Great Raid, The

The time and method of this disposition are as follows:

• The Time.
  
  Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders individual disposition [decisions by local prison-camp commandants] may be made in the following circumstances.
  
  (a) When an uprising of large numbers [of POWs] cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms.
  
  (b) When escapees from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force.
  

The Methods.

(a) Whether they [the POWs] are destroyed individually or in groups or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.

(b) In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.

Beyond such a policy (where local commandants could decide whether to execute Allied prisoners of war), photographs taken by liberating troops (or captured from defeated soldiers) reveal other atrocities. Beheading prisoners, bayoneting Filipinos and their families, and torturing people (including women) were part of the occupiers’ wartime strategy of fear and intimidation:

Allied soldiers and Filipino guerillas were often made to dig their own graves before they were beheaded in front of their colleagues.

Sometimes prisoners of war were executed while they were behind bars.

Seeing pictures of POWs today, one can easily understand why they called themselves “Ghost Soldiers.”

Even Filipino children were not spared, including those who were bayoneted from behind.

Liberators found both women and men who had been tortured.

One hundred fifty Cabanatuan prisoners, serving as slave laborers, were transferred to the Puerto Princesa prison camp on Palawan Island. For 2½ years they worked to build an air strip.

On 14 December 1944, after Americans landed on Mindoro (the next large island north of Palawan) - and two days before other American forces, fighting in Europe, were surprised by a major German offensive known as "Battle of the Bulge" - Japanese commanders at the Palawan prison camp decided to brutally execute all the prisoners.  Eleven escaped.

On 7 January 1945, Private First-Class Eugene Nielsen (one of the eleven escapees) briefed an Army intelligence officer on the massacre. Horrified, the officer heard the gruesome story: Hundreds of men died after they were forced into subterranean air-raid trenches, doused with gasoline and torched while still alive.

Most of those who escaped the incineration were shot or bayoneted. Nielsen, after jumping from the pit, hiding in garbage and dodging bullets aimed at him, swam nearly nine hours to safety.

To prevent another Palawan Massacre, elite Allied forces (Alamo Scouts and members of the 6th Ranger Battalion) cooperated with local Filipinos to undertake World War II’s most daring prisoner-of-war rescue: “The Great Raid.”