Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides

On a parched evening in the Philippines in 1945, 511 American POWs were saved from almost certain death. A force of elite US troops from the Sixth Ranger Battalion slipped 30 miles behind enemy lines and marched for three days through jungle and peat swamps. They stormed the camp at dusk, killing over 250 Japanese soldiers, rounded up the dazed prisoners and led them out of the gate. With bullets and mortars whining past, the Rangers hauled the prisoners across the Pampanga river and led them down a network of secret paths, past an 8000-man-strong phalanx of Japanese troops. A guerilla force of a few hundred men ambushed the Japanese, destroying a series of bridges along the river, holding off the enemy long enough for the POWs to escape. Today, the raid on Cabanatuan remains the largest and most successful operation of its kind ever undertaken by the US army. A mission of mercy, the raid was of immense symbolic importance for the USA in its fight against the Japanese.