"Pray for Eternal Peace"
RESCUE AT LOS BAÑOS: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of Wold War II
by Bruce Henderson
As the liberation of the Philippines by the Americans is drawing to a close, civilian prisoners, majority are Americans, suffered greatly from the hands of cruel Japanese soldiers in a desperate attempt to break their spirit. Starvation, beatings, and killings of internees did not dash their hopes that one day, they will be rescued.
In an exciting, dramatic accounts of life told by numerous civilian survivors, author Bruce Henderson creates a splendid masterpiece, weaving together the emotions and memories that will surely make you root for the American 11th Airborne Division paratroopers and their comrades, the Filipino guerrillas, in a deadly race against time.
A sketch of the interment camp.
The book is written through the victim's point of view. It contains stories about their suffering, survival, and happiness they have experienced inside the camp. At first, the camp was a GOOD place for the internees, because the first two commandants are empathetic towards them. They have experienced good health, camaraderie, and order.
Everything changed when at August 1944, camp quartermaster Sadaaki Konishi arrived together with the third camp commandant. The commandant is not interested in running the camp, so the sadist Konishi enjoyed the power he got in torturing the internees by cutting their rations in half, inducing power outages, and killing the prisoners.
Because of a "bootleg intelligence", Lt. Col. Henry Muller, together with Maj. Gen. Joseph Swinger's command staff and Lt. Col. Gustavo Ingles, hatched a four-phase plan to rescue the civilians. And on February 23, 1945, the raid happened, and it was one of the most successful rescue missions in modern military history.
For me, it was one of the best well-written collection of memoirs I have ever read. It made me excited while I was reading it. It was clear, and it did not go off the track. The book has stories that are well-connected to each other. And also, as someone who loves reading historical memoirs, too many dates and jargon are the things I hate the most, and this book has less of it! The author just wrote the important dates and the jargon is easy to understand, so this is also a book I can recommend even to teenage readers.
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