Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Rescue at Los Baños...

"Rescue at Los Baños" written by Bruce Henderson details one of the most flawlessly planned and executed raids in American military history...It concerns a rescue in the waning days of WWII in the Pacific Theater of a group of prisoners nearly unknown by Allied forces...

It almost didn't happen because General MacArthur had more faith in traditional infantry than he did in the newfangled airborne units, mostly because paratroopers couldn't bring armor and artillery with them, but had to fight with whatever they could carry on them...Airborne infantry was a relatively new concept which had seen early success by Italy, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany prior to WWII...US forces were among the last to embrace this new conveyance...


Before the rescue took place, the 511th Paratrooper Regiment proved MacArthur wrong by entering the Leyte jungle from the air and reducing the tough 8800-man Japanese 16th Infantry Division to a surviving group of 500, while losing 128 of their own men...They did this in 31 straight days of combat in the bush with almost no supplies or replacement ammunition...

In many cases the killing was done with knives and bare hands...The battle was so intense that one surviving soldier, Private Rodman Serling, had nightmares about it for years afterward, and found it to be therapeutic to write horror screenplays after the war...From this he eventually created and produced The Twilight Zone...

I finished reading Rescue at Los Baños in one night...Once the author got past the detailed background research and on to the actual raid, it was one of those I couldn't put down...Unfortunately by the time I put it away, it was past 2AM, and then my puppies wanted out at 3:30, and 5:00 and finally 6:30 when I gave up and put the coffee on...

But it was worth the lost sleep...The author's story telling style let me see what happened as if I was there...The raid is still used today as a textbook model for successful military operations, as it went off without the loss of a single prisoner's life, while Army casualties totaled four dead and a number of minor wounds...


2100 mostly American and other Allied civilian prisoners were rescued after more than three years of captivity at the hands of the Japanese...The Japanese forces were annihilated and their few survivors scattered in the jungle where many were later captured and prosecuted as war criminals...Those captured were the lucky ones as they were not found by Filipino guerrillas whose people had suffered horribly at the hands of the Japanese...

Some of the best reading is at the very end where the fates of those involved, both civilian and US and Japanese military participants is revealed...I won't spoil that part for anyone who hasn't read the book...It makes the entire time spent reading worth the effort...I will mention that one of the repatriated civilians was Frank Buckles who, when he died in 2011 at the age of 110, was the last surviving American veteran of WWI...


As daring and worthy of praise as the raid was, it was eclipsed in news reporting by another successful military incursion taking place on the island of Luzon at Cabanatuan where 513 survivors of the Bataan Death March were awaiting their fate at the hands of their Japanese captors...Their rescue was of paramount importance to Gen. Douglas MacArthur who wished to preserve his own place in history by reclaiming the Philippines...

The raids were a month apart...Cabanatuan prisoners were all military, while Los Banos housed strictly civilian captives...Hardly anyone in the military realized there were thousands of civilians being held until a Filipino trader mentioned it to a G-2 officer, who began assembling intel on his own...When the rescue order came down directly from MacArthur, he already had a jumpstart on planning...In the case of both raids, a tough, but small Army unit known as the Alamo Scouts took their place in history yet remain almost unheralded today...


The Los Baños rescue occurred during the Battle for Iwo Jima which took headline precedence over the civilian rescue, pushing it further out of the public's attention...It was a time of great peril to many, and tremendous daring and bravery by well-trained, dedicated units which performed their duties flawlessly...Bruce Henderson's retelling of the rescue, together with its backstories and aftermath is worth the read by anyone with an interest in the Pacific War...


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