'Bring Our Boys Home': The Daring Raid That Rescued 500 POWs From Behind Japanese Lines

Hundreds of American prisoners of war had spent nearly three years starving in a Japanese camp in the Philippines, and in the first weeks of February 1945, they were finally on their way home. Their rescue, carried out by a small force of Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas on Jan. 30, had stunned the American public when the news broke Feb. 2. By Feb. 11, 280 of the freed men were aboard the USS Gen. A.E. Anderson, steaming from Leyte toward San Francisco. Many were so frail they had to be carried.

The story of how they got out remains one of the most extraordinary rescue operations in American military history.

A Race Against Execution

The prisoners at Cabanatuan, on the island of Luzon, were survivors of the Bataan Death March and years of captivity marked by disease, forced labor and routine brutality. At its peak, the camp held more than 5,000 men. By January 1945, roughly 500 remained, most too sick or weak to ship to Japan as slave labor.

When U.S. forces landed at Lingayen Gulf on Jan. 9, 1945, Army intelligence faced an urgent problem. Weeks earlier, Japanese troops at a POW camp on Palawan had herded roughly 150 American prisoners into air raid shelters, doused them in gasoline, and set them on fire. Only 11 survived. With Gen. Douglas MacArthur's forces advancing toward Cabanatuan, commanders feared the same fate awaited the prisoners there.

Maj. Robert Lapham, a guerrilla leader on Luzon, rode 30 miles through Japanese-held territory on horseback to reach Sixth Army headquarters and propose a rescue. Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger gave the order.

Behind Enemy Lines

Lt. Col. Henry Mucci, commander of the 6th Ranger Battalion, assembled a strike force of 121 Rangers and Alamo Scouts, reinforced by more than 200 Filipino guerrillas under Capts. Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson. They marched 30 miles behind Japanese lines over two days, relying on Filipino villagers along the route to muffle dogs and cage chickens to avoid alerting nearby enemy troops.

At 7:45 p.m. on Jan. 30, with a P-61 Black Widow night fighter buzzing the camp to distract the guards, the raiders attacked. The assault lasted roughly 30 minutes. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers were killed, along with several tanks destroyed by guerrilla bazooka teams. Two Rangers were killed in action.

The biggest challenge was the prisoners themselves. Many refused to believe the rescue was real, fearing a Japanese trick. Rangers physically pushed, carried and dragged men out of the camp. At the Pampanga River, Filipino civilians had gathered carabao carts to carry those who could not walk. The convoy swelled from 26 carts to more than 100 as the column made its way to American lines at Talavera by dawn Jan. 31.

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MacArthur called it the most satisfying incident of the Pacific campaign. Mucci and Capt. Robert Prince, who planned and led the ground assault, received the Distinguished Service Cross.

The Cabanatuan rescue sparked a wave of similar operations across the Philippines. Within a month, combined American and Filipino forces liberated four more camps, freeing more than 7,000 prisoners in all, including 2,147 in the airborne raid on Los Baños on Feb. 23.

Sources: U.S. Army, "The 75th Ranger Regiment Remembers the Great Raid" (2025); U.S. Army Special Operations Command, "Rescue at Cabanatuan"; Congressional Medal of Honor Society; National WWII Museum, "Battle of Iwo Jima."

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