Heroic Invasion : Ceremony: Veteran parachutists to observe the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Los Banos prison camp in the Philippines during WWII.

If you see five men falling from the sky in Hollywood on Thursday, it’s not a movie shoot.

It will be part of a ceremony marking the raid 50 years ago at Los Banos prison camp in the Philippines, in which 138 members of the U.S. Army 11th Airborne Division and Filipino guerrillas saved more than 2,000 civilian prisoners, most of them American, held by the Japanese Army.

The parachutists are veterans of the 11th Airborne Division, which received the order to liberate the camp at Los Banos in 1945 while taking part in the battle to gain control of Manila, some 30 miles away.

The ceremony, sponsored by members of the Rudy Hernandez Chapter of the 11th Airborne Assn., a veterans group, is scheduled to take place at 12:30 p.m. Thursday on Sunset Boulevard, between Argyle and El Centro avenues.

Meeting the paratroopers will be Sister Patricia Marie Callan, 88, of Monrovia’s Maryknoll House. She was one of the 1,500 American citizens interned at Los Banos.

“We call them the angels because they came from heaven as an answer to our prayers,” said Sister Patricia. “When they came our only ration was hot water. I saw nine planes approaching and all of a sudden all of the paratroopers tumbled out. Very exciting.”

The prisoners at Los Banos, many of whom suffered from disease and starvation, included Protestant missionaries and Roman Catholic nuns, mothers and their children, corporate executives and airline mechanics, drifters and merchant sailors.

The paratroopers and Filipino guerrillas took the Japanese guards by surprise and rescued all the civilians, avoiding detection by a Japanese army division nearby and sustaining no fatalities. The rescue was overshadowed by other war news. Nazi Germany was on the brink of collapse. And on the same day of the Los Banos operation, U.S. Marines took Iwo Jima.