70th Anniversary of the Cabanatuan Raid
I’m a few days late, luckily they weren’t. But The Great Raid on the Cabanatuan POW Camp on the Philippine island of Luzon happened on January 30th, 1945, 70 years ago. The prisoners there had survived the Bataan Death March which began on April 9, 1942 with the surrender of the ill-prepared 60-80,000 US and Filipino troops after their three-months battle with the Japanese Army. Cabanatuan was the largest POW camp at one time housing more than 9000 POWs.
Fearing that the Japanese would execute the POWs left at Cabanatuan, Lt. Col. Henry Mucci, the commander of the 6th Rangers led about 120 Rangers from C and F companies. They infiltrated enemy lines and humped 30 miles to the camp. The force linked up with about 200 local partisans and raided the camp.
The Japanese lost about 500 troops in the raid, the Americans lost two raiders. Two prisoners died in the attempt, one died of excitement as he was being carried by a Ranger before he could get through the gate, another died of illness during the trip back.
Edwin Rose, a deaf British prisoner, slept through the raid while he was in the latrine. When he awoke the next morning, he noticed that everyone was gone, so he walked out of the camp and was rescued by partisans.
All in all, 492 Americans, 23 British (including Edwin Rose), three Dutch, two Norwegians, one Canadian, and one Filipino were rescued from the camp. Unfortunately, 2,656 Americans died at the camp during their 3-year imprisonment.
Category: Historical
It’s not just remarkable that they got those guys out, but that they lost only 2 Rangers in the process.
Kudos, big time, to these Rangers.
By coincidence, I just bought a book about this raid a couple of weeks ago and haven’t gotten to it yet.
I have a question that I have not been able to find an answer to by researching online. Were any of the WWII Ranger units Airborne? The earliest reference I can find to Airborne qualification associated with Ranger training is with the opening of the Ranger Training Program at Fort Benning in 1950.
Jonn? Hondopedia? Anybody?
I think I’m not mistaken when I say that the Rangers of the World War II era were all legs and the Korean War was the first appearance of Airborne Ranger units.
Korean was the start of the Airborne Ranger units
[…] Source: This ain’t hell. But you can see it from here […]
Poetrooper: While it’s true the Ranger units were not airborne, there was a daring raid at the Los Banos prison camp conducted by two companies of paratroopers from the 11th ABN division’s 188th PIR along with some engineers in AMTRACS and Phillipine partisans attacking from the woodline. Pretty amazing story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_at_Los_Ba%C3%B1os
Whoops, my bad, 188th was a glider outfit, it was the 511th that jumped in.