Customer Reviews

Angels at Dawn: The Los Banos Raid

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This well-written book is a "must-read" for anyone who is interested in U.S. military actions in the Pacific during WWII. Angels at Dawn tells the little-known story of the February 1945 rescue by 11th Airborne Division paratroopers and Filipino guerillas of American civilians and other nationalities who were being held by the Japanese in a prison camp at Los Banos on the Philippine Island of Luzon. This book does a better job than many dealing with the Pacific war in explainining why prisoners of the Japanese were at much risk. In part this was due to the threat of starvation and disease, but also because during the latter stages of the war in 1945, Japanese murders of prisoners increased as Allied troops advanced. Against this backdrop the author, who was a member of the 11th Airborne Division during the 1945 fighting in the Philippines, recounts how General MacArthur called on the "Angels" as the division was nicknamed, to mount a hazardous parachute and ground assault behind enemy lines to rescue the prisoners at Los Banos before starvation or Japanese violence could take their lives. As a former soldier who served in Korea, this book reminded me once again of how important the actions of U.S. military forces were during the 20th Century. We live in a better world because of what they did. Angels at Dawn tells the story of one of those actions, which resulted not so much in the destruction of the enemy, but in the preservation of the lives of American civilians, and other foreign nationals.

This book is a good version of the events but does not have the same level of non-military background that a much earlier and now out of print book by Anthony Arthur does. Arthur wrote his in the eary 1980s when many of the participants could still be interviewed.