The Great Raid on Cabanatuan, page 25
A few minutes past 3:30 A.M., Colonel Mucci received word from O’Connell that the roadblocks were in place. No one held any illusions that a few bazookas would turn back an all-out effort by a Japanese force to crash through to the carabao convoy. But Mucci had no alternative: At 3:34 A.M., he waved the first cart onto the Rizal Road.
Henry Mucci remembered the danger vividly: “The Gods of War were smiling on us. That long column of slow moving carabao pulling carts loaded with POWs had to use the road for more than an hour before swinging out into open country. We sent Rangers on some ponies we found, two miles up and down the highway, to warn us if the Japs were coming. Luckily, they didn’t come. That time we spent on the customarily busy road was the longest hour I had ever sweated out in my life.”8
Earlier, during the long halt in front of the Rizal Road, Alamo Scout Lieutenant John Dove noticed that many of the POWs far back in the column had grown nervous. Others had climbed from their carts and were meandering around. Many were concerned that the Rangers up ahead had run into trouble, and that all hell might break loose.
Dove recalled: “During the wait, I saw a dark object in a rice paddy, for we had good moonlight. I walked out to see what the clump was. It was a confused POW who had wandered out there and fallen asleep. I woke him up, and he had a hard time getting to his feet. So I picked him up; he was skin and bones, probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. I crowded him into a cart with two other POWs, and I kept my eye on him.”9
While Henry Mucci was leading his carabao caravan across open country toward the northwest, at about 2:00 A.M., Lieutenant Bill Nellist and his Alamo Scouts, along with eight Rangers and a small force of Filipino guerillas, marched wearily into Balincarin. Lieutenant Merle Musselman, the POW who had helped operate on Captain Jimmy Fisher, arranged for the seriously injured man to be put on a cot in a nipa hut. All through the grueling trek from Plateros, Musselman had been keeping his patient under close observation, regularly monitoring vital signs.
Now, Musselman told Lieutenant Bill Nellist, “Unless we can get Captain Fisher to a hospital, and soon, he is a goner.”
Although they were in the midst of Japanese territory, it was decided that an airstrip would be hacked out near the barrio and a radio message would ask for an airplane to land and take Fisher to an American field hospital in the vicinity of Guimba. Alamo Scout Private First Class Gilbert Cox was one of those given the task of rounding up a large number of natives to help build the improvised airstrip.
Cox remembered: “It was really amazing. Every native man, woman, and child for miles around came out to level a stretch of rice paddies. They used shovels, hoes, rakes, and even large spoons and their bare hands. They began work at about 3:00 A.M., and never rested for a moment until the strip was complete in five hours. Sadly, no airplane showed up.”10
20
Hamburgers, Tears, and Freedom
Dawn was beginning to shatter the slate gray sky over Luzon when Colonel Mucci halted the column. Captain Bob Prince, still bringing up the rear, was a mile and a half away. At this point, Mucci decided to break radio silence, and his communications man, Staff Sergeant Norton S. Most of Hawley, Minnesota, tried to reach Sergeant James Irvine, who had been waiting by his radio set in the command car outside Guimba for nearly seventy hours. Now, for undetermined reasons, Most could not make electronic contact, so Mucci ordered the caravan to push onward.
Although the constant marching in the past three days had severely tested the physical mettle of the Rangers, Mucci had walked the greatest distance of them all. Almost on a regular basis, he strode up and down the long, stretched-out column, exhorting the Rangers and the POWs to hang in there.
“All right, men, only three more kilometers, just three more!” he would call out.
Eventually, his tired Rangers joked when they saw Mucci approaching: “Here comes ’Old Three Kilos More!’ ”
It was typical dry GI humor; the Rangers loved their colonel.
Two hours after sunrise, tired men in the column heard the faint purr of powerful engines off in the distant sky. Then they saw the specks, which grew larger as they drew nearer. A surge of concern swept through many in the convoy: Had the Rangers and POWs been discovered and were these Japanese planes approaching?
