The raid on Los Baños

On 23 February 1945, a few minutes before seven in the morning, nine C-47 transport aircraft appeared over the shore of Laguna de Bay on Luzon. At 7 a.m. B Company of the 1st Battalion, 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, of the US 11th Airborne Division jumped from them. At the same moment the division’s reconnaissance men and Filipino guerrillas, who had been lying hidden around the perimeter fence for two nights, attacked the Japanese guard posts, while a column of several dozen tracked amphibious vehicles approached from the lake. The objective was an internment camp set up by the Japanese in the grounds of the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, some 30 kilometres behind Japanese lines.

After a quarter of an hour or so of fighting the guards had been killed or scattered, and by evening all the prisoners were on the American side of the lake. According to figures cited in the standard accounts and monographs of the operation, 2,147 people were freed (some studies give 2,146). Although they are sometimes described as military and civilian prisoners, almost all were civilians – interned citizens of Allied countries, the vast majority of them Americans – and there were few service personnel among them, including eleven US Navy nurses. The raid on Los Baños is regarded as one of the best-executed rescue operations of the Second World War. A few days later, however, the inhabitants of the surrounding towns paid for it – in a Japanese reprisal in which, by the most commonly cited estimates, some 1,500 Filipinos were killed.

The camp by the lake

The Japanese, who had occupied the Philippines at the turn of 1941 and 1942 in the Philippines campaign, locked up the civilian citizens of enemy states living there in internment camps. The largest was set up in the grounds of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. When it became overcrowded, 800 men were taken in May 1943 to Los Baños in Laguna province to build a new camp. In the following months further transports arrived, including women and children. The camp, a complex of bamboo and thatch barracks surrounded by barbed wire, lay between the foot of Mount Makiling and the shore of Laguna de Bay, the largest lake in the Philippines.

The internees included Americans, Britons, Australians, Canadians, Dutch and Norwegians, as well as a few Poles and Italians – businessmen, engineers, teachers and bankers with their families. Clergy and members of religious orders formed a separate group: in September 1944 the Apostolic Delegate to the Philippines, Guglielmo Piani, using extraordinary powers granted by Pius XII, erected a separate prelature for the more than three hundred missionaries and nuns held in the camp. The internees elected their own committee to represent them before the camp command.

In the prisoners’ accounts the first Japanese commandants were considered relatively correct. In the summer of 1944 command passed to Major Iwanaka, while real power in the camp was taken over by his deputy, Sadaaki Konishi (described in the sources as a warrant officer or a lieutenant), remembered by the internees as particularly cruel. The food rations, meagre as they were, were steadily reduced; by early 1945 people were dying of exhaustion and disease, and hunger was the main subject of the camp diaries.

A race against time

When the Americans landed in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon in January 1945, the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur began to fear for the fate of the several thousand prisoners of war and internees held on the island. The warning was the Palawan massacre, where in December 1944 Japanese guards had murdered American prisoners on hearing of an approaching convoy. On the night of 30/31 January Rangers, Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas freed about 520 prisoners from the camp near Cabanatuan, in the days of the landings at Zambales and Nasugbu, and on 3 and 4 February, at the start of the battle for Manila, the spearheads of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 37th Infantry Division reached the internees at Santo Tomas and in Bilibid Prison.

The camp at Los Baños remained out of reach. Major General Joseph Swing’s 11th Airborne Division, which had landed near Nasugbu on 31 January as part of Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army, and on 3 February had dropped the 511th Regiment onto Tagaytay Ridge, was given the task of rescuing the internees that very day. For the next two weeks, however, the division was tied down in heavy fighting in the southern suburbs of Manila – for the fortified Genko Line, Nichols Field and Fort McKinley. Swing’s staff, led by his intelligence chief, Colonel Henry Muller, worked out a plan in the meantime, and on 18 February Major Henry Burgess’s 1st Battalion, 511th Regiment, earmarked for the operation, was withdrawn from the front.

