And he could surely make this one too
And he could surely make this one too.
And he did.
He walked out of enemy country on his own two feet.
Villages along the way came out with food and water for men who had not eaten a real meal in years, and slowly, cart by cart, mile by mile, the column drew back toward the American lines.
When they came within a few miles of friendly ground, Mucci got on the radio and called for help to bring the men the rest of the way in.
Trucks and ambulances rolled out to meet the carts at the river.
By the morning of the 31st of January, the column had reached the American lines at Tala.
More than 500 men brought back in a single night.
For the men in the carts, the night passed in pieces.
Some talked without stopping, starved for the sound of their own countrymen.
Some could not speak at all.
Some kept asking the Rangers the same questions.
what year it was, how the war was going, whether it was really truly over for them, and then asked them again an hour later, as if the answers might not hold.
They had gone into the war young and strong.
They came out of that camp as shadows of the men their families remembered.
And yet they were alive and moving and going home, which was the one thing none of them had let themselves believe was still possible.
These were the men of Batan and Corugador, some of them prisoners since the first months of the war, going on three years behind the wire.
They had been marched north in 1942 with their hands raised in surrender.
Now they were riding the other way, out of enemy country, in the dark toward their own lines.
I have read the afteraction reports of that night more than once, and the figure that stays with me is not the count of the enemy dead or the miles marched, but how few Americans it cost to carry more than 500 of their own out of a country that had left them behind.
When the first of the freed men reached safety, the general who met them, Walter Krueger, looked at their faces and said afterward that most of them were in pitiable condition and still could not realize they were actually safe.
That was the thing that stayed with everyone who was there.
Not the shooting, not the bridge, the look on the faces of men who had been told in a hundred small ways over three years that they had been forgotten, [clears throat] and who now had to be convinced gently that they had not been.
When they finally crossed into American lines, there were doctors and ambulances and hot food and clean water.
Grown men wept at the taste of it.
Some had dreamed of this exact moment for three years and could not quite trust it now that it had come.
They ate slowly, carefully, the way starving men have to, and then at last they slept, really slept behind their own lines under their own flag for the first time since 1942.
Rangers who had not slept in two days lay down in the dirt beside the carts and slept where they fell.
More than 500 men who had been written off were on their way to hospital beds and then to ships and then home.
And the price had been two lives.
News of Cabanatuan ran across the United States like fire.
For a country that had swallowed the bitter news of Baton 3 years before.
Here at last was the other half of the story.
The men who had been surrendered on these islands had not been abandoned.
After all, America had come back for them 30 mi into enemy country in the dark for men most of the world had already counted as lost.
That was the whole meaning of the thing, and it needed no speech to explain it.
It was written in the act itself.
In a hundred rangers who crawled across an open field for strangers.
In the Filipinos who held a bridge and gave up their carts and sent their sons into the fight to see it done.
In the two Americans who did not come home so that 500 could.
For the soldiers who made the raid, it was one night in a long war.
They went back to the fighting soon enough.
Luzon was far from won, and the hardest battles of the Pacific still lay ahead of them.
But they carried something out of Cabanatuan that stayed with them.
The memory of a night that was purely about saving and not about taking.
Most of a soldier’s war is spent trying to end lives.
For 30 minutes on the last night of January 1945, these men spent theirs entirely on the other thing.
The men who had been forgotten spent the rest of their days knowing that they had not been.
The country made much of the men who led them out.
Mucci and prince were both awarded the distinguished service cross.
Every officer on the raid received the silver star and every enlisted man the bronze.
By the measure of the men it brought home alive.
It was the most successful rescue of prisoners the American army had yet carried out.
But most of the men who had been carried out of that camp went home and lived quietly and lived long, years and decades that the wire at Cabinet had very nearly taken from them.
Many of them are gone now.
So are the rangers who carried them and the scouts who counted the guards in the dark and the Filipino fighters who owned the ground and shared it.
But the story they made together on that plane in Luzon is not the kind that should be allowed to fade.
If your father, your grandfather, or someone at your own table served in the Pacific or in Korea, tell us about them in the comments below.
Somewhere out there are the names of men who crossed 30 m for people they had never met.
And the stories your family carries are how we keep them from being lost.
November 9th, 1943.
