EPISODE 61: Raiders in the Night

History on Fire

Daniele Bolelli

Society & Culture

4.7 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 136 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Never in history had the United States Army been called on to rescue such a large number of POWs from so deep in enemy territory.” William Breuer “We were in the best shape of our lives, and with this mission we understood why he had driven us so hard.” Alvie Robbins speaking about Henry Mucci’s physical training “As far as we were concerned, they were gods.” Bob Body about the Rangers who rescued him and his fellow POWs. “Nothing in this entire campaign has given me so much personal satisfaction.” General MacArthur “I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life that I had a chance to do something in this war that was not destructive. Nothing for me can ever compare with the satisfaction I got from helping to free our prisoners.” Robert Prince This is the tale of one of the most daring missions in the history of WWII. After being defeated by the Japanese in 1942, by 1945 American forces were back in the Philippines ready to retake the islands. But their very success may have spelled doom for some survivors of the Bataan Death March, who had spent nearly three years as prisoners of the Japanese. Plenty of evidence, in fact, suggested that Japanese guards were ready to kill them all rather than letting them be freed. The only way to stop this imminent massacre was for a newly formed unit of Rangers, along with Filipino guerrilla fighters, to travel 30 miles behind enemy lines, face off with numerically superior forces, and rescue the POWs. By every logical metric, this had suicide mission written all over it. And yet, the Rangers and guerrilla, all volunteered. Rarely are war stories feel-good stories. But this may be the exception to the rule. If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Whether or not you're into history, if you care about bravery, wisdom, passion, larger-than-life characters and some of the most emotionally intense moments in human experience, you've come to the right place.
0:12.0	Danieli Bolle is a university history professor, writer, and martial artist, and he shall
0:17.0	be your guide in a journey to the place where history and epic collide. Aly. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Let's go a history on fire.
0:51.0	a history on fire. Hello and welcome to episode 61 of history on fire.
0:58.8	First things first, I want to thank all the wonderful people who are supporting the podcast on
1:04.2	patron at patreon.com forward slash history on fire for as little as five dollars a
1:10.7	month which is really what you give to a waiter you don't particularly like if you go out for dinner kind of thing.
1:18.0	So hopefully is not too prohibitive of a price.
1:21.0	Not only do you support the podcast and you keep it going, which is something that I deeply thank you for, but you also got bonus content. Every month I create a mini episode exclusive for supporters. I'll probably start a duplicate of what I'm doing
1:36.0	on patron on sub-stack as well, but that's coming up. It's not set up yet.
1:40.8	Patron on the other end is set up. A special thanks to Mark Chang,
1:46.1	Chimim-Oxam, He's Unser, and Theresa and Charsa Corso, who are supporting at the highest
1:51.7	possible level on patron.
1:53.6	Also a shout out to Dakota pure bison.com.
1:57.6	Nice people from South Dakota were supply me with some of the
2:01.2	eltiest meat you could possibly eat.
2:03.7	Their bison are naturally raised, no hormones or antibiotics, so if you are in the market for
2:08.9	stakes, ground bison, jerky, or a bunch of other bison-based products you can do no better than Dakota Pure
2:15.8	bison. Use the code H-O-F-10 for a 10% discount at your order at the Dakota Pure Bison.com.
2:24.0	Last thing before we got going with the episode,
2:27.0	just want to let you know that currently schedule for April 2024 is a historical tour of Japan that I would love to be part of.
2:38.8	So it looks like if the sign-ups are going well, if we get enough people, we're going to go off to Japan and explore a whole lot of samurai history, particularly
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