Suddenly, there was enormous excitement: These were American planes, swift P-51 Mustangs, which zoomed in low over the marching men, waggling their wings. Like mother hens hovering over their brood, the P-5 Is circled protectively. Other fighter planes could be seen and heard on all sides, strafing and bombing Japanese troops and vehicles that had been caught on the roads or out in the open.
Recalled former POW George Steiner: “We were jubilant over the appearance of our airplanes, and the sound of their strafing was music to our ears. Many POWs were still deeply worried, however, because we still had a long way to go through Japanese territory.”1
Meanwhile, back at Cabanatuan camp, which was strewn with Japanese corpses, the stone-deaf and nearly blind Canadian, Ed Rose, awakened after daylight and soon became convinced that the POW camp had turned into a ghost camp. His calls to comrades went unanswered. So the elderly man began edging toward the front entrance, which was about a hundred yards from his barracks, and walked out through the gate to the road, which was barely discernible to his limited vision.
Pausing briefly, Rose decided to head in the direction of the Cabu River, but after going perhaps three hundred yards, his instincts told him to get off the thoroughfare and strike out cross-country. Soon, he came upon a path and began hobbling along it, not having the slightest notion in which direction he was traveling.
Suddenly, he faintly discerned four or five armed men scramble from thick vegetation, and moments later, he was aware that they were aiming rifles at him. Perhaps they were demanding that he identify himself, but clearly Rose was not a Japanese. Dame Fate had smiled on the Canadian; the Filipino guerillas he had encountered escorted him to a nearby barrio where he would be safe until he could be handed over to the Americans.
It was about 8:00 A.M. when the carabao convoy came to a halt before a barrio. Rangers and POWs alike, dead-tired and sleepy, grumbled. They wanted to push on. A Filipino guerilla who had been scouting ahead of the column returned to Colonel Mucci who asked, “What’s the holdup?”
The Filipino said that about a hundred armed Huks had control of the barrio and that they were not going to permit the Rangers and POWs to pass. The Communist-led Huks were especially resentful over the fact that Major Bob Lapham’s Filipino guerillas were guiding Mucci’s group.
Mucci had been thrust into a dilemma not covered in West Point textbooks. Tough fighting man that he was, the colonel’s first inclination was to tangle with the Huk force blocking his way. Yet that could result in many Ranger and POW casualties and hold up the convoy indefinitely. Then there was the political angle to be considered: Mucci had no desire to be caught in the bull’s-eye of a squabble between guerilla groups over control of the Philippines after the war. Compounding the situation, the Huks were led by hard-line Communists, and Communists were supposed to be America’s allies.
Mucci asked his Filipino guides if there were other trails leading around the barrio, and he was told that there were none. Now the colonel made up his mind.
Turning to the Filipino, he declared: “Go back to that barrio and tell those Huks that we’re coming through if we have to blast our way through!”
It was a bluff: Mucci’s Rangers were stretched out for a mile and a half and all of them were weak from physical strain and lack of sleep.
Mucci knew—or hoped he knew—that he had an ace in the hole: The Huk force did not know how many Rangers he had with him, nor was it aware that Mucci’s contingent had no machine guns or artillery. The colonel waved the convoy forward and within minutes, it was rolling through the barrio. Lining both sides of the dirt road were the Huks, who glared menacingly at the passing parade. Not a single Huk stepped forward to aid the POWs or offer words of encouragement to them.
Just after 9:00 A.M., the caravan reached the barrio of Sibul, where Mucci ordered another brief respite. Typically, the natives eagerly produced fresh drinking water and a wide array of vegetables for the Rangers and freed prisoners. As if by a magical wave of a wand, the villagers also produced 19 carabao and carts, bringing the total number of the two-wheeled carriages to 106.
Again Sergeant Norton Most tried to contact Guimba, and this time, he reached James Irvine in his command car. Through a coded message, Henry Mucci informed Sixth Army headquarters that his column would soon be approaching the north-south National Highway, and he asked that enough trucks to carry about four hundred POWs and ambulances to hold some one hundred immobile prisoners be dispatched to meet the caravan.
