"It was hell on earth." -Unnamed 11th Airborne Division trooper

After the 11th Airborne Division’s historic landings on Luzon’s southern beaches at Nasugbu on January 31, 1945, the Angels began a mad dash inland to secure the heights of Tagaytay Ridge just south of Manila. It was a sprint which 8th Army’s LTG Robert L. Eichelberger called, “an exploit that (I consider) one of the most thrilling of the entire Pacific war.”

North of Manila in the Pampanga Plains, General Walter Krueger’s 175,000-man Sixth Army had become “bogged down”, and General Douglas MacArthur placed his hopes for a breakthrough on General Eichelberger’s Eighth Army to the south.

While originally a mere reconnaissance in force, the 11th Airborne, supported by various units, fought through enemy defenses in the Aga Pass then up to the heights of Tagaytay Ridge which the Angels in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped onto on February 3, or X+4.

As the Angels spread out to secure road junctions on Highway 17 and patrol nearby towns, Generals Swing and Eichelberger set up their CPs atop the ridge at the Manila Hotel Annex. The two had a decision to make: continue securing the surrounding areas (their written orders) OR continue north into Manila (a verbal proposal given to Eichelberger by MacArthur himself).

There was no question: the Angels would push into the city.

With the hindsight of 80 years, we read of the division’s fight to liberate Manila from the grip of Imperial Japan with respect and awe. I recently read through 3,000 pages of division and 8th Army documents regarding the Nasugbu landings and the battles at Imus, Paranaque, Nichols Field, Fort McKinley, the Manila Polo Club, etc., in addition to hundreds of pages of journals, letters and after-action reports written by Angels who were there.

After speaking with troopers who were there, it is humbling to read through radio communiques that flew back and forth then look at casualty totals for each day. Having spent over a decade now studying the division’s Luzon campaign, what those messages represent is, at times, hard to put into words.

My grandfather, 1LT Andrew Carrico of D-511, fought on Leyte and Luzon and told us five decades later, “War IS hell”, and for our Angels and the civilians trapped in the city, Manila became a hell on earth. Japanese defenders burned, raped, and killed their way through the city and left behind them a tragic wake of destruction and death that affected Manila for years to come. By the end of the war, the only city to receive a higher percentage of destruction than Manila was Warsaw and over 100,000 civilians lost their lives (that’s a conservative estimate).

It was into this hell that our Angels would descend in February of 1945, full of courage and a determination to defeat Imperial Japan and to free the people of Luzon. They fought their way from street to street, one blasted defensive position to another. They endured heavy shellings, heavy and light machine gun fire, Banzai attacks, hunger, thirst, and all the indescribable horrors of war.

“Day by day we advanced as best we could,” 1LT Andrew Carrico recalled. “Some days we did not get very far, sometimes yards! Most of the period between February 4-22 was pretty heavy fighting all the time.”

The Angels cleared neighborhoods one house at a time, charged across open fields while under fire, hurried down streets wary of snipers and fought hand to hand engagements against suicidal Japanese marines and soldiers. They cleared pillboxes and trenches with bayonets and flame throwers and in the words of CPL William C. Kitchen of the 511th Airborne Signals Company “mortars, machine guns and men of the highest quality.”

HQ3-511’s PFC Robert LeRoy would add, “There were no boys in this fight — nothing but men, blood, sweat and tears.”

The Division took or destroyed 1,227 pillboxes, bunkers and other defensive positions and eliminated 5,210 Japanese occupiers. No wonder 3/511’s PVT Walter Cass wrote to his mother, Lucille Mintz of University Heights, Ohio. “The air was constantly filled with artillery and mortar salvos, the banging of rifle fire, the chatter of machine guns, the whine of ricochets.”

The medics and surgeons did their best to save the wounded, both their own and the Filipinos who came in with bayonet wounds to their chest and back, or whose neck muscles had been severed by Japanese swords as cruel form of torture and punishment.

