War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  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.

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p; 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.