by Oliver North
(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 prison
ers 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 b
ehind 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.