A civilian engineer named Pete Miles walked into the headquarters of the 11th Airborne Division south of Manila at 11:00 on the morning of February 20, 1945. Just days earlier, he had been a prisoner of the Japanese at Los Baños, a camp holding more than 2,000 American and Allied civilians roughly 20 miles behind enemy lines. He had slipped out through the wire. Now he handed the division’s planners the one piece of intelligence no aerial photograph could provide.
Every morning without fail, the off-duty guards at Los Baños did their exercises from 7:00 until 7:30. For that half hour, their rifles were not in their hands. According to the division’s historian, Jeremy Holm, the weapons stayed in the guards’ barracks; another account says they were locked in the camp arms room. Either way, the paratroopers had their window.
They set the raid for 7:00. Miles also marked where the internees slept and where the guard posts and pillboxes stood. He placed the machine guns, including some so well camouflaged that reconnaissance photographs had missed them. Most of those guns, he said, were positioned to fire into the camp at the prisoners, not outward at anyone coming to free them.
He gave the planners a number they badly needed: how many internees would have to be carried out on stretchers. The camp sat on the grounds of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, between the slopes of Mount Makiling and the southern shore of Laguna de Bay. Nine hundred men had been sent down from the Santo Tomas camp in Manila in May 1943 to build it. It covered about 60 acres inside a double fence of barbed wire, with 26 long barracks of palm roofs and woven-mat walls.
Priests, nuns, and missionaries lived at the southwest end in a section the camp nicknamed the Holy City; everyone else lived at the northern end, known inside the wire as Hell’s Half-Acre. The first two Japanese commandants had, by the internees’ own accounts, been reasonable men. In July 1944, a third took over, Major Iwanaka, and he left the day-to-day running of the camp to his supply officer, Sadaki Konishi. Konishi cut the food.
By January 1945, the ration was below 450 calories a day, and the internees were eating weeds, flowers, and the pulp of banana trees. Father William McCarthy, one of the interned priests, summed up the situation in a single line: deaths mounted to two a day in January 1945. There had been a false dawn that month when American troops landed at Lingayen Gulf on January 9. The guards left in the night and handed the camp to the internees’ own committee.
The internees raised an American flag and sang the national anthem. A week later, the guards came back. Then a guerrilla officer reported that the Japanese had local laborers digging a trench about ten feet wide and several hundred feet long near the camp. Nobody outside knew what it was for, and the people planning a rescue feared it was meant to be a grave.
The 11th Airborne had learned of Los Baños almost by accident. Its intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Müller, was questioning a Filipino farmer who had traveled to Manila for medicine for his sick wife, and asked what route the man had taken. The farmer mentioned that he had gone past a big prison camp at the old agricultural college. Müller had never heard of it.
After that, the information came mostly from Filipinos. Guerrilla units around the lake watched the camp and reported to an American officer, Major J. Vanderpool. Women from the Hunter guerrillas, working under Lieutenant Christina Figueroa, carried notes out past Japanese checkpoints hidden in their underwear.
By February 15, the division had a map of the camp built from aerial photographs and guerrilla reports. It had nobody, however, who had stepped inside. The first to come out was a 19-year-old named Freddy Zervoulakos, Greek on one side of his family and Filipino on the other. His brother Tony was already with the Hunters.
On the night of February 12, Freddy slipped through the fence and met the guerrilla commander for the operation, Lieutenant Colonel Gustavo Inglés. He went back in with a promise that the internees would be rescued. The camp’s committee talked it over and decided the internees should do nothing and keep away from the guerrillas, afraid of what the guards would do if they found out. The committee was trying to keep people alive, and it was wrong about how some internees were already outside.
The committee’s own secretary, George Gray, had escaped earlier with two other men, Bob Schaefer and Peter Nuome, and they were staying with Inglés. On the 13th, Inglés went to look at the camp and went over the guard posts and routines with Gray. Then came the breakout that put Pete Miles in front of the planners. Published accounts do not agree on the headcount.
The military writer Christopher Mcskimmom has four men leaving on the night of the 18th: Zervoulakos, Miles, Ben Edwards, and a man named Jack Connors. Holm’s timeline says Miles and Edwards escaped together and names Connors separately as an escapee who went back in with the raiders. The trio most histories settle on is Miles, Edwards, and Zervoulakos. Counting Gray and his companions, at least seven internees were outside the wire by the end.
