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| School in Guimba set up for the 92nd Evac, complete with sign: |
The article from the Saturday Evening Post, April 7, 1945, "We Swore We'd Die or Do It" by Henry A. Mucci, Lieutenant Colonel, USA Army (with the home towns of the soldiers taken out for smoother reading) continues:
Finally, we were hiding on a little hill about 700 yards from the main gate of the prison, where we could get a pretty good view. We could see there was only one tower with a Jap sentry on it. The other guards probably had gone to supper. Between us and the prison, the ground was pretty flat - rice paddies most of the way. As night came, Lt. William J. O'Connell ... began crawling toward that gate with thirty men. Lt. Melville H. Schmidt ... began crawling up with another thirty. Lt. John F. Murphy and his men got into position back of the camp about 7:30 P.M.
Here is the way our plan of action went: The attack was to begin when Murphy's men opened fire on the guards at the rear gate. Lieutenant O'Connell's men were then to sweep the entire open area on the right side of the camp with fire from their automatic weapons. One squad of five men was to break down the main gate and kill the Jap guards there. Another, going right in with them, was to cut some barbed-wire fencing and set up a cross fire over the right side of the camp. Bazooka and grenade teams were to rush in and knock out those tanks and trucks.
Lieutenant Schmidt's platoon was to enter the main gate and swing to the left, raking the left side of the camp with automatic fire, and one squad of Murphy's men was to swing left, too, to give them cross fire. There was a third squad in reserve under Capt. Robert W. Prince ... . They were to get the prisoners out as fast as they could be rounded up. They were told to order all prisoners to dash for the main gate, and they were to help those who couldn't make it on foot on their own. Twenty-five yards in front of the main gate, I stationed some Rangers to round up the rescued in batches of fifty and start them back toward Plateros, where we would meet our carabao carts. I also moved up my sixty unarmed Filipinos to help carry the sick and the wounded. Capt. James C. Fisher ... was our medical officer, and he came up to the main gate to help the wounded. Captain Fisher, son of the novelist, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was a fine man, one of the best.
Everything went off exactly as we had planned, by luck and by the grace of God. The prison camp itself was a big one. It was an enclosure about 600 yards long, front to rear, and about 400 yards wide. I hear that it once had held about 10,000 Americans. There was a barbed-wire fence about ten feet high running around the outside, and two more lines of barbed-wire fence running across it, separating the Jap soldiers from the American prisoners, and the Jap enlisted men from the officers. There certainly was an awful lot of barbed wire.
There were two main guardhouses at the front and rear gates and two pillboxes at the northeast and northwest corners along the main road leading to Cabanatuan on the sets and Cabu on the east. There wee a whole lot of barracks within the camp - a hundred or more. But we had all the Jap officers' quarters, all the enlisted men's quarters, all of the American prisoners' quarters and the buildings housing the tanks spotted, and correctly.
Our attack began exactly at 7:30 P.M., when Lieutenant Murphy's men opened fire at the rear gate. Then everybody rushed forward and began shooting. The next twenty minutes were pandemonium. The fight itself must have been over in about twenty minutes. By this time, we had killed every Jap in the place, and we were herding the American prisoners through the main gate. The element of surprise was complete. We killed about 225 Japs in all.
The minute Murphy's men began firing from the rear, S/Sgt. Theodore Richardson ... rushed across the main highway and battered at the lock of the main gate with the butt of his submachine gun. The clip fell out. Then he pulled out his pistol. A Jap sentry shot it out of his hand. Richardson retrieved his pistol, killed the Jap and opened the gate. Everybody poured through.
Reconstructing it now, I can see how well our squad leaders carried out their assignments. There was one squad under the leadership of S/Sgt. Homer E. Britzius ... . That one crossed the main road on the Cabu side and raked all one side of the camp with fire. The squad led by Sgt. Preston W. Jensen ... went through the main gate, cut the wire leading to the Jap enlisted men's quarters and went in, firing all the time. The bazooka and antitank-grenade squads, led by Sgt. Manton P. Stesart ... took care of those tanks and all the Jap trucks in a matter of minutes. A squad led by Sgt. Cleatus G. Norton ... knocked out the sentry tower. There was a whole section led by Sgt. Charles W. Brown ... which kept up fire on one corner of the camp. Then we had the job of cutting the telephone wires and knocking out the radios, so that no appeal could be made by the Jap garrison for reinforcements from anywhere. Squads led by Sgts. James V. Millican ... and James O. White ... did that job quickly in the darkness.
Lieutenant Schmidt's men directed the actual rounding up of our American prisoners of war in their barracks. The sergeants who went through the barracks, hustling everybody out, were August T. Stern ...; Clifton R. Harris ...; and Lester L. Malone ... .
There were some Englishmen in that prison, too = eighteen of them - a Norwegian and a Canadian. Of the 512 prisoners we freed, 490 were Americans. When Lieutenant Schmidt's men started yelling "All American prisoners head for the main gate!" one of the Englishmen yelled, "We ain't Americans, but we're coming too!" There was one Englishman of about sixty-five, deaf as a post, and sick, who slept through all the excitement. He wasn't rescued until the morning, when some of the Alamo Scouts who stayed behind went through the place and found that all the Japs were dead - any who weren't had pulled out.
Getting those prisoners out was quite a job. Some were dazed. Some couldn't believe it was true. Some tried to take their belongings, and we had to tell them they had to leave their stuff behind, as there was a tough march ahead. One old United States marine who had been a prisoner all the time wrapped his arms around the neck of one of the Rangers and kissed him. All he could say was, "Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!"