In turn, Jim Irvine passed along exhilarating news. Since the Rangers had left Guimba on the evening of January 29, Walter Krueger’s forces had driven forward and now occupied the town of Talavera, only eleven miles from Mucci’s column.
At Balincarin, far to the rear of Mucci’s cart convoy, Ranger Captain Jimmy Fisher was lying on a cot, his life steadily ebbing. Seated next to him was his top medic, Sergeant John Nelson. As with the other medics, Jimmy Fisher was a beloved figure—friendly, considerate, compassionate.
Fisher had been in a coma off and on since dawn. At about 11:00 A.M., the wounded man opened his eyes slightly and started to say something. Moments later, Captain Jimmy Fisher was dead.
Outside Balincarin at the stroke of noon, Lieutenant Bill Nellist and his Alamo Scouts, eight Rangers, and a couple of hundred Filipino civilians stood around an open grave on a little knoll where there was a palm grove about one hundred yards square. Father Hugh Kennedy, the POW who had chosen to remain behind with the grievously wounded Ranger, conducted the funeral service.
After Fisher’s remains were covered in his grave, the Filipinos put up a crudely lettered sign at the entrance to the grove of palms: Doctor Fisher Memorial Park.2
Five miles inside Japanese territory, near the National Highway, Heniy Mucci’s caravan met up with an oncoming convoy of GI trucks and ambulances, escorted by an infantry company. When the drivers halted and stepped down to the ground, they were engulfed by jubilant POWs.
“Christ, are we glad to see you!” one shouted, hugging a dust-caked driver.
It was a scene of minor pandemonium. More trucks and ambulances arrived, guarded by armored weapons carriers with GIs manning their machine guns. As the carabao column kept coming in accordion fashion, freed prisoners struggled off the carts and hobbled toward the young soldiers who had come to get them for the final lap to American lines. Fighter planes and Piper Cubs buzzed over the POWs like a swarm of happy hornets.
The exhausted Rangers, their mission accomplished, dropped where they stood, sleeping over one another, curled up next to straw stacks or lying flat on the ground. Scores, perhaps as many as two hundred Filipino civilians, alerted by the Bamboo Telegraph, descended on the site. They stared at the inert forms of the sleeping Rangers, thinking that they were dead.
Beside the dusty road, the liberated prisoners sat, still dazed, or, seized spasmodically by surges of emotion, they laughed and talked loudly or burst into tears. Some remained mute. Many munched on tomatoes given them by Filipinos or hamburgers that the relief trucks had brought in.
“If this is a dream,” one skinny POW declared, “then don’t wake me up!”
Nearly all the freed men tried valiantly to regain the soldierly pride that the Japanese had smashed during thirty-two months of brutality. Several of the POW officers and senior noncoms had retained their faded badges of rank, worn proudly on ragged shirts above shorts that had been patched and repatched. Some wore old campaign hats, some overseas caps with company insignia, and one had retained his prewar pie-plate helmet.
The first meeting of the POWs with the trim officers of the “new” United States Army that had landed at Lingayen Gulf three weeks earlier was a tense, courageous effort to span the dead years. Many POWs gave the newly arrived officers the regulation salute, hoping no one would notice their quivering hands. A few of the prisoners limped past an American flag flying from a short pole attached to a truck fender. Enfeebled Staff Sergeant Clinton Goodbla of Longview, Washington, broke into tears. Most of those with him did likewise.
Boyish-faced GIs, many of whom had been attending high school proms back home when the tragedies at Bataan and Corregidor were unfolding, stared in awe at the bony apparitions: POWs who limped from beriberi brought on by lack of proper food; men whose bodies were laced by tropical ulcers; men who lay helplessly on litters, staring into space; men without arms and legs.
Soon it was time to shove off for the five-mile ride to American lines. Gentle hands helped the POWs into trucks and lifted the litters with their immobile men into the backs of ambulances. Three miles later, the POWs saw an amazing sight: Lining the road on both sides and cheering loudly as the Ghosts of Bataan and Corregidor passed were swarms of GIs who had returned to the Philippines with MacArthur.