The guerrillas took Miles across the lake by banca, a narrow outrigger boat. Edwards did not get that far. He had been led to a small team from the division’s reconnaissance platoon, and by then he was too sick to go on, so he stayed with the soldiers while Miles went ahead alone. Mcskimmom puts Miles at headquarters on the 19th; Holm on the 20th.
They agree on what he brought. The guards were not what the planners had feared. There were somewhere between 150 and 250 of them, and even the prisoners were unsure of the number. Many were older men or soldiers getting over sickness and injuries.
The shift changed in the morning. The men coming off duty went to exercise. At about the same time, the internees would be lining up for roll call. The plan came together fast.
A company of paratroopers would drop beside the camp at 7:00. The division’s reconnaissance platoon, which the men called the Ghost Platoon, would already be hidden in the jungle with Filipino guerrillas, ready to hit the guard posts as the first parachute opened. The rest of the battalion would cross a lake in 54 Amtraks, tracked amphibious tractors, to carry the internees out. A second force would push down the highway from the west to hold off the Japanese Eighth Division, 8,000 to 10,000 men camped not far away.
The job fell to the 1st Battalion of the 511th Parachute Infantry. Its commander, Major Henry Burgess, was 26, and he said later he was shocked to learn that his battalion of about 412 men was expected to do all of it. B Company got the jump because it had the most men left: 93 on paper and nearer 80 by the reckoning of its commander, First Lieutenant John Ringler. Ringler chose to jump from four to five hundred feet, far below the usual height, so his men would spend as little time as possible hanging in the air.
On the 21st, a radio operator watching the camp with the guerrillas, Staff Sergeant John Fulton, sent an urgent message: he had reliable information that the Japanese had Los Baños scheduled for a massacre. That night, Lieutenant George Skau took the Ghost Platoon out onto the lake in three bancas. In Skau’s boat sat Pete Miles. The day after reaching safety, the escaped engineer was going back.
The crossing went badly. The biggest boat broke its rudder and had to turn back, and the boat that replaced it lay becalmed in the middle of the lake through the whole next day, with a dozen soldiers keeping low under the rails and hoping no Japanese patrol boat came near. It did not reach shore until the evening of the 22nd. Skau’s own party landed near a village called Nanhaya.
In the schoolhouse, they met the guerrilla leaders and two escaped internees, and one of them was Ben Edwards. He stood at the school blackboard and drew the camp for them. Skau split his men into teams and gave each one a group of guerrillas, and the escapees went in with them. Jack Connors joined Sergeant Cliff Town’s team.
Ben Edwards joined Sergeant Martin Squires, and Zervoulakos went with another. Skau told his men that if a sentry fired into the dark, nobody was to fire back. After a meal of field rations, they set off through the jungle and the rice paddies to their start lines. Around midnight, a night fighter reported what looked like hundreds of truck headlights moving toward Los Baños.
The division commander, Major General Joseph Swing, weighed it and let the raid go ahead without telling his commanders. Then he set off by jeep for the lake shore to see the Amtraks off. In the dark with the headlights masked, his driver, a young B Company lieutenant named Robert Baitler, stopped about three feet short of a gorge whose bridge had been blown. Baitler said many years later that he had never seen a man so angry before or since.
The general reached the beach just as the last Amtraks were pulling away. At 4:00 in the morning on the 23rd, the Amtraks slid into Laguna de Bay from a village called Mamatic and crossed in the dark by compass. Not one broke down. Just before 7:00, a Japanese sentry at the western edge of the camp fired at an animal in the bushes, possibly a hedgehog.
The guerrillas hiding in that brush took the shot to mean they had been seen. One of them jumped out and killed the sentry, and the Hunter captain, Marcelino Tan, ordered his men to open fire. Seconds later, green smoke went up on the drop zone and nine troop carrier planes came in low in three groups of three, with Ringler first out of the first plane. The only jump injury was a corporal named Francis Flanigan, who came down on the railway line and sprained his ankle.
Inside the wire, the Japanese were exactly where Miles had said they would be. The off-duty guards had just lined up for their exercises. Most of them stripped down for it, and their weapons were put away. The soldier in charge of them made one decision: he sent them back to their barracks to put their uniforms on instead of to the armory for their rifles.
Skau’s own team was still a few hundred yards from the main gate when the firing started. They ran through it carrying the platoon’s only machine gun and took the arms room, shooting guards who tried to reach it. Sergeant Terry Santos’s team knocked out three pillboxes outside the gate. Other teams cut through the wire, and guards who broke for the jungle ran into guerrillas waiting there.
