One hundred and fifty slaves stood on a tarmac 2,200 meters long and 210 meters wide, straining with shovels and pickaxes and rakes. Ever since the air raids started two months earlier, Lieutenant Sato, the one they called "the Buzzard," had ordered them out each morning to fill the bomb pits, to make the runway usable again. This morning had been no different. The men had risen at dawn and eaten a breakfast of weevily rice, then climbed aboard the trucks for the short ride to the airstrip. As usual, they worked all morning and took a break for lunch around noon. But now the Buzzard said no lunch would be served on the strip, that instead the food would be prepared back at the barracks. The men were puzzled, because they'd never eaten lunch at their barracks before, not on a workday. It didn't make sense to drive back now, for they still had considerable repair work to do. Sato offered no explanation.

Thomas was a loud, friendly giant of a man, a beaming six-foot-four strawberry blond from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he'd been a star end on the Godwin High School football team. He'd had a difficult upbringing, even in comparison to the hard-luck stories typically found in the Bataan army. His father left his mother when he was a baby, his young brother had lost an arm in a streetcar accident and then had died of scarlet fever, and during the depths of the Depression his family had sunk into a poverty so extreme that after a series of moves and a stream of bad men constantly coming through the house, Thomas struck out on his own. His mother loved him dearly, but couldn't provide for him. Thomas spent his last two years of high school camping out of a rattletrap car on Buck Creek, living off the meager proceeds of his paper route and his summer wages from tending lettuce in the region's famously rich muck gardens. He had wanted to go to college but he couldn't afford it, so he joined the Army, which in comparison to his life in Grand Rapids seemed a radiant existence, holding out the promise of good wages ($21 a month) and three hot meals a day.

Joson (ho-SOHN) was a short, generous-spirited man in his mid-thirties, bright but of limited education. He was a natural politician with a knack of gentle persuasion and a broad smile full of good teeth. Major Lapham, the American guerrilla leader, had always considered Joson one of his most capable officers. Joson couldn't count the run-ins he'd had with the Japanese over the past three years - skirmishes and ambushes and moonlight raids. Joson thrilled to the idea of attacking Cabanatuan. His runners had brought him the news last night. He and his lieutenants had gone out into the countryside, canvassing the surrounding barrios to round up as many able-bodied men as possible. Now here they were mustered and ready to join the mission.

A few minutes later an airplane shot across the sky. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, as though a trapdoor had opened in the firmament. As the aircraft streaked low over the camp, Thomas caught a momentary glimpse of the twin tailed contraption. It was black, futuristic, sleeker than any plane Thomas had seen before. He observed that the guards up in the tower were apoplectic, hurling themselves upon the floorboards.

The plane flew exceedingly low, low enough so that Abie Abraham thought he could "easily hit it with a rock." All about the camp, the prisoners stared up in awe, wondering what the strange ship had in mind for them. John Cook thought the aircraft looked like "Buck Rogers come to life." The plane looked so different from anything else they'd seen at that first they thought it was German, or possibly Russian. Other prisoners described it as "a black barn swallow," "a War of the Worlds rocket," and an "angel of death." To the men of Cabanatuan, the plane, whatever it was, seemed a powerful, almost eerie emblem of how far American technology had evolved in the three years of their captivity. Mechanically, logistically, conceptually, this was a different Army. On Bataan, they'd starved in their shallow metal helmets fighting old-fashioned pitched battles with dud shells and rusty artillery Thirty-odd months later, they had only to gaze upon this sci-fi lozenge streaking through the clouds at 300 miles per hour to understand that everything, the whole social and industrial universe back home, had changed. It was as though they were looking at a new country, a new era.