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.