Not every guard was caught unready. A handful got a defense together and killed two young guerrillas, Private First Class Atanacio Castillo and Private First Class Anelmo Solah, and the guerrillas buried them beside the college chapel. Two of the Ghost Platoon, Vincent Call and Lawrence Botkin, were hit when they first saw the parachutes. Many internees thought it was a food drop.
One woman saw soldiers at the wire, ran to fetch a pair of wire cutters, and handed them through. When B Company came in about a quarter of an hour after the first shots, the paratroopers found the banner of the Hunter’s 45th Regiment already flying over the barracks on a makeshift pole. Then the Amtraks came up the road from the beach and crashed through the main gate. The roar of their engines set off a panic, because people thought Japanese tanks were coming.
A United Press correspondent named Francis McCarthy climbed out of one and found his brother and sister alive in the camp. Getting 2,000 weak and bewildered people to leave was harder than taking the camp. Many went back to their huts for belongings, and some did not want to go at all. Lieutenant Walter Hedging noticed that people were moving away from huts that had caught fire, so he and a sergeant began setting barracks alight on purpose, and the crowd moved toward the Amtraks.
The sick, the women, and the children rode. Everyone else walked the two miles to the beach with the camp burning behind them. One of the internees who rode was three days old. Lois Kathleen McCoy had been born in the camp on February 20, delivered by a Navy nurse, Dorothy Still, and she went out of Los Baños in the liner of a soldier’s helmet.
At the beach, there were not enough Amtraks for everyone at once. About 1,500 people crossed in the first wave, leaving at around 11:00, while Burgess held the beach with his paratroopers and about 700 internees still waited. General Swing flew over in a small spotter plane, got Burgess on the radio, and suggested that once the internees were clear, the battalion might stay on the Japanese side, take the town of Los Baños, and link up with the force on the highway. Burgess switched his radio off before the suggestion could become an order.
The Amtraks came back at about 1:00. The last internees boarded first, then the gunners, then the paratroopers, as Japanese troops began firing from the high ground and the last Amtraks pulled away at three. On one of them, the gunners had a small howitzer lying across a pile of luggage, and they fired a round back at the hill. The Amtrak rocked and shipped water, and its driver pointed a pistol at them and said the next man to load it would be shot.
That evening, the internees were taken by truck and ambulance to New Bilibid Prison, which had been cleaned out and fitted with a dining hall. Soldiers handed out chocolate and pots of soup, and people went through the line again and again. One of them was Frank Buckles, who had been in Manila on business when the war began and had lost 50 pounds in the camps. He had also served in the First World War, and he would become the last surviving American veteran of it.
The Americans lost two or three men, depending on the account, all of them on the highway in the force that had kept the Japanese division busy: John Dwion and Vernal McMurry of the 188th Glider Infantry. The cost to the people of Los Baños was far higher. The guerrillas had warned the town’s people to leave before the raid. Not all of them could.
After the Americans had gone, Japanese troops came back to the town. By the usual count, they killed about 1,500 Filipino men, women, and children, helped by local collaborators called the Makapili. They burned homes in the town and the villages around it. Konishi, the supply officer who had starved the camp, later admitted that he had helped plan the killings.
The accounts split on how Konishi’s story ended. Most say he was tried by an American military tribunal and hanged in 1947. Others have him taken to Japan and hanged at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo on April 30, 1949, and Bruce Henderson’s book on the raid deals at length with the confusion over his fate. Major Iwanaka got away.
B Company received a Distinguished Unit Citation decades later, and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell called Los Baños the textbook airborne operation for all ages and all armies. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary, a historical marker went up at Baker Hall, where the camp had stood, and a foundation set up by former internees pays for students at the university’s rural high school to stay in school. Part of what they study is the raid and the killings that followed it. The three escapees are much harder to follow.
None of the histories used here says what became of Pete Miles, Ben Edwards, or Freddy Zervoulakos after the war. Frank Buckles is easier: he died on February 27, 2011, at the age of 110, four days after the anniversary of the morning he was freed. For more than 80 years, the number given for that morning has been 2,147. It came from a roster that was already several days old when the division sent it up the chain.
Since that list was made, six internees had died in the camp and one baby had been born there. Holm, working with a rescued internee named Bob Wheeler, puts the true number of people carried out of Los Baños at 2,042. The youngest of them was Lois McCoy, in her helmet liner.