The Raid on Los Baños

By Jmar Gambol

February 23, 2020, marks the 75th anniversary of one of the greatest achievements of World War II. No, not that one.

By 1945, 2,162 American or Allied civilians—businessmen, emigres, missionaries, clergy, teachers, entertainers, wives and children of servicemen—stuck in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan, had been interned at the College of Los Baños for two years, in a camp built on the athletic fields next to Baker Memorial Hall. Now that the Americans had returned and Manila was under siege, rumors were the camp might be liquidated, as had happened to other POW and civilian camps elsewhere in Japan’s collapsing empire.

Three internees, Americans Peter Miles and Ben Edwards and Greek-Filipino Freddy Zervoulakos, escaped and contacted young Col. Gustavo Ingles of the Hunters ROTC guerrillas to tell them the long-planned rescue had to happen, now.

Ingles was already in touch with the provisional recon platoon of the 11th Airborne Division, currently fighting mostly solo on the southern front of the Battle of Manila, who had been tasked by MacArthur with any rescue of Los Baños. Miles was sent to 11th Airborne headquarters, at the Adolfo Garcia mansion in San Dionisio, Parañaque, where he met with 11th staff officers Henry Muller and Douglas Quandt. The rescue was go.

The plan was to send a company of paratroopers to jump on the camp and collect the prisoners. The recon, or “ghost”, platoon and guerrillas would attack the perimeter and kill the guards. A battalion of paratroopers would ride in on amtracs and extract the prisoners and raiders overland to a large diversionary force sent nearby.

It made sense that the jump company be organic to whatever battalion was used. “Which company still has enough men to do this?”

“B Company of the 511th.” With 94 men out of an original 150. Currently fighting for Fort McKinley, future Fort Bonifacio.

They pulled B Co off the line, along with the rest of the 1st Battalion of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The paratroopers had no idea what for. When they were told, at recently recaptured and empty New Bilibid prison where they were assembled, not a few among them thought “suicide mission.”

But their new CO, Lt. John Ringler, told them, “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done. It might be the most important thing you will ever do."

So it began. February 21, the recon platoon under Lt. George Skau joined Ingles and under cover of night crossed Laguna de Bay by banca to the barrio of Nanhaya, where they met the local Hunters led by future AFP chief of staff Col. Romeo Espino. The boats were becalmed halfway in; Japanese patrols nearly discovered them. But they got through.

February 22, B Company left New Bilibid for Nichols Field, the future Manila international airport, retaken by the 11th only days before as one of its major objectives in the battle for Manila. There B Company got their parachutes and, surrounded by hastily patched shell craters and smoking rubble, went to sleep under the wings of the C-47s sent to ferry them to their task.

That same night the rest of the 1st Battalion proceeded to the barrio of Mamatid by the shore of Laguna de Bay, where the 672nd Amphibious Tractor Battalion was waiting. This was their staging area.

Meanwhile, a diversionary force led by the 188th Glider Infantry Regiment went noisily down the highway from Manila to Calamba, to draw the attention of local Japanese forces and wait for the extraction.

At midnight of the 22nd, Skau sent his recon “ghosts” and the Hunters to their positions: the landing beach at the barrio of San Antonio, the drop zone on what is now the International Rice Research Institute, and various posts along the perimeter of the camp itself.

They would open fire at the sight of B Company’s canopies.

5 AM on February 23, and B Company boards the planes of the 75th Carrier Squadron. 5 AM, and the 1st Battalion sets off on the amtracs across the southern narrows of Laguna de Bay.

6 AM, and it’s wheels up at Nichols, as the C-47s collect themselves into a V of Vs, circle over the smoldering city, and head south towards misty Mount Makiling.

A dog barks at Los Banos. A gunshot rings out. The ghosts and guerrillas hunker down. Were they given away?

No. The guards on duty remain where they are. The rest of the garrison is collecting on an exercise field, in just their fundoshi and hachimaki. The internees are beginning to get up for another hungry, fearful day. It hasn’t been good in the camp since the American invasion. Their captors are nervous and quick to punish. The rations have been cut too deeply. People are starving, and there are rumors about an open pit or a march into the hinterland. American forces are in Manila, just thirty miles away; but will they be too late?

At the drop zone the ghost team hears the planes. At 0650 they set off their smoke markers. Hukbalahap, Communist insurgents who usually hated the Americans as much as or more than the Japanese, have agreed to help this raid. They throw their own markers. The columns of smoke rise to the lightening sky.

The planes descend. They sweep over the volcanic promontory of Mayondon Point and the perfectly circular maar called Alligator Lake, cross the hot springs and hotels of Los Baños itself, and home in on the smoke rising just beyond the college grounds. Makiling’s shrouded summit is already in daylight.

At 0700, B Company jumps.

At San Antonio, the rest of the battalion roars onto the beach.

At the camp the ghosts and guerrillas see the canopies of the jumpers unfurl and catch the sunrise. They break cover and open fire. The guards on duty are taken by surprise. They are cut down by weapons fire or the machetes of the Hunters.

