Ghost Soldiers: WWII’s Greatest Rescue

Hampton Sides has wrote a great historical true story of the US Army Rangers, scouts and Filipino resistance fighters rescuing POWs captured at Bataan and others from the monstrous horrible Japanese prison/death camp Cabanaantuan in WW2 Philippines.

The 342 page book was a page burner, exciting and extremely informative. The reader has an enjoyable learning experience that is exciting and fast paced. No boring parts. I read it in 2 days. Could not put it down.

The reader learns about the Bataan death march and how the US prisoners and a few foreigners were tortured, used as slave labor, given almost no food ( a little rice now and then. They killed and ate what small animals they could ( rats, snakes etc…later they were able to grow vegetables in a garden)and allowed to get all kinds of diseases and vitamin deficiencies. Their bodies are recked with diseases from many parasites and dysentery from human and animal feces and urine contact. Almost no sanitation facilities. We see the Japanese as cruel monsters that killed some of the prisoners for pleasure and thought of them as non humans. Killing and torture are the norm.

Hampton does show a very few Japanese that treated the prisoners with a slight degree of compassion.

The US Army is in full swing with MacArthur and soldiers returning and taking back the Philippines with Filipino resistance fighter help. Because of this we see the Japanese taking over a thousand of the prisoners out of the prison camp to be shipped to Japan as slaves. The rest of the prisoners are non productive with many diseases and unable to work. US intelligence believes the remainder of the prisoners will be executed. We see a spy “High Pockets” an American women working at her bar/dance establishment giving US intelligence information about Japanese ship movements and troop placements.

The prisoners had been in prison three years and they believed America had forgotten them, until the Rangers break into the camp to save them. A group of US Army rangers led by Lt. Colonial Mucci and Captain Prince with the help from scouts and Filipino resistance fighters storm the camp, kill the remaining Japanese there and free the prisoners. We see the firefight and the over 15 mile trip toward US lines using Philippine cattle and carts to carry the men that can not walk. Many of the saved POW weigh only 100 lbs and have lost their teeth, hair,eye sight, and have sores all over their bodies with different disabilities due to disease, parasites and vitamin deficiency. They are walking and non walking skeletons.

I won’t ruin the ending. Just say that the reader will get a deep empathy with the tortured prisoners and really praise the Rangers, scouts and Filipino resistance fighters for saving them. This is a true WW2 story and a history that should be shown so all will remember the atrocities committed on POWs. This has happened before and after. Will humankind ever stop the inhuman treatment of POWs, end wars forever or is it in the inner nature of humankind to kill each other?

A very enlightening book. 5 stars

The book was in mint condition and the story was very well written.
I finished it in one sitting.

At dawn on March 8, 1945, on the deck of the troop transport USS General Anderson, near the very end of their ordeal, the 500 men of Cabanatuan, heroes every one of them, were enveloped in a fog bank as they traveled through the Golden Gate on their way into San Francisco Bay. The fog peeled away to reveal their first sight of home, the familiar orange piers of the Golden Gate Bridge, washed in the early morning light.

They looked up and saw that the bridge was lined shoulder to shoulder with people. “Thousands and thousands of tiny human specks, waving handkerchiefs, screaming from the rails.” When the Anderson passed beneath the bridge, they were showered with all sorts of odd objects: money in various denominations, women’s lingerie, tickets to movies and musical shows. A banner hung from the bridge welcomed them: “God Bless You, Ex-POWS.” To a man, the heroes wept. They were home and it was over.

Hampton Sides’ “Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission” is the story of these American and Allied POWs and those who didn’t survive and the daring rescue from the Japanese prison camp Cabanatuan. The camp was located on a plain in the shadow of Mt. Arayat on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

The soldiers had survived the Bataan Death March to be interred by the Japanese Army where they endured three years of extreme brutality and suffering at the hands of their captors and from a list of every known tropical illness. Without medicines, the camp doctors improvised using maggots, for example, to clean out infected wounds. They conducted crude operations using what they called vocal anesthetic “This won’t hurt very much.”

This also is the story of leaders and troops of the U.S. Army Sixth Ranger Battalion and their exploit behind enemy lines to rescue the prisoners. Col. Henry Mucci and Capt. Robert Prince led their rangers 30 miles behind the Japanese line. Time, for them was as much an enemy as the Japanese. In the waning months of the war, the American’s great fear was that in retreat the Japanese would slaughter the survivors and bury them in a mass grave, as they had done in other situations. Surprise was their weapon and Sides tells the story of how the raid was planned and carried out in great detail and with nail-biting suspense. History remembers their great victory: more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers fell; only four American victors died. “Theirs was a delicious victory, a jailbreak on an epic scale, the largest and most triumphant mission ever undertaken by the U.S. Army.”

Sides pulls from the war record, news stories and numerous memoirs to construct his own telling of the heroic story. He has a reporter’s eye (ear and nose) for detail. He met with and interviewed many of the survivors. He talked to children and relatives of those many prisoners who have since died. Sides tells each of these personal stories, capturing the suffering and the will to endure. “Ghost Story” is a gripping and ultimately very moving story of the men of Cabanatuan, their courage and fortitude.

Arrived in good time, love the book. Brenda