell my story if I’d stayed in Cabanatuan. We left there on 31 October 1942, and went to a prison in Manila, the staging area before we went on the ship. I was on the initial work detail of 1,600 Americans to be sent to Japan.
They truly were hell ships. I went on an old ship that the British had sold to the Japanese in 1932 as scrap metal.
They put us aboard the same ship that had come from Japan to the Philippines carrying livestock. So we were sleeping on the filthy straw, with the stench of animals that had been in those holds.
They packed us in so that you had no room to turn around. And then twice a day they’d pass food down—a bucket of rice and what they called mislau soup, made out of soybean paste.
We had a submarine attack a couple days out of Manila, and we weren’t allowed on deck after that. And when the submarine attack came, they’d given us lifejackets, which God knows would never have kept us afloat—they were that old.
I was on that ship nineteen days and had some pretty bad experiences. We used buckets for latrine purposes but the rolling of the ship upset those buckets, so we lived in a mess that’s beyond description. Seven or eight men died on the ship. They were dumped overboard with no ceremonies.
We got to Moji, Japan, on Thanksgiving Day, 1942. And then the Japanese took us off and made us undress and stand on the pier. In November, Japan is very cold. They brought a number of women with tanks on their back, who sprayed us for body lice. When we left that port area where we landed, we left behind about 150 prisoners who were too sick to go any further. They just left ’em on a pier. From every check that I’ve made, nobody’s ever found those 150 men. They just disappeared.
I stayed in Japan from November of ’42 until September, ’44.
We were building a hydroelectric dam, the fourth largest in Japan, built mainly with prisoner-of-war labor. The worst part of that place was a very frigid climate—men without proper clothing and proper shoes. We lost a lot of men to pneumonia, real fast.
You were beaten without provocation. When the war ended, the Japanese guards all took off. And we ran the camp ourselves for awhile. About a week after the war ended we learned about the bomb.
On 4 September we all walked to the railroad station, climbed aboard a train, and headed down to Hamamatsu, a seacoast town where the American navy had come ashore to locate and help repatriate prisoners in the area.
Pretty soon I was on a hospital ship, the Rescue, sitting out in the bay. They kept us there a couple of weeks, then took us home to America.
Sergeant Richard Gordon spent time at U.S. Army hospitals and aboard hospital ships heading back home, finally ending his journey at Madigan General Hospital in Fort Lewis, Washington. Gordon finally boarded a train in Seattle and crossed the country to arrive at Penn Station in New York City. His wife and other relatives were not allowed to see him yet, and Dick recalls a poignant moment when an older woman came up to the railroad car window and peered inside. He describes the moment: “I saw my mother come up and look through the window... she had put on weight, and her nose was all smudged from the dirt on the windows. And I saw a kid standing next to her about eighteen years old. It was my kid brother. I didn’t recognize him, ’cause I hadn’t seen him in some time.”
An ambulance took Dick Gordon to Holland General Hospital in Staten Island. There a proper reunion with his family took place. Two weeks after that reunion, Dick’s mother died.
Dick Gordon stayed in the hospital another four months before being discharged. Then he reenlisted, received a commission as second lieutenant, and remained on active duty until 1961.
ARMY EVAC HOSPITAL
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
14 FEBRUARY 1945
By mid-February 1945, six weeks after the successful prison break, the former residents of Camp Cabanatuan had recovered enough in the Army evacuation hospitals to begin the long trip home. They boarded the USS General Anderson for the long trip back to the United States. With no escort, the 20,000-ton troop transport ship was virtually defenseless in the Pacific lanes on its way back. Ordinarily, it would’ve been a major target for Japanese subs and other enemy ships. But there were no Japanese ships and the Anderson pulled into San Francisco Bay with her precious cargo intact. The city went wild in celebration and gratitude.
The 121 young American Rangers, the Alamo Scouts, and the Filipino guerrillas who went on the raid to rescue the “Ghosts of Bataan” at Cabanatuan were a remarkable lot—and they were all volunteers. They all made a choice—believing that the value of the lives of their comrades was worth putting their own lives at tremendous risk.
Captain Bob Prince and Lt. Colonel Henry Mucci were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor, and the other officers were awarded the Silver Star. All the other men from the 6th Ranger Battalion were awarded the Bronze Star for their courageous acts during the raid. But the Rangers had chosen to dare the difficult and dangerous not for personal glory, fame, or fortune, but simply because if they didn’t do it, who else would?
The American military, war correspondents, and the American public alike celebrated the remarkable achievement. The raid had touched a nerve among Americans who cared about the fate of those long-suffering defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.
To this day, the 6th Rangers’ raid on Camp Cabanatuan has remained the largest and most successful rescue mission of its kind ever conducted.