From the Grave

When the news came, Mrs. Ralph Hubbard was at Oklahoma City's Crippled Children's Hospital reading to polio victims. Nurse's Aide Hubbard dashed out, ran all the way to the Culbertson School and right into the First Grade. There she gave her son Joe the news: his father was safe.

On the night of Jan. 30, Major Ralph Hubbard and the other prisoners of Pangatian Camp waited as they had waited for months--ever since they had seen the first white-starred bombers over Luzon. They could only guess at what was happening now in the northwest,. where the sky on past nights had been lit with pale flashes of gunfire. Over a radio improvised from scraps and toothpaste tubes they had caught fragmentary reports. They knew that MacArthur--who would "always seem to see the vision of the grim, gaunt, and ghostly men"--must have returned. Inside their bamboo and barbed-wire stockade, they thought with mixed hope and despair of their own chances of escape.

The Jap guards at their camp had pulled out three weeks ago. Major Takasaki, the commandant, had silkily explained that they were leaving, "due to certain inconveniences." He had ordered: "Remain within the stockade for your own protection. We shall leave food for 30 days." The prisoners had raided the Jap stores, greedily drunk up some 500 cases of milk.

Behind the Stockade. They butchered Brahma steers, began to recover some of the strength drained out of them by almost three years of the horror which began at Bataan. But they were still sick, emaciated, unarmed--still prisoners deep within the Jap lines. Jap combat troops, moving northeast along the highway which ran past the camp, used the prison's garrison barracks for temporary quarters. Japs in force were only a mile to the south.

The distant cannonading grew louder, drew nearer. Over the gaunt men hung the dread that the enemy, in fury, might yet decide to finish them off. Caught between the lines, they might even be wiped out by U.S. artillery or by bombers. Even if MacArthur knew they were there, how could he effect their rescue?

On the night of Jan. 30, Private Edward S. Gordon of the 4th Marines was eating a piece of bread he had made from rice flour. Rifle fire shattered the darkness. A Jap sentry, standing on a watch tower listening to the night's hush, tumbled to the earth. The crump of grenades mingled with ripping bursts from automatic weapons. Japs screamed orders, fell before the headlong rush of dimly seen figures brandishing knives and pistols. Unmistakably American voices yelled: "This is a prison break--make for the main gate! These are Yanks!"

In Chicago, white-haired Mrs. Mary Zelis went to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where she had prayed every day for Louis, her son. Now she gave thanks for Louis' delivery.

March of the Half-Dead. Some of the prisoners ran on bare, swollen feet out through the main gate toward the hill which the raiders pointed out to them. Some of them in hysteria tried to embrace and kiss their rescuers. Some of them, bedridden, found themselves hoisted pickaback by sweating soldiers.

Along the highway south of the camp the rattle of automatic rifles was now heavily punctuated by cannon fire. Jap troops from the direction of Cabanatuan were trying to break through a cordon which the rescue party had thrown across the highway. The Japs were rumbling up in tanks.

The prisoners had all been collected--Hubbard, Gordon, Colonel James Duckworth, the sick. There were some 500 of them. Herded by their rescuers, in weird and motley columns they plunged westward through fields, over streams and across the rice paddies toward the American lines.

Under a moon and all through the hot night they tramped. They passed Filipino natives, who stared. Carabao carts were commandeered and the weakest were loaded aboard. One man died of shock, another died when his faltering heart gave out. The rest of them, still bewildered by the suddenness of their delivery, trudged on.

In Oakland, Calif., two days after she was notified by the War Department that her brother had been killed on Leyte, Mrs. Caryl L. Picotte wept again with happiness. Her husband had been rescued from the prison camp on Luzon.

Mucci's Rangers. The rescued men learned then who their deliverers were. They were from the Sixth Army of Lieut. General Walter Krueger, who had moved swiftly south from Lingayen Gulf. Filipino guerrillas had reported the location of their camp, which was 25 miles inside the Jap lines on the Sixth's left flank. The men who had rescued them were 286 Filipinos and 121 picked men of the U.S. 6th Ranger Battalion. The squat, handsome man wearing a lieutenant colonel's insignia and a shoulder holster over his sweat-stained shirt was Henry Andrew Mucci, in command.

Mucci's men were a tough breed. Formerly they had been a pack field artillery unit whom Mucci himself had trained as combat troops two years ago in New Guinea. Mucci was a West Pointer, son of a Bridgeport, Conn, horse dealer. In command of his Filipinos: Major Robert Lapham, who had been fighting with the guerrillas since before the fall of Corregidor. Mucci's force had suffered some casualties: three wounded, 27 killed.

It was dawn when the cavalcade began to flow into the rendezvous, a native village. There ambulances and trucks were waiting. The prisoners walked and rode between lines of curious infantrymen. They tried to be casual. They said, "Hi, Yanks," and hoped no one noticed that their voices quavered. They tried to give officers the regulation salute and to keep a soldierly bearing.

They tried to forget their blistered feet, their racking pains, their sores, their ills. Some knew they were living skeletons of men. Some were still filled with unbelief. They caught sight of an American flag and Staff Sergeant Clinton Goodbla openly wept.

Later they were able to talk, quietly and coherently. In an evacuation hospital they recalled the horrors and degradation they had endured for almost three years; the last days on Corregidor, when the enemy lost 4,500 troops in his final frenzied attack; the death march from Bataan; the sight of Filipino children impaled on Jap bayonets; the notorious compounds at Camp O'Donnell, where the death rate among captives had been as high as 250 a day; the filthy and vermin-ridden compound at Pangatian, where every foot of ground finally was a filled-in latrine; the diet of rice, sweet potatoes, radish tops, "pigweed," fish powder; the beatings with hardwood sticks; their friends who had died.*

In Oak Park, Ill., Mrs. Abraham Katz heard the news that her son, Charles, "was saved, and said quietly: "I wish all mothers of prisoners could share my joy." But in Maywood, Ill., families waited in vain for word of 85 of their sons who had been with the 192nd Tank Battalion at Bataan. For most of the families of some 12,000 American soldiers and sailors taken by the Japs--and still unaccounted for--the waiting and suspense only became sharper.

* Japan is ready to do anything she can "to improve the lot of Allied prisoners," the Tokyo radio reported last week. "We hope that the enemy will in turn recognize the Japanese generosity for making such a noble decision. . . ."

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