Its success or failure banked on 100 percent surprise. No one but Krueger and the Rangers themselves knew anything of the mission. Mucci and Captain Robert Prince, commander of the Ranger C Company, were instructed to lead their men behind enemy lines ahead of MacArthur's advance, rescue five hundred prisoners, carry them back, and turn them over to the Sixth Army. Krueger assigned the mission to Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, commander of a new, highly trained but little-used elite unit of Army Rangers, the Sixth Ranger Battalion. Sixth Army, ordered an eleventh-hour mission to rescue the Cabanatuan prisoners. On January 26, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, head of the U. It had just happened in a smaller camp in the Philippines near Puerto Princesa, where 141 prisoners were burned alive and shot as Imperial forces fled. Robert Lapham, a local American guerrilla leader, issued a warning to Army officials: As the Japanese forces retreated, they would certainly massacre these POWs rather than transport them. But these remaining inmates, 'the ghosts of Bataan,' were the sick and the dying, the leftovers, the ones too weak to work. Most of the thousands of prisoners who passed through were sent to other Japanese work projects in the Philippines and Japan. Cabanatuan became the largest American POW camp in the Pacific. The prisoners were among the last of the twenty thousand American soldiers who had surrendered to the Japanese in April and May of 1942, and many were survivors of the Bataan Death March, which had claimed the lives of more than a thousand Americans.

As MacArthur's troops advanced south toward Manila, Army officials learned that approximately five hundred American prisoners of war were still being held at a Japanese work camp in Cabanatuan in the central Luzon plain. forces was one of the largest land invasions of World War II.

The storming of the island of Luzon by U. In early January 1945, General Douglas MacArthur unleashed hell on the Philippines.

Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides