Battle EUCOM

On 27 January 1945 the 6th Ranger Battalion and the 6th Army Special Reconnaissance Unit (the Alamo Scouts) began the most dangerous and important mission of their careers to rescue 500 American, British and Dutch prisoners-of-war held at a camp near Cabanatuan. This daring plan was fraught with difficulties - the rangers had to struggle with harsh jungle terrain, 30 miles behind enemy lines against a far larger force, knowing that if their secret mission was leaked, the POWs would be massacred by their captors.

A tense, powerful, grand account of one of the most daring exploits of World War II. On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected troops from the elite U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty miles in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POWs who had spent three years in a surreally hellish camp near the city of Cabanatuan.

On January 30, 1945, American troops staged a successful raid on Cabanatuan, a notorious Japanese POW camp where thousands of prisoners had been tortured and died. Based on interviews with the heroes who survived the raid, this book brings to life in electrifying detail the dramatic events that took place on that historic day.

When the Philippines fell to the Japanese, the remnants of Gen. MacArthur's Army were forced down the Bataan Penninsula where they were surrounded and cutoff with no hope of rescue. They were starving and dying of disease. Gen. Wainwright eventually surrendered and the troops were marched off to prison. Along the way thousands died or were murdered by the Japanese. They were taken to Camp O'Donnell and to Cabanatuan Prison Camps where they were starved and beaten. When MacArthur invaded the Philippines he made it a priority to rescue the remaining prisoners still alive in Japanese hands.

In January 1945, captured American soldiers, emaciated and ill from brutal mistreatment, were still in the notorious Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines when Army Rangers set out on a daring mission to enter Japanese-controlled territory, storm the camp, and escape with the POWs, carrying them if necessary.