War Stories II (64 page)

CAPTAIN ROBERT PRINCE, US ARMY
6th Rangers Rescue Raid
Vicinity Camp Cabanatuan
28–31 January 1945

We were on Leyte just a few weeks and then we embarked for Luzon, landing at Lingayen Gulf.

For a few weeks we acted as guard for the 6th Army headquarters. As missions arose we were sent out. At that time we hadn't had much
information on other actions that had taken place. We'd heard that a number of POWs had been moved to Japan and Manchuria as slave laborers.

On 28 January through the last day of the raid on 31 January, I was aware that there were many POWs but I had no idea where they were. I knew simply that we were there to rescue prisoners.

We had to study the layout of the prison camp, how we were to approach it, and what we would use for protection on our flanks. We had one guerrilla force that was to be our flank protection and another on the side where we knew there was an active battalion of Japanese soldiers camped.

The makeup of my unit consisted of all of C Company, and one platoon of F Company. Our mission, if we succeeded, would be a great thing because we were going to release our own men and that made it unique from almost any other mission in the war. Usually you were trying to kill the enemy.

Colonel Mucci insisted that there be nothing but volunteers, so I went out in front of my company and said, “I want all the people that want to go on this raid to take one step forward.” When I turned around they were in the same formation. Every one of 'em had stepped forward to volunteer.

We marched eight or ten miles inland from Lingayen Gulf on the road to Manila, and then we continued by truck on that road, about forty miles, to near Guimba. At that point the trucks discharged us and we spent the afternoon talking to the two guerrilla captains, Pajota and Joson. Major Lapham and the Alamo Scouts were also there. They'd prove to be instrumental in the success of this mission.

We started off about five in the afternoon. When we got to Rizal Road, the main road that the Japanese were using, we went under a culvert to get across the road past a Japanese tank.

We spent the first night at Balincarin and the second night in Platero, waiting for a concentration of Japanese to move out of the area. On the evening of the raid we waded the Pampanga River and crawled across this field.

Murphy and his F Company platoon were crawling up a dry riverbed, under the cover of the bank, until one of the tower guards spotted 'em and that started the whole thing.

Our men killed the man in the guard tower, opened the gate, and we went through. The second platoon out farther lined up, firing everything they had—BARs, tommy guns, rifles—at anything that moved in there. And in one case they took a bazooka and blew up a truck that some Jap was trying to move out of there.

Anyway, then all the firing stopped and we began moving the POWs out. We went out the same way we went in. We crossed the river and it was a good thing it was so low at that time of year. We had carts waiting, and during the night we picked up a lot more carts, thanks to the Filipino civilians.

There were two main highways that we crossed. We were told to approach them with Filipino guides out ahead of us and we had one place we had to stop while some traffic went by. And then, we'd go across two or three at time and run and hide in the jungle just off the road, so it took a while to get across those roads.

Mucci was at the head of the column and I had the rear—our flanks were covered by the guerrillas and they became a rear guard on our way out.

First Sergeant Anderson said, “I think that we should fire the flare, now that we're through at the prison camp and moving out.” So Anderson shot a red flare, which not only alerted our people ahead of us, but signaled the guerrillas on each side of us that we were withdrawing.

And a medic came up and said, “This man's wounded. We need to find Captain Jim Fisher (the medical officer).” And the wounded man on the ground said, “I'm Captain Fisher!”

Captain Fisher was taken to one of the Filipino villages where Dr. Liog, the Filipino doctor, tended to him. Then, one of the POWs, First Lieutenant Merle Musselman from Omaha, Nebraska, who'd spent three years in the prison camp, volunteered to stay and help take care of him. And I think that took a special bit of courage.

A British soldier who was deaf was in the POW camp latrine and couldn't hear the firing, and missed us. He was found by Filipino civilians the next day and repatriated later.

There was enormous jubilation when we got back to American-held territory. MacArthur had been there and greeted the first ones across, and General Krueger had been there, and Lt. Colonel Mucci had already gone back to headquarters. That was the time-lag between the top of the column and the bottom.

SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY
Japanese POW Camp
Hydroelectric Dam Construction Site
4 September 1945

I was at Cabanatuan from 5 July until late October of '42; most of my time taken up on burial detail because we had so many Americans to bury in that camp. In the first month I was there, something like 500 Americans died and then it escalated, it kept climbing, until it reached over 780 in the month of August.

That situation was unbearable. You'd go out in the morning on a detail to dig one mass grave that took many men. And then in the afternoon you'd come back out and carry these bodies from underneath the hospital out to the cemetery, and throw one body on top of another body. Then a different detail was ordered to cover them up. Many times they
were not very well covered up either. And sometimes when it rained in that camp, the water would be discolored from blood mixed with it as it ran along the road.

Once a body rolled over as we carried it and landed on me, and then the skin broke and the gases escaped. The odor was unbelievable.

You couldn't even recognize the corpse that you were burying. They were beyond recognition. You'd see a picture of the man, now an emaciated corpse so thin there was nothing but skin and bones . . . so it was hard to recognize somebody looking like that. I could've very easily buried friends and never knew it.

But I may not have been around to tell my story if I'd stayed in Cabanatuan. We left there on 31 October 1942, and went to a prison in Manila, the staging area before we went on the ship. I was on the initial work detail of 1,600 Americans to be sent to Japan.

They truly were hell ships. I went on an old ship that the British had sold to the Japanese in 1932 as scrap metal.

They put us aboard the same ship that had come from Japan to the Philippines carrying livestock. So we were sleeping on the filthy straw, with the stench of animals that had been in those holds.

They packed us in so that you had no room to turn around. And then twice a day they'd pass food down—a bucket of rice and what they called
mislau
soup, made out of soybean paste.

We had a submarine attack a couple days out of Manila, and we weren't allowed on deck after that. And when the submarine attack came, they'd given us lifejackets, which God knows would never have kept us afloat—they were that old.

I was on that ship nineteen days and had some pretty bad experiences. We used buckets for latrine purposes but the rolling of the ship upset those buckets, so we lived in a mess that's beyond description. Seven or eight men died on the ship. They were dumped overboard with no ceremonies.

We got to Moji, Japan, on Thanksgiving Day, 1942. And then the Japanese took us off and made us undress and stand on the pier. In
November, Japan is very cold. They brought a number of women with tanks on their back, who sprayed us for body lice. When we left that port area where we landed, we left behind about 150 prisoners who were too sick to go any further. They just left 'em on a pier. From every check that I've made, nobody's ever found those 150 men. They just disappeared.

I stayed in Japan from November of '42 until September, '44.

We were building a hydroelectric dam, the fourth largest in Japan, built mainly with prisoner-of-war labor. The worst part of that place was a very frigid climate—men without proper clothing and proper shoes. We lost a lot of men to pneumonia, real fast.

You were beaten without provocation. When the war ended, the Japanese guards all took off. And we ran the camp ourselves for awhile. About a week after the war ended we learned about the bomb.

On 4 September we all walked to the railroad station, climbed aboard a train, and headed down to Hamamatsu, a seacoast town where the American navy had come ashore to locate and help repatriate prisoners in the area.

Pretty soon I was on a hospital ship, the
Rescue
, sitting out in the bay. They kept us there a couple of weeks, then took us home to America.