(2 of 3)
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.