A foxhole.
Two men, an island in the Pacific most Americans have never heard of.
The younger of the two was 21 years old, 3 days past his birthday.
He’d been lying in that hole for hours, listening, not to anything in particular, to the dark, to the sound of grenades falling closer with each pass.
At some point during the night, he said three words to the man beside him.
I’ll take it.
He wasn’t talking about a job.
He wasn’t answering a question anyone had asked.
He had looked at the weapons they were carrying, looked at the situation they were in, done the kind of math that most men spend their whole lives hoping they never have to do.
And he had told the man beside him what he had already decided.
I’ll take it.
Nobody ordered him to say that.
Nobody asked.
He wasn’t the only one.
8 days before that conversation, on the same island, a man from South Carolina had stood up on a beach while a gun was killing the men around him and walked straight toward it.
6 days after that, in the jungle a few miles inland, a man from West Virginia had thrown a grenade and hadn’t moved when it came back.
Three men, 8 days.
None of them knew the other two existed.
This is their story.
By the fall of 1943, the United States had been fighting Japan for nearly 2 years.
Guadal Canal had been won at enormous cost.
The Japanese had been pushed back one island at a time across the Solomon’s chain.
The supply lines were shifting.
The momentum was shifting.
But Rabbal still stood on the northeastern tip of New Britain.
The Japanese had built the most powerful military base in the entire Pacific.
A 100,000 troops, five airfields, a harbor deep enough for a fleet.
From Rabbal, Japan could threaten everything south of New Guinea.
Every American ship, every convoy, every transport that came within range did so at risk.
The American commanders understood the problem clearly.
Rabbal could not be taken by force, not without a cost in men and ships that nobody was willing to pay, and not with the resources available in late 1943.
A frontal assault was out of the question, but it could be strangled.
If American aircraft could fly regular missions over Rabal, hitting the airfields, mining the harbor, cutting the supply lines, the base would wither on its own.
It wouldn’t need to be taken.
It just needed to be made useless.
To do that, the Americans needed an airfield within striking range.
They needed flat ground, somewhere in the islands to the south, somewhere engineers could pour concrete and carpenters could build a runway and fighter pilots could take off and be over Rabal before they ran low on fuel.
They found it on Bugganville.
Buganville is the largest island in the Solomon chain, 60 mi wide in places, covered almost entirely in jungle so dense that a man could get lost 20 yards from the trail he’d just left.
The Japanese knew it mattered.
They had 40,000 troops on the island.
The bulk of those forces were concentrated at the northern and southern ends, around Bukah in the north, around Buin in the south.
The middle of the island, a stretch of swampy coastline along Empress Augusta Bay, was held by a much smaller garrison.
That was the opening.
Admiral Hally’s plan was straightforward in concept and brutal in the details.
Land at Cape Tokina, right in the middle of the island’s western coast, where the Japanese were thinnest on the ground.
Establish a beach head.
Build an airfield as fast as possible.
Then let the aircraft do the work.
The resources were thin.
There was one carrier group available for air cover, and it couldn’t stay indefinitely.
Once the Marines were ashore, they would be largely on their own.
Each man was issued one unit of fire, one combat load of ammunition, enough for one fight, not more.
The men who would make that landing belonged to the Third Marine Division.
They had been formed just over a year earlier in September 1942 at Camp Elliot outside San Diego.
The division was built from scratch.
Cadre officers, freshly trained enlisted men.
A handful of veterans mixed in among thousands who had never heard a shot fired in anger.
Most of the men in the division had never been in combat.
They trained in New Zealand through the southern hemisphere winter of 1943, then moved to Guadal Canal to absorb what the veterans there had learned.
What the Guadal Canal veterans had learned was not the kind of thing that transferred easily in a classroom.
It was the kind of thing you either knew from being there or you didn’t know at all.
They tried to pass it on anyway.
How to move through jungle without sound.
how to read the ground when the ground was trying to kill you.
How the Japanese fought at night and what they did when they thought they had you surrounded and what they did when they didn’t.
The third Marine Division listened and took notes and ran exercises in the heat and tried to be ready.
Nobody was ever really ready.
On the night of October 31st, the convoy moved through Empress Augusta Bay without running lights.
The waters were calm.
