Rescue at Los Banos

'Bruce Henderson has told a wonderfully exciting story of one of war's greatest rescues with verve, style, and panache. I didn't even stop for coffee during my reading: it was so classically unputdownable.'

Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic and The Surgeon of Crowthorn Like Ghost Soldiers and Unbroken comes the incredible untold true story of one of the greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 Los Banos prison camp raid in the Philippines.

As the Pacific War was ending in 1945, the Japanese bitterly tightened their grip on their prisoners of war. Starved, beaten, and demeaned, the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Banos prison camp in the Philippines-almost all Americans-knew that their chances of survival were slim if help did not arrive soon. Fearing the worst, General Douglas MacArthur authorized the 11th Airborne Division to embark on a dangerous mission deep inside enemy-held territory-and a heart-pounding race against the clock. A combination of world-class strategy and a more than a little luck, this flawlessly-executed raid has gone down in history as what Gen. Colin Powell calls "a textbook operation for all ages and all armies." Weaving together insights from personal interviews, diaries, memoirs, and archival research, Sunrise at Los Banos tells the timeless story of a group of POWs of all ages and both genders who overcame hardship with courage and resilience, and of the young American and Filipino fighting men who risked their lives to rescue them.