On the morning of January 31, 1945, British soldier Edwin Rose woke up in a latrine to find his Japanese POW camp in the Philippines destroyed and completely empty. He shaved, put on his best clothes, and walked out the gate. The night before, U.S. Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerrillas had pulled off one of the most audacious rescues of World War II. This episode reconstructs the raid at Cabanatuan, where survivors of the Bataan Death March were starving in the so-called Zero Ward and the Palawan Massacre had made clear that liberation could trigger mass execution.

We follow Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, Captain Robert Prince, and guerrilla leader Captain Juan Pajota as the force treks 30 miles behind enemy lines, hides beneath a road while a Japanese tank rolls over them, and delays 24 hours to let a 7,000-man division pass. A P-61 Black Widow backfiring overhead distracts the guards while Rangers crawl across open moonlit ground, and the assault clears the towers in 15 seconds. Then comes the harder part: moving hundreds of frail men home on 106 carabao carts at two miles per hour.

• How prisoners built a secret radio to hear broadcasts from San Francisco
• Why trusting Pajota’s local intelligence over the military timetable saved the mission
• The V-shaped choke point at the Cabu River bridge and the bazooka that stopped four tanks
• Why terrified POWs hid from their rescuers and mistook modern uniforms for a Japanese trick
• Mucci’s bluffed artillery strike with a broken radio to get past the Hukbalahap