A battle for the textbooks
As Los Banos prisoners staggered from their barracks at dawn, a
woman glanced upward and gasped as dozens of white puffs suddenly
blossomed in the sky.
”
They’re coming!
”
she yelled. Japanese guards shouted a warning to the soldiers
outside the camp doing calisthenics.
A battle for the textbooks
As Los Banos prisoners staggered from their barracks at dawn, a woman glanced upward and gasped as dozens of white puffs suddenly blossomed in the sky. “They’re coming!” she yelled. Japanese guards shouted a warning to the soldiers outside the camp doing calisthenics.
It was already too late for them. A reconnaissance platoon that had infiltrated the area during the night opened fire and raced inside to seize the enemy’s arms. The American paratroopers were firing as they ran and the soldiers, who had left their rifles inside the camp, dropped in rows except for a few who fled into the hills.
The liberation of more than 2,100 civilian prisoners and a handful of Navy nurses was under way on Feb. 23, 1945, the very day they were to be slaughtered.
They had been scooped up during the fall of the Philippines three years earlier – English, American, French and a few other nationalities – and had eventually ended at the former site of the Philippines Agricultural College, 25 miles southeast of Manila.
Three Los Banos prisoners managed to escape. They made their way to the American lines and told them of their plight. An officer of the 511th Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne Division was chosen to lead the liberation.
During the briefing, he and other officers decided on an air/amphibious attack. Amtraks were assembled, and Company B of the 1st Battalion of the 511th was pulled off the lines for the mission. The paratroopers were to drop from 500 feet, about half the normal jump altitude, for shorter exposure to enemy fire.
On the night of the 22nd, the amtraks with the rest of the battalion began the voyage across Laguna de Bay to be in place by dawn. Hours later Company B boarded nine C-47s in Manila.
At 7 a.m. the senior officer leaped from the first plane and 85 paratroopers followed. Fifteen minutes later the last Japanese had been killed but the problems were far from over.
“It was a madhouse,” my brother Larry recounted years later. “They kept ducking back into the barracks to get something or other. Some crowded up to embrace us and others just milled around, laughing and crying. They were starved to the point where many men weighed only 90 pounds, and the women, less. It broke your heart to see the kids.”
Knowing that 2,000 Japanese soldiers were stationed an hour away, an officer hit upon the solution of burning the barracks. That worked and the oldest and weakest of the freed prisoners were loaded into amtraks for the trip to the beach. Some managed to walk the two miles but all were rescued. Everyone made it to safety except two guerillas who were killed. The freed prisoners dubbed their saviors as “Angels,” a name the 11th Airborne has kept to this day.
Years later Army Chief of Staff Colin Powell said of it, “It is the textbook airborne operation for all ages and all time.”
That the raid remains largely unknown to most Americans is because on that same morning in another part of the Pacific, Marines raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