B Company hits the drop zone. They break up instantly into their three platoons, one to the north end of the camp, one to the south end, one to the main gate. Reinforcing them is the weapons platoon of battalion headquarters. They catch the unarmed garrison at exercises and slaughter them. The other guards at the camp flee toward Makiling, the Hunters at their heels. B Company cuts the double barbwire fences and penetrates the Los Baños internment camp.

They are met by dazed, happy folk. “Are you Marines?"

They have a hard time assembling the people they’re supposed to rescue. It seems the civilians think they’re all staying now they’re saved. They are not. There is at least a battalion of Japanese at the quarry on the Dampalit river, and 8,000 more nearby, being distracted by the 188th at Calamba.

The amtracs arrive half an hour into the rescue, crushing the main gate under the lead trac’s enormous treads. The internees think they’re tanks. It’s chaos. Getting together, the leaders of the various raider units decide to light a fire under the proceedings, literally.

They set fire to the barracks.

That gets the civilians moving. One suitcase, they are told, and some cooperate. Families assemble. Single girls pretty themselves up for the paratroopers, who look huge compared to their starving boyfriends. (By today’s standards they’re skinny kids.) Conventfuls of nuns keep order, habits fluttering.

The camp nurses, commissioned officers and heroes of Bataan and Corregidor, collect the sick from the camp hospital. They are loaded first onto the amtracs, and then the frail and elderly. Anyone who can walk, has to.

The battalion commander, 26-year-old Maj. Henry Burgess, gets a radio call from the 11th’s commander, General Joseph Swing, buzzing around in a small liasion plane. Instead of withdrawing and joining up with the 188th, the proud gung-ho general suggests, could Burgess’s men stay and hold the town?

Burgess calculates. Four hundred men, eight thousand enemy, thirty miles behind enemy lines with no resupply. He hangs up, pretending the radio conked out.

The plans change. Forget the overland link-up. They are getting everybody out across the water. The amtracs will have to take two trips. They bring the sick and frail first, the rest waiting with B Company and the ghost platoon at the beach.

Sporadic, isolated enemy fire begins to approach.

The amtracs return. The hostile fire is getting close, and loud. The last of the internees load up, followed by the paratroopers. As they steam off over the lake, enemy fire finally finds them, plinking off the armor of the last amtracs. Return fire scalds an infant, days old.

On the journey back the jumpers of B Company are hushed. Tired? Probably. Sad? No. Triumphant? Not exactly. Only two rescuers died, guerrillas with the Hunters. One B Co man had a twisted ankle from the jump. Other minor injuries. Escapee Ben Edwards got shrapnel from a grenade blast; he had joined the ghosts and guerrillas on the perimeter assault. But these were limited casualties compared to the complexity of the operation and its near flawless execution. All the people they were commanded to save, were saved. It was humbling. Maybe that was why they were quiet.

The troopers arrive at the assembly area, back at New Bilibid, late in the afternoon of February 23, a few soaking wet from a truck that slipped into the water. They are tired, dirty, hungry and sleep-deprived. They march wearily through the entrance gates into the evening yard.

The rescued of Los Baños are there to greet them.

“Hooray for our angels!”

The insignia of the 11th Airborne was the number 11 in white, on a red spot in a blue shield, the spot surround by a white winged circle. A halo. The Angels, they were called. Not the All-Americans, the Screaming Eagles, the Golden Talons; the Angels. Coming up in training they’d earned themselves a reputation for brashness and troublemaking; when confronted with some infraction or another, General Swing would say, “All my boys are angels!” despite obvious evidence to the contrary. No soldier wanted to be called an angel.

That day, to those people, they were.

That night, the rescuers and rescued of Los Baños rest and relax at New Bilibid, the empty new prison south of Manila. It’s another jail, but the doors are open, and there’s food for all. B Company and the rest of the battalion return to combat the next morning.

A week or so later, the war brings them back to Los Baños, to find that the Japanese, in reprisal for the raid, have massacred hundreds around the lakeshore. The reprisals were led by the camp’s hated second-in-command, who had eluded the ghosts and Hunters and even the diwata who dwells upon Makiling. Months later, after Japan surrendered, he was found working as a gardener at the Wack-Wack golf course and country club in Greenhills, Mandaluyong. He was arrested, tried for war crimes, and eventually executed, in Japan.

The 11th Airborne would go on to the province of Batangas, where they would end Japanese resistance in southwest Luzon at the battles of Mount Macolod and Mount Malepunyo.

Their last mission in the Philippines would be a jump on Aparri, to head off any escape by General Yamashita’s forces across the Luzon Strait. They end the war in Japan itself, securing Atsugi airfield and Yokohama before taking up occupation duty in Hokkaido.

The raid on Los Baños was one of the most successful rescue missions of the war and called “the textbook airborne operation of all ages and armies” by Colin Powell. But it has always been overshadowed by an event that occurred thousands of miles away. The same day B Company jumped on Los Baños and were mistaken for Marines, the Marines were raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

The raid on Los Baños never got an unforgettable front page photo. There is the carillon on the grounds of UPLB’s Freedom Park where the camp once stood. A plaque remembering the 11th Airborne at the base of the Aquino statue in Tagaytay’s rotonda. Otherwise, little remains. But in the lives of those rescued—and their children, grandchildren, inheritors, and legacies—can be found the enduring monuments to the Angels’ daring raid.

The Raid on Los Baños

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