The key intelligence came from the Filipino guerrillas. The units active in the area – the Hunters ROTC, originally made up of cadets of the Philippine Military Academy and students, Marking’s Guerrillas, President Quezon’s Own Guerrillas, the Chinese-Filipino 48th Squadron and units of the Hukbalahap – were placed for the operation under the coordination of the American Major Jay D. Vanderpool, while Lieutenant Colonel Gustavo Inglés of the Hunters ROTC acted as liaison officer at divisional headquarters. The guerrillas had been watching the life of the camp for months. On 12 February 19-year-old Freddy Zervoulakos slipped out of it, and a week later so did the engineer Pete Miles, who gave the planners the exact daily routine of the guards and the layout of the guard posts and barracks. One piece of information proved decisive: every day at about seven in the morning most of the Japanese garrison went out for morning exercises – without their weapons and equipment, which were left in the racks.

A plan in four parts

On this basis a plan was drawn up combining four elements. The division’s provisional reconnaissance platoon under Lieutenant George Skau was to cross the lake by night in fishing boats, link up with the guerrillas, mark the drop zone and the landing beach with smoke and, at 7 a.m. – together with Lieutenant Colonel Inglés’s 45th Hunters ROTC Regiment – attack the guard posts. At the same time Lieutenant John Ringler’s B Company, reinforced by a platoon of heavy machine guns, was to jump. The rest of Burgess’s battalion was to cross the lake in 54 LVT(4) amphibious tractors, known as amtracs, of the 672nd Amphibian Tractor Battalion and land near San Antonio, about three kilometres from the camp. The fourth element was Colonel Robert Soule’s force – the 188th Glider Infantry Regiment with tank destroyer and artillery support – which was to attack along Highway 1 across the San Juan River and block the way to the Japanese 8th Division, whose units were stationed in the area. Other guerrilla groups were to block the roads at Calauan, Bay and Pila and around Calamba.

Seven in the morning

On the evening of 21 February Skau’s platoon – 31 men – set off from the western shore of the lake in three banca boats, slipped past Japanese patrols and landed near the village of Nanhaya. In the local school the escapee Benjamin Edwards drew a plan of the camp on the blackboard; the reconnaissance men were split into six groups, each reinforced with guerrillas. On the night of 22/23 February the groups made their way through jungle and rice paddies to their start positions. At 4 a.m. Burgess’s battalion boarded the amphibians at Mamatid and set off across the lake, while Ringler’s company, which had spent the night at Nichols Field, boarded the aircraft of the 65th Troop Carrier Squadron.

Everything went to schedule. At 6.58 a.m. the reconnaissance men and Marking’s guerrillas lit green smoke candles on the beach near San Antonio to show the amphibians where to land. At 7 a.m., as the aircraft appeared over the camp and the first parachutes opened at about 150 metres, Skau’s groups and the Hunters ROTC guerrillas opened fire on the sentries and the exercising soldiers. The paratroopers assembled in a field next to the camp and a quarter of an hour or so later entered it through gaps cut in the fence. The fight was short and chaotic; some of the guards were killed, others fled towards the hills. Soon Burgess’s amphibians arrived, having destroyed a bunker on the way and rammed the gate.

Japanese losses are given very differently. Most often more than two hundred soldiers and camp personnel are said to have been killed, but some studies give much lower figures, in the dozens; the question cannot be settled today. Both the commandant, Iwanaka, and Konishi escaped.

The evacuation

The hardest part proved to be getting more than two thousand people weakened by hunger out of the camp before Japanese reinforcements arrived. Some of the internees, surprised and dazed, began to gather up their belongings, and some did not want to leave the barracks. The soldiers then set fire to the buildings to speed up the departure. The sick, the women and the children were loaded onto the amphibians first, while the fitter internees set off on foot for the beach. Among those rescued were three-day-old Lois Kathleen McCoy and Frank Buckles, a First World War veteran interned as a civilian in Manila, who died in 2011 as the last surviving American veteran of that war. The amphibians made two trips across the lake to Mamatid; the last of them left at about 3 p.m. From there the internees were taken by lorry to New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa, where they received medical care and food.

