Description: On that parched evening in the Philippines 53 years ago, 511 American prisoners of war were saved from almost certain death. A force of elite American troops from the Sixth Ranger Battalion slipped 30 miles behind enemy lines and marched three days without sleep through jungles and peat swamps. They stormed the camp at dusk, achieving total surprise, and killed more than 250 Japanese soldiers while rounding up the dazed prisoners and leading them out the gate. With bullets and mortar shells whining through the tree canopy, the Rangers pulled the prisoners across the Pampanga River in carabao carts, and then led them down a network of secret paths. They almost didn't make it: A phalanx of 8,000 Japanese troops, encamped just a few hundred yards away from Cabanatuan, heard the gunfire and soon went on the offensive, intent on cutting down the prisoners and their liberators before they could return to the safety of the American lines. But an American-led guerilla force of a few hundred men ambushed the Japanese, destroying a series of bridges along the Pampanga, and holding off the enemy long enough for the prisoners to disappear into the night jungle. The raid was a surgical strike of utmost intricacy, one that depended on utter stealth, the perfectly synchronized actions of hundreds of players, and enormous stores of luck.

Today, more than a half-century later, the raid on Cabanatuan remains the largest and most successful operation of its kind ever undertaken by the US Army -- a jail break on an epic scale. It was in every sense a mission of mercy, for the risks of saving 500 diseased and wasted men far outweighed any possible strategic gains. But the raid carried immense symbolicimportance. It was a definitive reversal of fortune in an otherwise desperately bleak chain of events -- a second act, a story of redemption, of return, of coming back for one's belongings. All of the Philippines would eventually be liberated, of course, but it was the raid on Cabanatuan, this searing yarn at the heart of the larger story, that would resonate most powerfully for the thousands of American troops engaged in retaking the archipelago. As General Douglas MacArthur wrote shortly after the war, "No incident of the campaign in the Pacific has given me such satisfaction as the release of POWs at Cabanatuan".

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