History on Fire
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EPISODE 61: Raiders In The Night
🕑 Added 2023-07-03 15:08:51 +0000 UTC“We are all ghosts now. But once we were men.” — Anonymous POW from Cabanatuan camp
“Never in history had the United States Army been called on to rescue such a large number of POWs from so deep in enemy territory.” — William Breuer
“We were in the best shape of our lives, and with this mission we understood why he had driven us so hard.” — Alvie Robbins speaking about Henry Mucci’s physical training
“As far as we were concerned, they were gods.” — Bob Body about the Rangers who rescued him and his fellow POWs.
“Nothing in this entire campaign has given me so much personal satisfaction.” — General MacArthur
“I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life that I had a chance to do something in this war that was not destructive. Nothing for me can ever compare with the satisfaction I got from helping to free our prisoners.” — Robert Prince
This is the tale of one of the most daring missions in the history of WWII. After being defeated by the Japanese in 1942, by 1945 American forces were back in the Philippines ready to retake the islands. But their very success may have spelled doom for some survivors of the Bataan Death March, who had spent nearly three years as prisoners of the Japanese. Plenty of evidence, in fact, suggested that Japanese guards were ready to kill them all rather than letting them be freed. The only way to stop this imminent massacre was for a newly formed unit of Rangers, along with Filipino guerrilla fighters, to travel 30 miles behind enemy lines, face off with numerically superior forces, and rescue the POWs. By every logical metric, this had suicide mission written all over it. And ye, the Rangers and guerrilla, all volunteered. Rarely are war stories feel-good stories. But this may be the exception to the rule.
Comments
Joseph Carrillo
Awesome! Also, never knew I could post here. Cant wait to get into this episode didn’t know it was out till just now.
History on Fire
That's very much the theme of the episode I did on Sand Creek
Scott
WWII was full of so many horrors, but what the forces at Bataan suffered is worth remembering. Being a POW is never a pleasant situation, but the intensity of human hatreds and cruelty can be daunting. This was quite the rescue operation. I have struggled to understand some of the tragedies of the past and present, to see if there are ways they could have been prevented... I think there is no simple answer. Sometimes a bit of human kindness can prevent great tragedy, sometimes people have to be stopped from doing monstrous things by basically whatever it takes. I've experimented with the idea of whether a great many historical injustices have mostly come about because the people who knew it was wrong failed to actually do anything to stop them. It feels partly true to me, but not universally so.
