Did you know that the most successful prison rescue operation of all history happened at the campus of UP Los Baños in the early morning hours of 1945 February 23? Army Chief of Staff Colin Powell said of it: ‘I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will be able to rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook airborne operation for all ages and all armies’ (Robert Wheeler, Los Baños internee, blackfive.net).
Class 58 has a copy of the DVD documentary of that historical event, entitled Rescue At Dawn: the Los Baños Raid produced by The History Channel (history.com). In a meeting at Los Baños early January this year, the officers of Class 58 watched the historic video at the historic Los Baños Station of the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), the use of the conference room, LCD projector and IBM laptop courtesy of the PhilRice station.
After watching the video, I’d like to correct the General a bit by saying that it was really a combined air, land and water rescue of 2,146 Allied civilian and military internees imprisoned by the Japanese Imperial Army within the UPLB campus. (More on this in succeeding posts.)
Filed under: Vanguards | Leave a Comment
No Responses Yet to “Most Successful Rescue In History (1)”