We were just clearing the last of our prisoners through the main gate when we heard a fight begin where Jap reinforcements were being rushed up to Pajota's guerrilla road block, down toward Cabu. The Japs came down that road in a column of trucks, and they were singing some kind of weird song - or perhaps simply howling there in the night. They jumped out of their trucks when they reached the bridge, and Pajota's men, shooting at twenty to twenty-five yard range, piled up the Jap dead on that bridge neck high. They must have killed about 400 of them. The Japs brought up eight tanks, Pajota's men stopped them, too.
As we were starting our prisoners along the road - mind you, many were barefooted and hardly clothed - shells, mortar and small-arm fire began to drop in our midst. One shell killed Captain Fisher, our doctor, and wounded a couple of our men, one fatally. That was Cpl. Roy F. Sweezy ... . Sweezy's buddy, Corporal Schilli ... was holding Sweezy in his arms, trying to lift him up, when he saw he was dying, and Schilli baptized him just before he died. He didn't know what religion his buddy believed in, but he thought that was the right thing to do.
That was a pretty bad march over to our rendezvous with the carabao carts. Some of the Rangers gave their shoes and most of their clothes to the men who needed them. They gave them cigarettes and held them up when they needed it. The spirit of some of the old-timers was wonderful. There was an old man who could hardly hobble, but he insisted on walking alone. He said, "I made the death march from Bataan, and I can certainly make this one."
It took us about a half hour to get to our carts. All that time Pajota's men were fighting around the bridge. Once we got to the carts, there was no time to stop. We had to cross the Pampanga River, and some of the carts tipped over into the water. We had some morphine syrettes, and that helped some of the sick men. We also had some benzadrine for ourselves, just to keep us awake and give us that last needed bit of energy.
After what seemed like an age, we got to the little town called Plateros. While we were there, Pajota sent me a runner, asking for instructions. I had him act as a rear guard for us on the right flank, with Captain Prince and our Rangers in the center, and Captain Joson's Filipinos as a rear guard on our left. There was one pretty bad stretch on that return march, but we couldn't avoid it. We had to move our slow column down the main Rizal highway for a mile, and that was a main traffic artery for the Japs going north in strength. Lieutenant O'Connell and some of our men went up ahead to set up a road block a half mile ahead of where we could leave the road and swing out into open country. We also sent Rangers, on some ponies we found, two miles up the road and two miles down to warn us if the Japs were coming. Luckily, they didn't come. It still took us a whole hour to cover that mile, and it was the longest hour I've ever seated out in all my life.
There was a little village called Sibul our across the field when we left the road. There the Filipinos helped us to round up about twenty more carts. We had to have them. All our prisoners were quite exhausted. We got to Sibul about nine o'clock that night, and we heard that the main body of the American forces had come up to the Talavera River. We got in touch with them by radio. I asked for food and ambulances. We pushed on. We reached our junction point with the main forces shortly before midnight, the night of January thirty-first, and that was victory. Not one of the prisoners we had freed was hurt during the operation. Two of our men had been killed and three wounded. There were 107 Rangers, fourteen scouts and 150 armed Filipino guerrillas in the whole action. The Filipinos listed twenty-six of their number as missing.
There were both funny and pathetic incidents during that raid. One was on the night of January thirtieth, the night before the attack, when five little Filipino girls came to the barrio where we were hiding out. they asked permission to sing songs. They brought leis made of freshly picked flowers and hung them around the necks of several of us. I told them they might sing if they would do it very softly. So they sang The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America. Then we all joined in , and there in the semidarkness, singing very low, we sang God Bless the Philippines.
Then there was the mayor of Cabanatuan, who came to the barrio. I was pretty suspicious of him, because he had been mayor all through the Jap occupation. He brought us a bottle of prewar whisky. It was Scotch, and it was good. We passed it around, so that a lot of the boys could get just a little sip, just a taste. Then I held the mayor under guard until the operation was ended. He later was released.
There was another thing we worried about - and that was the barking of dogs. I sent two guerrillas to all the near-by barrios to see that every dog was tied up the night of the thirtieth when we were moving forward. Not a dog barked, by some miracle. Our march out was about twenty-nine miles, and the long march back was about twenty-one.
It should be mentioned that Lieutenants Dove and Nellist, of the Alamo Scouts, spent two days before the attack within a few hundred yards of the prison camp with the other scouts and a Filipino guerrilla named Tobmo, whom they sent back with the information about the prison layout on which I acted. All one day they were in two rocking chairs in a little shack within 200 yards of the prison, directing scouts who were getting detailed information.
Some of the scouts stayed behind to bring in the last nine of the prisoners who were freed, and the wounded Rangers. They saw the Filipinos bury Captain Fisher. There was a Filipino doctor who stayed with Captain Fisher, trying to help him, and who gave him plasma. But the captain died near Plateros about eleven o'clock on the morning after the attack. His spirit won the admiration of all of us.
Filipino guerrillas with escort scouts took him to a little knoll where there was a palm grove about 100 yards square. There was a Catholic chaplain, 1st Lt. Hugh F. Kennedy ... who was one of the prisoners set free at the camp. Father Kennedy stayed behind with the scouts and conducted a funeral service for Captain Fisher in the grove. The Filipinos attached his tags to a little cross and put up a sign at the entrance to his grave, naming it Doctor Fisher memorial.
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| The field behind the school at Guimba |