Numerous Angels gave their last K-Ration to homeless orphaned children they caught scrounging through trash cans for food. Others held back tears as they said goodbye to a combat buddy whose life had been cruelly cut short in its youth by the hand of fate.

Manila proved a costly for the division and the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial is the final resting place for dozens of Angels who gave their last full measure of devotion in the battle against tyranny and oppression.

Angels like SGT Robert Steele who climbed on top of a stone building at Imus to eliminate Japanese holdouts who were inflicting serious casualties. Bob was put in for a battlefield commission to 2nd Lieutenant, but three days later he was killed just west of Nichols Field. He lies in the cemetery, not far from his brother Richard who would be killed on Luzon three months later.

Not far from these brothers lies T/5 Henry E. Winne of RHQ-187. The Silver Star recipient from Portland, Oregon was killed while leading a patrol when a lone sniper shot him in the neck. The medics did their best, but it was too late and his loss stayed with his buddies for the rest of their lives, especially T/4 Clifton Evans who noted, “He was a great man and fighter. He was a natural born leader and had guts plus!”

B-511’s PFC Bud Karst remembers watching elements of HQ1-511 march past their position in Las Piñas and Bud waved to his old buddy CPL Carl J. Bolas. Two days later Carl was killed and Bud said, “The news of Carl’s death crushed the Third Platoon, B Company...It is like some part of you is missing. A part of your life is buried at ‘Nasugbu’. It hurts so bad you just want to cry.”

Dozens of such heart-wrenching stories could be told for as H-511’s 1LT Miles Gale noted with deep emotion, “It was very hard to wrap up a good friend and buddy in a poncho and bury him in a strange place.”

After ten days of fighting, Miles’ 511th PIR was short 601 men with 51 dead and 400 wounded. H-511’s PFC Richard Keith, who would retire a brigadier general, noted of H Company, “Of three platoons, we now were made up of only three live and unwounded officers and 55 enlisted men.”

When Nichols Field was declared secure on February 12 (X+12), H Company’s original compliment of 121 was down to 49. RHQ-511’s PFC Kenneth J. Haan noted, “Up around Parañaque, Nichols Field and Ft. McKinley we had over 300 killed and 800 wounded in ten days. At one time the (511th’s) regimental strength was 900 men, about 40%.”

2/187 GIR’s S-4 1LT Eli Bernheim noted, “the 187th had not received any replacements since the beginning of the Leyte battle. I believe that the 2nd Battalion effective strength was below 200 with very few MOS riflemen. We were all in bad shape.”

Division Tactical Executive Officer MAJ Louis A. Walsh said, “Our strength at this time was approximately 50 per cent of T/O...”

Memorial ceremonies would be held after the fighting died down and our young Angels, most barely out of high school, thought of friends now gone and the destruction they had witnessed in Manila.

There were highlights, of course, including the division’s historic rescue of over 2,100 men, women and children from behind enemy lines at the Los Baños Internment Camp which Division G-2 MAJ Henry Muller called the Division’s “Finest Hour”. There were Filipinos saved, weddings attended, births announced, families fed, freedoms restored, and occupiers defeated.

There were still battles to be fought on the Bicol Peninsula and in the Malepunyo mountain range, followed by Aparri and Okinawa and ultimately Japan. But the fight to liberate Manila left an indelible impression on the Angels of 1945, and in the words of HQ-11’s 2LT William Abernathy, “Despite all the publicity the 1st Cavalry Division and the 37th got, the 11th went through by far the strongest defenses, with fewer men and a lot less artillery and equipment. That’s the straight stuff, too.”

Of the battle into and for Manila, one 2/187th GIR report declared, “We had only ten officers and 392 enlisted men left out of 644 that landed at Nasugbu, but we left a trail of enemy dead, smashed pillboxes and captured equipment, and liberated civilians behind us.”

The unknown Angel then declared with pride, “But you should have seen the other guy.”

The 11th Airborne Angels Remember Their Fallen in the Battle for Manila - Batangas, Luzon 1945

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