The men aboard the transports were awake long before dawn.
Some ate.
Most didn’t.
The men who had been through this before, who had climbed into boats before, who had gone in on beaches before, sat quietly with whatever they had learned to do with the hours before something started.
The men who hadn’t been through it sat quietly, too, because there was nothing useful to say, and they knew it, and because saying something just to fill the quiet felt wrong.
On one ship, a sergeant from Spartanberg, South Carolina, sat with his tray in the dark, and didn’t have much to say.
There was nothing left to say.
Tomorrow was coming, whether he talked about it or not.
At 0500 on the morning of November 1st, the ship went to general quarters.
At 0637, the destroyers began shelling the shoreline.
At 0710, the ramps dropped.
The men of the Third Marine Division stepped off into the water and the gun opened up.
Nobody on those landing craft could see where it was coming from.
What they could see was the result.
A boat would be moving toward the beach and then it wouldn’t be.
Landing craft went down.
Others were torn up badly enough that they couldn’t make it back.
The men in the water had nowhere to go.
Rifle fire couldn’t reach the gun.
Grenades fell short.
The beach at Cape Tooka was narrow.
Dense jungle pressing right to the waterline on both sides.
No angle to flank, no ground to work with.
The men who had reached the sand were flat in the black volcanic sand, heads down, the gun somewhere in the treeine, and nobody able to get eyes on it without drawing a burst.
Every man who raised his head got shot at.
The battalion commander, Major Mason, was moving forward, trying to push his men off the beach when he took a wound.
Before they carried him back, he turned toward the men still pinned down in the sand.
Get the hell in and fight.
They carried him off the beach a few minutes later.
The gun kept firing.
Robert Allen Owens was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1920.
His family moved to Spartanberg when he was still small.
He left school after his second year of high school, not because he had somewhere better to be, but because there were bills that needed paying, and he was old enough to help pay them.
For 5 years after that, he worked the looms at a mill in one of the towns nearby.
Early mornings, long shifts, the kind of work that doesn’t make the news.
He enlisted in February 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor.
He went through boot camp at Paris Island, Infantry School at New River, North Carolina.
Then the division shipped to New Zealand, then to Guadal Canal for training.
not to fight, but to learn from men who had.
By November 1943, Owens had been in uniform for nearly two years.
He had never fired a shot at anyone.
There was nothing in his service record that set him apart from the men around him.
No combat experience, no special schools.
He was a sergeant, 23 years old, and November 1st, 1943 was his first day in a fight.
The gun that was killing his men was a 75mm artillery piece set into a bunker built from coconut logs and packed earth dug flush into the treeine at the edge of the beach.
It had been positioned carefully on either side of the main gun.
Smaller positions provided covering fire.
Each one protecting the other, each one protecting the 75.
Any approach from the left flank would walk into crossfire from the right.
Any approach from the right would walk into crossfire from the left.
The only open angle was directly in front.
Straight down the barrel.
For more than an hour, the Marines on that beach hadn’t moved.
40 yards of sand at most before the jungle started.
Nowhere to maneuver.
Nowhere to regroup.
Those who had reached the sand were packed into that strip of ground, face down, close enough to the gun to hear it fire, but unable to get close enough to do anything about it.
Every attempt to suppress it with rifles fell short.
Grenades couldn’t reach.
Owens had been watching the muzzle flash for most of that hour.
He had been thinking about what happened if nobody did anything.
The rest of the landing force was still on those boats.
The beach had to be cleared.
The gun had to stop.
And there was only one direction to go.
Straight at it through the open ground in front of the bunker.
While the gun was still firing, he called for four volunteers.
He placed them on the flanks, two to each side, with orders to draw fire from the smaller positions to keep those gunners occupied, to give him 30 seconds of their attention pointed somewhere other than straight ahead.
Then he went for the main gun himself.
What happened next was put on record by the men who saw it.
Owens crossed the open ground in front of the bunker under fire.
He didn’t sprint.
The accounts say nothing about a sprint.
He moved toward the imp placement across open sand under fire while the gun was still operating.
He reached the bunker.
He entered through the firing port.
The narrow slot cut into the front face of the structure, the same opening the crew used to aim and shoot.
From the front, while the gun crew was still inside, inside a round already chambered.