When the vehicle convoy reached Guimba, six barefoot POWs carrying the regimental flag of the U.S. 26th Cavalry, which had fought to the bitter end on Bataan, climbed off a truck. This flag, piped in gold, had never touched the ground in three years of Japanese occupation of Luzon. Its first bearer was killed as he went into battle on Bataan. It was sewn for a time inside a pillow provided by a Filipina housewife, then flown by a band of three thousand Filipino guerillas before being smuggled into Cabanatuan camp, where it was hidden for months.
Singing “California, Here I Come,” the six barefoot men marched up to General Oscar Griswold, commander of the U.S. XIV Corps, and presented the historic battle flag to him.
With tears in his eyes, the hard-nosed general said: “This is the most touching incident of the war. I accept this flag for the United States government in humility, in the presence of the brave soldiers who carried it. To you men, the American flag has never ceased to fly over Bataan and Corregidor.”
In the meantime, many miles behind the Rangers and POW column, Lieutenant Bill Nellist was leading his band of Alamo Scouts across the dry flatlands toward Guimba. Their mission as rear guard for Mucci’s caravan had been completed. The long trek from Plateros had been uneventful until about halfway home when the Scouts were halted by a heavily armed band of Communist-led Huks.
Gilbert Cox remembered: “The Huks were very nasty. Said we couldn’t get through. All of us thought we were going to have to shoot our way through. Then Lieutenant Nellist walked up to the Huk leader and said, ‘You sons of bitches better get out of the way or we’ll have the whole United States army hunt you down like rats.’ They got out of our way and we reached our lines without incident—but thoroughly exhausted.”3
Soon, the liberated prisoners reached the 92nd Evacuation Hospital where the “new” United States Army’s efficiency and planning astonished them. They were registered and given showers. Seriously ill or injured cases went into the wards at once. Others were taken to tents. All received Red Cross kits and they played with the contents like children playing with dolls.
Each doctor’s or nurse’s hand that touched a POW was one of such feeling that many of the men who had held up so staunchly and proudly until now broke down and wept. When this occurred, the medical people would go right on, giving no indication they had seen the breakdown.
For other POWs, their long dream of liberation became a reality when they had their first breakfast under freedom. Private Alfred Jolly of San Francisco, a young soldier who had lost an arm on Bataan, ate six eggs, a large helping of ham, seven biscuits with jam, and an entire can of sliced grapefruit. He washed it down with five cups of coffee.
“This will probably make me sick as hell,” Jolly told a reporter. “But I don’t give a damn!”4
Private Jolly proved to be an apt prognosticator.
Just before noon on February 1, a dusty jeep, bearing the five stars of a general, halted in front of the 92nd Evacuation Hospital, which had once been a large schoolhouse. Out stepped Douglas MacArthur, his jaw set grimly. He had come to greet the gaunt Ghosts of Bataan and Corregidor, although many of the mobile POWs had been trucked to another camp earlier that morning.
When MacArthur entered the reception room, haggard veterans, their faces lined from nearly three years of abuse, moved toward the general, trying to raise enfeebled arms in salutes and reaching out to touch him. A few broke out in sobs. Clasping the hand of one man after another, the Southwest Pacific commander made no effort to conceal his deep emotions.
“God bless you, General,” one whispered hoarsely.
“Thank God you came back!” said another.
His voice choking, MacArthur said, “I’m a little late, but we finally made it.”5
For all, MacArthur had an encouraging word. “Eat all you can now,” he urged. “You are a little better off than the last time we met (referring to the starvation diet on Bataan).”6
MacArthur immediately recognized Lieutenant Colonel James Green, a veteran of nearly four decades in the army, and he recalled promoting Green to corporal thirty-five years earlier. Although wobbly, Green insisted on standing at attention, even though MacArthur gently admonished him several times to “please sit.”
Navy Lieutenant Carl Baumgardner, former manager for Radio Corporation of America in Manila, reminded the general that the last time the two had met, he had asked MacArthur to attend an American Legion dinner.
POW Lieutenant Colonel Thomas R. Wilson declared, “The Rangers and Alamo Scouts have done a wonderful job.”
“Indeed they have!” MacArthur replied. “I’m going to decorate every one of them!”7
