Raid at Los Baños

Los Baños Raid
Part of World War II, Pacific theater
Painting of a guerrilla armed with a bolo knife disarming a Japanese sentry of his rifle.
Date 23 February 1945 Location Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines Result Successful Allied military rescue operation
Belligerents
United States  Commonwealth of the Philippines	Japan  Second Philippine Republic
Commanders and leaders
Henry A. Burgress Edward Lahti John Ringler Robert H. Soule Joseph W. Gibbs Gustavo Inglés	T. Iwanaka Sadaaki Konishi
Strength
company of U.S. paratroopers 300 troops on amphibian trucks 800 Filipino guerrillas	150-250 Japanese guards 8,000-10,000 Japanese soldiers near camp
Casualties and losses
United States: 3 killed 2 wounded Philippine Commonwealth: 2 killed 4 wounded	70-80 killed

 United States

 Japan

The Raid at Los Baños in the Philippines, early Friday morning on 23 February 1945, was executed by a combined U.S. Army Airborne and Filipino guerrilla task force, resulting in the liberation of 2,147 Allied civilian and military internees from an agricultural school campus turned Japanese internment camp. The 250 Japanese in the garrison were killed. It has been celebrated as one of the most successful rescue operations in modern military history. It was the second precisely-executed raid by combined U.S.-Filipino forces within a month, following on the heels of the Raid at Cabanatuan at Luzon on 30 January, in which 522 Allied military POWs had been rescued. The air/sea/land raid was the subject of a 2015 nonfiction book, Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II, by New York Times bestselling author Bruce Henderson.

Since the landings of the U.S. Sixth Army at Lingayen Gulf and the U.S. Eighth Army at Nasugbu, Batangas on 9 January 1945 and 31 January 1945 respectively, to retake Luzon, the Imperial Japanese Army was being repeatedly pushed back and was increasingly becoming desperate. Soon news was filtering down to Allied commanders that the Japanese were killing innocent civilians and prisoners of war while falling back.

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