Meanwhile Soule’s force was fighting on Highway 1. In the morning it crossed the San Juan River and ran into resistance in the Lechería hills, where it suffered casualties. When Soule saw that the amphibians were already turning back from the beach towards Mamatid, he pulled his troops back across the river. Holding Los Baños was out of the question: the camp lay deep in territory where – according to American estimates – thousands of soldiers of the Japanese 8th Division were nearby, and the 11th Division was still fighting outside Manila.

The losses of those taking part were small. According to one tally, two soldiers of the 188th Regiment (near Lechería) and two young Hunters ROTC guerrillas were killed, and two reconnaissance men and four guerrillas were wounded; some sources give three Americans killed. According to most accounts, none of the internees died during the operation.

Reprisals against the population

The Filipinos paid the price for the internees’ freedom. A few days after the raid a strong Japanese force returned to the empty camp, accompanied, according to accounts, by Konishi. Finding the prisoners gone, the Japanese turned on the inhabitants of Los Baños and the surrounding villages, accusing them of collaborating with the guerrillas and the Americans. Supported by members of the pro-Japanese Makapili militia, they murdered men, women and children and burned houses. The guerrillas had warned the population to leave the town beforehand, but many residents stayed. The death toll is an estimate; the literature most often cites about 1,500 killed. The reprisals at Los Baños were part of a wave of Japanese atrocities against the population of Luzon in February 1945, the most tragic expression of which was the Manila massacre, going on at the same time.

Konishi was tracked down after the war. An American military tribunal in the Philippines sentenced him to death for starving the prisoners at Los Baños and for the killing of civilians; according to some sources he also admitted complicity in planning the reprisal. He was hanged – 1947 is usually given, although according to some accounts, based among others on Bruce Henderson’s monograph, he was executed in 1949 in Japan. Major Iwanaka was never held to account for his actions.

Cabanatuan and Los Baños

The raid on Los Baños is sometimes compared with the operation at Cabanatuan three weeks earlier. In both cases success was decided by intelligence supplied by the Filipino guerrillas, surprise and speed, and the attackers’ losses were minimal. The differences, however, were clear. At Cabanatuan the Rangers reached the camp on foot and led out about 520 prisoners of war, mostly survivors of the Bataan Death March. At Los Baños the group was four times larger and made up mainly of civilians, including old people and children, and the operation combined a parachute drop, an amphibious crossing of a lake, guerrilla action and a diversionary attack on land. It required several American and guerrilla units to be coordinated to the minute; this is why the operation is sometimes studied as a model case in the training of American airborne and special forces.

As writers on the operation often stress, its publicity in the United States was overshadowed by other events of the same day – among them the raising of the flag on Suribachi on Iwo Jima. In the decades that followed the raid was somewhat forgotten in the United States, but it was remembered in the Philippines, where the part played by the guerrillas is emphasised, and veterans of the 11th Airborne Division marked its anniversary every year.

Place in the war

The liberation of the Los Baños internees closed a series of rescue operations on Luzon, carried out for fear that the Japanese, facing defeat, would massacre their prisoners. Together with Cabanatuan, Santo Tomas and Bilibid, it saved several thousand people worn down by years of captivity. For the 11th Airborne Division it was an episode in the fighting south of Manila; after Los Baños its units returned to the battle for the capital and then to clearing the Japanese out of Batangas and Laguna provinces. Meanwhile the Battle of Manila went on, ending only on 3 March, as did the fighting for Corregidor, where – after the airborne landing on Corregidor – the island was declared secured a few days after the raid. The Battle of Luzon itself continued: in the mountains of northern Luzon the troops of General Tomoyuki Yamashita laid down their arms only after Japan’s surrender in September 1945.