The soldiers spent months behind enemy lines, marching hundreds of miles through the tangled jungles and steep mountains of Burma as they battled hunger and disease between firefights with Japanese forces during their secret mission.In February 1944, the American jungle fighting unit nicknamed Merrill's Marauders set out to capture a Japanese-held airfield and open an Allied supply route between India and China.
Starting with 3,000 soldiers, the Marauders completed their mission five months later with barely 200 men still in the fight.The journey of roughly 1,000 miles (1,610 kilometers) on foot was so grueling that fighting “was the easy part,” said Robert Passanisi, who at age 96 is among just nine known Marauders still known to be alive..