150 rounds of high explosive ammunition stacked beside the crew.
He drove the crew out through the rear exit.
His men were waiting on the other side.
The gun went silent.
Owens came out through the rear after them, and then he went down.
He died of his wounds on the beach at Cape Tokina.
He had been in uniform since February 1942.
He had never fired a shot at anyone until that morning.
General Alan Turnage, commanding the Third Marine Division, would write afterward that among all the acts of courage on that beach head, no single action saved more lives or contributed more to the success of the landing than what Robert Owens did on the morning of November 1st.
The rest of the landing force came ashore.
They crossed the beach he had cleared.
Most of them never knew his name.
He is buried at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
He was a mill worker from Spartanberg, 23 years old.
If you’ve never heard his name before today, hit subscribe because there are two more men on this island you need to know about, and history forgot all three of them.
6 days later in land from the beach a few miles into the jungle the air smelled of wet rot and something burning.
A football player from West Virginia was leading his men toward a Japanese machine gun.
Herbert Joseph Thomas Jr.
was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1918.
His family moved to South Charleston, West Virginia when he was seven.
He grew up there, went to the local schools, played halfback for South Charleston High, did well enough that after graduation, he spent a year at Greenbryer Military School before earning a full athletic scholarship to Virginia Tech.
By his senior year, he led every college football player in the state of Virginia in scoring.
His mother had died when he was 13.
That is the kind of loss that either makes a person or doesn’t.
For Thomas, it hadn’t stopped him.
He had kept going, one thing at a time, until the one thing in front of him was a diploma two months away.
He left before he got it.
His friends were joining the Marines, and Herbert Thomas was not the kind of man who stayed behind while the people he cared about went somewhere dangerous.
He went into the Army Air Corps first, spent several months there, then put in for a transfer to the Marines because that’s where his friends were, and that was reason enough.
That transfer put him on Bugganville on the morning of November 7th, 1943.
But he had been on the island for 6 days before that morning.
He came ashore on November 1st with the rest of the Third Marines in the same waves that were being torn apart by the 75mm gun at Cape Tokina.
His unit landed east of the Cape.
He made it up the beach.
He dug in.
For the first several days, the work was not combat.
It was the grinding, unglamorous labor of turning a strip of sand and jungle into something that could hold.
His regiment pushed inland, cutting trails through growth so dense that the men in front were invisible to the men 10 yards behind.
They built defensive positions.
They ran patrols.
They found Japanese stragglers and dealt with them.
They learned the ground.
On the night of November 6th, word came down through the lines that Japanese troops had landed to the south at Koramokina Lagoon, 6 milesi from the perimeter.
A counterattack was coming.
Thomas and his men moved out before dawn.
The jungle on Buganville was not like anything they had prepared for.
Marines who had come through Guadal Canal said the terrain here was worse.
The canopy was so thick that even at midday, the ground below was in near darkness.
The trees grew close enough together that a man could lose sight of the man beside him after 10 steps.
The ground underfoot was either hard coral rock or ankled deep mud.
sometimes one then the other within the same 20 yards.
Sound traveled strangely.
A machine gun firing 50 yards off could seem to come from any direction.
Thomas moved through it anyway.
He found the first Japanese machine gun position by watching for the muzzle flash through the undergrowth.
He moved his men into position around it.
Two to suppress from the left, two from the right, and went for it with grenades.
It stopped firing.
He found the second position dug into the root system of a large tree.
The roots providing cover on three sides.
It took him nearly 20 minutes to find an angle that wasn’t covered.
He got close enough and used grenades again.
That one went silent, too.
He kept moving.
The third position was in tighter ground.
The machine gun sat behind a low rise with a creek bed dropping away on the left and a wall of wait a while vines on the right, the kind with small curved thorns that caught clothing and skin and wouldn’t let go.
There was no clean approach from either flank.
Thomas looked at it for a moment.
His men were behind him, waiting in the cover.
He had used the same tactic twice already that morning, and twice it had worked.
throw a grenade into the imp placement.
Rush it the moment the grenade went off.
It was the right call.
There was no reason to think the terrain had changed enough to make it wrong.
He pulled the grenade.
He threw it.
It hit a vine in the canopy and came straight back down into the middle of his men.
There was no time to warn anyone.
There was no time for anything.
Thomas dropped onto the grenade.
He was 25 years old.
His men stood up.
They went for the machine gun position exactly as Thomas had told them to, exactly as he had planned.
They took it.
The man who made the plan was gone.
The plan had not gone with him.
Herbert Thomas was the first man from West Virginia to receive the Medal of Honor in the Second World War.
In 1945, his sister Audrey put her name to the christristening of the destroyer USS Herbert J.
Thomas.
She broke the bottle herself.
In 1946, the city of South Charleston opened a new hospital and named it after him.
Virginia Tech named a dormatory in his honor.
It stood for decades.
He had been a halfback, a scholarship athlete, a man who transferred from one branch of the military to another because his friends were there, and he couldn’t think of a good reason to be anywhere else.
He made a choice.
Walked through a door.
The door closed behind him.
2 days later, along the pea trail in the dark before dawn, two Marines shared a foxhole.
Henry Girk was born on November 6th, 1922 in Nicha, North Dakota.
1 mile north of Nichch is the Canadian border.
The nearest city of any size is nearly 90 mi away.
His parents, Julius and Halda, had come from Ukraine, passed through Winnipeg, and settled in the far northeast corner of North Dakota at a time when the land was still cheap and the work was hard.
Julius Gork was a carpenter.
He spoke German at home.
Henry was the fifth of eight children.
He enlisted in Minneapolis on April 15th, 1942 at the age of 19.
Boot camp at San Diego, then the New Heis, then Guadal Canal, then Buganville.
On the night of November 9th, 1943, 3 days after his 21st birthday, he was lying in a twoman foxhole along the pea trail with a marine named Donald Probst.
The Piva Trail ran through the interior of the island south from the beach head.
Whoever held it controlled the main approach to Cape Tokina from the south.
The Japanese 23rd Infantry Regiment had been pushing down it for days, trying to break through the Marine roadblock before the Americans could consolidate their position and bring up heavier weapons.
The Marines holding that roadblock had been in contact since November 6th.
3 days of fighting in terrain that made movement almost impossible.
The jungle on both sides of the trail too dense for units to stay in contact if they spread out more than a few yards.
Reinforcement meaning single file down an exposed path.
Resupply meaning the same.
By the night of November 8th, the Japanese were probing more frequently.
The grenades were coming in closer.
Earlier that night, the two Marines in the foxhole directly beside Gorka and Props had been killed in the first minutes of one of those probes.
Their position was empty.
Gorka and Props were the only ones left holding that section of the line.
If they gave way, the entire left flank of the roadblock opened up.
They held.
Donald Probst was from Seattle, Washington.
He carried a BAR, a Browning automatic rifle, beltfed capable of sustained automatic fire that a submachine gun couldn’t match.
In a two-man foxhole under grenade attack in the dark, the BAR was the more valuable weapon by a wide margin.
Girk had the submachine gun.
During a lull in the firing, the two men talked.
It was not a long conversation.
They looked at their weapons and they looked at the situation and the situation was not complicated.
The Japanese were not going to stop.
The grenades were going to keep coming closer.
At some point, one was going to land in the hole.
They agreed.
If that happened, the bar needed to keep firing, which meant Prob needed to keep firing.
Then Girk said something that a lieutenant positioned nearby would write down afterward.
“If a grenade drops into this hole,” he told Probst, “Don’t worry about it.
I’ll take it”.
It was not a dramatic thing to say.
There was nothing in his voice, as it was later described, that made it sound like anything other than what it was, a plan.
The conversation ended.
They went back to watching the dark.
The night continued.
The Japanese came again before dawn.
The grenades came with them, more of them landing closer, probing for the position.
One dropped straight into the foxhole.
Girk shoved probes to side hard.
no time to be gentle about it and covered the grenade with his body.
Prob was wounded in the blast.
He got back to his feet.
He got back behind the bar.
What happened in the minutes after that is what earned him the silver star.
Not the act of surviving, but what he did with it.
The position he and Girk had been holding was still the only thing standing between the Japanese and the left flank of the roadblock.
The men who had been killed in the foxhole beside them were still dead.
Nothing about the tactical situation had changed except that Girka was gone.
