Military History - Rescue of POWs in Raid at Cabanatuan

Background

By early 1943 Imperial Japan's fortunes of war experienced a complete turnaround from its previous dominance. Defeat met the Japanese Imperial Army facing the British in the China-Burma-India theater, and against the U.S. and Australians in the Pacific islands (Sides, 63). The increasing superiority of the Allied war machine was mostly because of the successful U.S. submarine campaign against Japanese merchant shipping, and the devastating losses the Japanese Navy suffered in the Battle of Midway in 1942 (McRaven, 57).

In August 1944, the War Ministry in Tokyo apparently was piqued by the U.S. State Department's communiqué concerning Japan's war crimes against Allied POWs and issued the "Kill-All policy" to annihilate the principal witnesses—the last surviving POWs (Johnson, 78).

On 20 October 1944, General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on Leyte, paving the way for the liberation of the Philippines. On 14 December 1944, as the Americans consolidated their forces to prepare for the main invasion of Luzon, nearly 150 Americans were executed by their Japanese captors in a POW camp at the island of Palawan. These Americans were herded into air raid shelters, sealed in, doused with gasoline, and burned alive (Breuer, 27). One of the escaped survivors, PFC Eugene Nielsen, recounted his tale to U.S. Army Intelligence on 7 January 1945.

Two days later, MacArthur's forces landed on Luzon and began a rapid advance towards the capital, Manila. During this time, Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, the U.S. Sixth Army commander, was notified of the Cabanatuan camp's existence by Major Robert Lapham, the senior USAFFE guerrilla leader in Luzon (Sides, 64).

By 26 January, with Sixth Army forward units nearing Cabanatuan, Gen. Krueger became increasingly concerned of the situation at the camp, and with his intelligence officer, Col. Horton White, called in the special reconnaissance unit attached to his Sixth Army—the Alamo Scouts—for a briefing (McRaven, 58). The next day, Krueger assigned Lt. Col. Henry Mucci and his 6th Ranger Battalion the mission to raid Cabanatuan and rescue the POWs.

Behind enemy lines

On the evening of 27 January, two teams of Alamo Scouts, led by 1st Lts. William Nellist and Thomas Roundsville, infiltrated behind enemy lines to attempt a reconnaissance of the prison camp. The next morning, the Scouts linked up with several Filipino guerrilla units at the village of Platero, two miles (3 km) north of the camp (Johnson, 79).

In the early afternoon, Mucci and a reinforced company of 127 Rangers under Capt. Robert Prince slipped through Japanese lines near Guimba. Guided by the guerrillas, the Rangers hiked through forests and open grasslands, narrowly avoiding a Japanese tank on the national highway by following a ravine that ran under the road.

The following day at Balincarin, five miles (8 km) north of the camp, Mucci met with USAFFE guerrilla Captain Juan Pajota, whose intimate knowledge of enemy activity, the locals, and the terrain proved crucial (Breuer, 28). Upon learning that Mucci wanted to push through with the attack that evening, Pajota resisted, insisting that it would be ...