Robert Prince - Army Ranger, Cabanatuan POW rescue raid veteran - RIP

Antipodean Andy · Jan 7, 2009

Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides is a very good account of the Cabanatuan raid.

World War II's 'Great Raid' hero dies

The great raider has died.

Robert Prince, a Seattle native and Army Ranger who was the assault force commander of the daring World War II mission to liberate Allied prisoners that was portrayed in the 2005 movie "The Great Raid," passed away New Year's Day in Port Townsend, his family confirmed.

At Robert Prince's request, no services were held. Remembrances are suggested to the Children's Orthopedic Hospital or a charity of one's choice.

"He will be lovingly remembered by his family and friends as a warm, generous, but reserved and humble man," Prince's family said in a funeral notice.

A Garfield High and Stanford graduate, Prince was "a lifelong student of history, an avid follower of politics, and until recently, an enthusiastic Husky football fan," his family wrote.

Prince's humility extended to the mark in history he made as a soldier, from which he often deflected attention. His obituary says simply, "He served in the Southwest Pacific in New Guinea, the Philippine Islands and in Japan. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in the rescue of 571 Bataan prisoners of war from the Cabanatuan Prison Camp January 31, 1945."

Prince was only 25 when he was handpicked by a man he deeply admired, Lt. Col. Henry Mucci, to lead 120 Rangers of the 6th Ranger Battalion, Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas to rescue POWs from a Japanese prison camp near the town of Cabanatuan in the Philippines.

The highly successful mission was quickly heralded across the U.S. Mucci, Prince, nine other Rangers and their wives were sent on war bonds campaigns, and met with President Franklin Roosevelt.

Mucci and Prince both received the Army's highest award, the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the nation's second highest tribute for valor, after the Medal of Honor. The two also were named to the Army Ranger Hall of Fame.

Prince, originally from Seattle's Madrona neighborhood, returned home to Seattle and his wife, Barbara, leaving the Army as a major in February 1946.

The couple settled in Wenatchee, where they raised two sons and focused on getting on with their lives. Prince's son, Jim, has said his dad never talked about the war or the mission to him or his brother until once, when their mom urged Prince to tell them.

Prince carved out a business career marketing Washington apples in Seattle and Wenatchee for 40 years. He retired in 1985 as president of Gwin, White and Prince Inc., and held several leadership positions in the fruit industry.

He and his wife retired in Kirkland, where Barbara died in 2003. Prince then moved to a condominium in Port Townsend to be near his family.

Prince not only knew war as a veteran but as a parent. A son, Spc. 4 Stephen Robert Prince, was killed in action Aug. 11, 1969, near Quang Ngai, Vietnam, while serving with the Army's 11th Light Infantry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division.

In addition to his son, Jim, Prince is survived by daughter-in-law Mardee Stadshaug, grandchildren Amy Murray and Andrew Prince, and a brother, John, of Seattle. He was preceded in death by brothers Ken and Dick of Seattle.

In an Apr. 16, 1945, interview Prince gave to the P-I while home on leave, he said:

"People everywhere thank me. I think the thanks should go the other way. I'll be grateful the rest of my life that I had a chance to do something in this war that was not destructive. Nothing for me can ever compare with the satisfaction I got from freeing those men."
Click to expand...

Antipodean Andy · Jan 11, 2009

Opinion | Reflecting on the life of World War II hero Robert Prince and the "Great Raid" | Seattle Times Newspaper

THE death of Robert Prince on New Year's Day should remind us why we are here and what the world is about.

Prince, the famous Army Ranger captain who led a raid during World War II to rescue American and other Allied prisoners of war in the Philippines, lived in Kirkland for many years and died near his family in Port Townsend. He was 80.

A visit to his home, before the 2005 movie of the raid was released, showed a man of great humility and heart. Asked why he looked so stern in a photo of him during the Philippine campaign, Prince told me, "I think my feet hurt."

Yet is was Prince and some 120 Army Rangers along with a swashblucking outfit known as the Alamo Scouts and determined Filipino guerrillas who rescued 570 imprisoned souls, the remnants of the Bataan Death March, in that long-ago time of true world war.

I went to see Prince, and he greeted me among his plants and flowers on a hillside in Kirkland. Sitting in the living room, he eventually, almost shyly, brought out a box, with its gold major leaf and the black beret of the Army Ranger. Prince had been inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame at Fort Benning, Ga. The black beret was his — before incoming Veterans Affairs Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki took the black beret away from the Rangers and distributed it to the whole Army.

Prince's epic, told magnificently in the nonfiction work "Ghost Soldiers," by Hampton Sides, and related in the movie "The Great Raid," became a huge public event in Seattle and the nation in the mid-1940s. Prince was a Garfield grad and a Stanford grad, although he told me in later years he had drifted away from Stanford "because of its politics."

Yet nothing about the mild-mannered man sitting in a Kirkland living room gave hint to the determination and ferocity that must have guided him those days and nights living on the edge of valor or sorrow.

The names of those times are almost lost in fog. Lt. Col. Henry Mucci of the 6th Ranger Battalion, who ended up a businessman in Thailand, but not without constant rumors he was CIA. Prince remembered a fabulous dinner held in Bangkok in the postwar world of Mucci and some of the Asian traders who came from the raiders.

No matter, it all comes back to Bob Prince. How did America produce such men? They are still working their jobs in the Rangers and the infantry, still in the Marines and flying the aircrews, but Prince was that mystery of the accidental soldier who accounted for great things.

A man who spent his life marketing Washington apples and raising a family was not a killer for a moment, but a patriot for all time. Time was the thing that brought him to World War II, as surely as my father faced the Depression and an uncle drove a tank in North Africa. They were all destiny's children, back then, men and women with lives so cluttered by the debris of depression and war that it is hard to conceive it in today's remote-controlled world.

So, now, I leave him go. I was honored to have talked with him, glad to hear the story from the man himself, felt shadowed in the penumbra of that major's leaf on a real black beret, conflicted by the world he fought for and the world we have made.

Prince lost a son in Vietnam. Others have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, Afghanistan and who knows what other hellholes.

The hero of his time endures.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Robert Prince - Army Ranger, Cabanatuan POW rescue raid veteran - RIP

Antipodean Andy New Member

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Robert Prince - Army Ranger, Cabanatuan POW rescue raid veteran - RIP

Thread Tools

Antipodean Andy New Member

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches