Nagsubu
by Carl Memmel
This is a "tunnel vision" account of the
period from late January to mid-February of 1945 in the
In trying to put it down on paper, the total
inadequacy of words to describe the mental and physical aspects of this entire
situation became rather quickly apparent. What wasn't so evident, but was
certainly there nevertheless, was my limited ability to recall in detail all of
those things that happened more than 50 years ago.
Anyhow, to get around at least a part of this, I
cheated by going to the local library to get some dates and what very few maps
were available. Within that framework, the individual events are, I believe,
pretty much in their proper sequence, but the exact day that they may have
occurred is in question. One event happened after another, but whether they
were both on one day or one on one day and one on the next is beyond me. (It
should be noted that after this essay was started, a "History of the 11th
Airborne" became available some of my dates and events seem to tie with
that and some don't. In point of fact,
somewhere along the line, I seem to vary at least a couple of days from their
chronology. I don't know why.) Guess
what's really being said is that these are my recollections of what went on
if anybody wants to contradict, elaborate or sprinkle them with holy water,
please, be my guest.
To get started then, after three months in the ASTP,
three months basic training, three months 60MM mortar training (with the 100th
Infantry,) and fresh from jump school, I went into the weapons platoon of E-Co.,
188th. Over the next few months my world shrank from a great big place right on
down to squad level - those people were the only ones who I really knew much
about or even cared about. The rest of
the world was there, but
.
Late January, 1945
From the rest area on
The first indication that maybe everything doesn't
always go as planned came when somebody decided there might be problems with
speedboats loaded with explosives trying to ram us during the night. To take
care of this, the plan was that men with M-1 rifles should stand guard duty on
the top deck at night it was felt that carbines just wouldn't didn't have
enough range or power. So nobody would feel left out, if the relief man was
armed with a carbine, the rifles were passed on to him and the carbine went
with the retiring soldier. (We changed back later.) Under these circumstances,
I caught the 4:00 to 6:00 A.M. duty, swapped my carbine for an M-1, and
apparently did a wonderful job as there weren't even any loud noises during my
two hour stint. It was rather a shock, however, to have the sun come up, pull
back the bolt of the rifle and discover that not only was it not loaded, there
weren't any live rounds within twenty
feet. Such is life.
January 31, 1945
In mid-morning of the 31st, we were given grenades and
K rations and told to prepare to land. Off to our left, we could see a Navy
rocket launching ship just pounding the dickens out of something inland. Both
the sight and sound was rather awesome, particularly since I didn't even know
that such a vessel existed. After a little time, our own gangplanks (or
whatever they were called) were dropped and we went down into water just above
our waists.
Ahead of me was one of the light 30 caliber machine
gunners trying to keep his "baby" dry by holding it high. It
momentarily struck me that, with the barrel upright, he looked like a submarine
plowing along with its periscope up. The
beach was only about 75 feet deep and, as we went ashore, there was small arms
fire coming from somewhere off on the left flank near where the rockets seemed
to have been going. We immediately dropped our musette bags and a good part (if
not all) of the company headed towards the problem. After going about 400 yards,
we came to an old sheet metal building (sugar cane mill?) on a hill going down
to a small river or creek. The mortar was set up on the reverse side of this
rise and prepared for action. The small arms noise continued for a period and
then stopped. Shortly after that, word came down that, in addition to other
wounded, one of the machine gun squad leaders had been fatally wounded by a
sniper.
Things then remained quiet until the middle of the
afternoon when orders were received to move to a two story school or court
house about five miles away (on the other side of Nagsubu.). Upon arriving
there, it was getting quite dark so we dug slit trenches and got ready to spend
the night. This was the beginning of the infamous "two hours on, two
off" guard duty which made zombies of us all before it was over it also
reinforced the warning to make sure that your trench was long enough so that
you could completely stretch out your legs. If you didn't, absolutely
excruciating leg pains/cramps would come before morning.
February 1, 1945
About ten o'clock we began moving inland toward
Tagaytay Ridge along what was considered to be the main (only?) highway to
Aside comment the
Japanese had two types of machine guns. Size wise, one was about half-way
between our M-1 and BAR. It had a bipod, a twenty or thirty round banana
magazine, and a very high rate of fire. When in action, it's
sound was "brrrtttt, brrrttt."
Because of this, it was known as the Canary. The other rascal was a heavy
weapon that looked like a Buck Rogers ray gun mounted on a big tripod, fed with
what appeared to be a rigid belt of twenty rounds, sometimes with a telescopic
sight, and with a rather slow rate of fire- "pow,pow,pow".
Because of that characteristic, it was known as the Woodpecker.
Sometime in the early afternoon, the leading company
came under heavy fire from a rise where the road took a left turn to the west.
We all dove away from the pavement and began to dig in as quickly as possible.
After the initial commotion died down, sentries were put out to watch for any
more enemy activity in the immediate area - this involved crawling over the
embankments (all alone) and out into the "woods" about fifty feet or
so. The underbrush itself consisted of what were either huge weeds or small
trees pithy trunks maybe an inch in diameter, eight or ten feet high, big
leaves, and all a foot and a half or so apart. Except for the distant quiet sound
of your own people, it was eerily quiet, i.e., scary as the dickens; every leaf
stirring seemed to be at least an advancing enemy platoon. After about thirty
minutes, the word to return was extremely welcome the only consolation to it
all was that you hadn't been carrying that pack board for a while.
As we proceeded north, the evidence of the fire fight
was apparent a couple of torn-up musette bags, spent
brass, used first aid kits and bandages, etc. Beyond that, there were the enemy
positions. (Over their occupation years,
the Japanese had made cover and concealment into a real art form.) On the high
ground at the turn, there were a series of semi-invisible entrenchments looking
down the highway in either direction the Canaries were long gone when we went
by, but there remained a single abandoned Woodpecker which must have been just
too heavy to move in a big hurry.
In another couple of hours, we had reached the ridge,
moved off of the road sixty or eighty yards northward right to the top of Tagaytay, and begun the evening tasks of
digging in and unloading water, ammunition, and food from the battalion jeep.
There was little vegetation in this area so there were excellent fields of fire
on three sides and on the north (fifteen or twenty yards out) there was a sheer
drop-off of a couple of hundred feet. Although the night passed quietly, I was
once again jarred awake with those tremendous leg cramps and, surprisingly,
with the feeling that it was freezing cold. The former was once again caused by
either misjudgment on how long to dig the hole or on pure tiredness. Since it
was really summer there, the latter presumably was
because of the temperature change rather than the actual temperature. Having
been born and raised in
February 2, 1945
The activity for the day was patrolling. The mortar
squads remained in their dug-in positions up top to offer support where needed
and the rifle platoons went "exploring." Early in the afternoon, one
group found a path down (or around) the north side cliff and discovered a
series of large trails leading to a number of supply caves in the hills below.
Never did find out exactly what happened, but at least one of these exploded
and collapsed with a number of our people either in it and/or close by. The
rumors centered on grenades being thrown into ammunition supplies. Whether
accidentally or on purpose by our guys, or whether by Japanese suicide troops,
was never determined. Needless to say, there were losses and serious injuries
from both concussion and from flying debris. Shortly after this, a flight of four P-38
fighters appeared and began to strafe the hillsides where the trouble had
begun. It was rather a fascinating thing I'd never heard the sound of
multiple aerial machine guns being fired, and these airplanes were doing just
exactly that (and in fine fashion.) Additionally, the perspective was totally
unique in that we were on the Ridge and actually looking sideways or even down
at them as they went by.
The mood, later on, was much more subdued than it had
previously been part was due to the events of the afternoon, and part was the
tiredness that had begun to set in. Time was again spent hauling water,
supplies and ammunition and in cleaning both personal and squad weapons.
February 3, 1945
This day was not unlike the previous one. The riflemen
were out and about while the weapons people remained on the high ground. We did
have a front row seat watching as the 511th jumped about a mile away on the
other side of the road. Couldn't tell whether they were having a hard time of
it or not, although the drop itself was very impressive. Looked like there may
have been at least one "streamer", but we were not able to see if it
was an equipment chute or what.
February 4, 1945
In the morning, the whole company was crammed into two
or three trucks and taken to the village of (I think)
Aside comment - rice paddies were both a curse and a blessing. Don't
know whether they were standard or not, but these were approximately fifty feet
square with miniature dikes about eight or ten inches high surrounding the
paddy itself. The bad part was that you took twenty paces, stepped up, stepped
down, twenty more steps, up, down, etc.
In our condition, and with full loads, this was, to say the least, a
very tiring process. The beautiful part of the paddies was that it was the dry
season and the ground was literally cracked down to a depth of about ten
inches. To quickly get a nice little hole, you just snuggled up to the forward
part of a dike and easily pried out big chunks of dirt until you had what you
considered to be adequate shelter from anything with a flat trajectory. Your
entrenching tool just became a crowbar and time spent digging was wonderfully
reduced. After everything had been dug
in, six or eight of us were "volunteered" to go on a recon patrol
towards Nichols Field. (At that time, I'm not sure that I even knew where we
were, the field name, or what it was. Everything seemed to be, "go here,
go there do this, do that." Same
like the Light Brigade; ours not to reason why.)
Anyhow, by this time the heavy gear had been set up
and, with only our personal weapons, we strung out and headed across the open
ground. After moving about four or five hundred yards, we made visual contact
with Japanese soldiers still farther out.
Our patrol leader decided that this was the
information that we were supposed to secure and back we started. Suddenly,
there was the very loud sound of airplane engines. We looked up and saw a group
of
February 5, 1945
It was at this time that a water shortage started to
develop. Previously, there had been a couple of jeeps around dropping off five
gallon cans, but they suddenly were missing, apparently doing other things. A
few hundred yards away there was a carabao (Philippine water buffalo) wallow so
we wandered over to see if it was empty. It wasn't, but the one beast there
must have been as afraid of us as we were of him; he took off. The water was
just like you would expect; muddy, with bugs walking or swimming on the
surface. Put a handkerchief on the mouth of the canteen to strain out the bugs,
add halazone tablets, and
you were all set. (The Army said to use one pill per canteen, regimental medics
recommended two, and we used eight. The result was gawd-awful tasting, but when you left the canteen
out of its cover overnight, it cooled down and was sure nice and refreshing
early in the morning.)
In the afternoon, an airplane appeared over the
airfield (an A-20??) looking like it was trying to come in for a nice, normal
landing. The anti-aircraft weapons began
firing and the plane just continued to go right on down until it crashed and
exploded. This was the first time that I had seen a plane crash, and I just
couldn't believe that it happened that it wasn't going to just pull up at the
last minute and fly away.
The night was relatively quiet. Aside comment- at night, even when it was
described as "quiet", there was always sporadic rifle fire and/or
grenade noise.
February 6, 1945
This was the day that the "fun" really
began. In the early afternoon, orders came down to get all of our stuff
together and be ready to move out. With the rifle platoons leading, we headed
across the rice paddies towards woods about a mile and a half or two miles
away. As we came closer, it could be seen that the destination area was really
small trees and vegetation in a gently slopping draw.
According to the Army manuals, going through this
little valley was supposed to be the safest way to escape both detection and
small arms fire. Unfortunately, apparently the Japanese had read the same book
because as we approached the entrance, hell broke loose. There was all kinds of fire from machine guns, knee mortars, big
mortars, and probably at least two guys with slingshots.
We were pinned down "big time" right out in
the open paddies. (Thank goodness for
the dike part!!) After about twenty minutes of this, the word came to get out
as fast as we could. In all probability, there were a lot of "personal best" times
recorded for everything from the hundred yard dash to the four hundred yard
relay. It was with great relief that we made it back to our previous positions
and waited, panting, for whatever might happen at least we were in decent
individual slit trenches and ready for whatever.
February 7, 1945
The next morning, we again packed up and headed out
(in a different direction) towards Nichols Field. At what was presumed to be
the edge of the airfield, a new worry developed the enemy had managed to fix
the twin 20mm (and maybe 40mm) antiaircraft guns to fire horizontally, and fire
they did. Although I didn't see it, the story went around that the supply
sergeant was pointing at something when one of these babies started going, and
he was suddenly missing the last inch of his finger.
Another problem was aerial bombs which were armed and
buried upright in the paved and unpaved roads; don't know if the weight of a
person would set them off, but any kind of a vehicle certainly would. This was
evidenced, in the middle of the afternoon, while we were waiting to move again.
About a hundred yards from where we were laying, a jeep pulling an anti-tank
gun ran over one it was an unreal sight, nearly like the children's cartoons
these days. There was a tremendous noise, and the jeep and gun both just seemed
to float up in the air for a minute. There was a "thunk"
between the mortar gunner and me and, when we looked down there, was a large
nut apparently from one the mechanisms laying on the ground between us. It was too hot to touch at the moment, but
when it cooled down, it turned out to be one of the jeep's axles imbedded
straight down into the ground. Late in
the afternoon, I saw a fellow that I knew from one of the other companies
coming back for more ammunition; he looked absolutely beat. When I mentioned
this to one of my buddies he told me that we all looked the same way.
Just as it was getting dark, we succeeded in taking a
series of revetments used to protect aircraft from strafing attacks. These were
big earthen things built like a square with one side missing. (Like big right angle U's.) Each part was
about sixty feet long and had steeply slopping sides about twelve feet high.
Thankfully, the open part of ours was toward the back so it made an ideal fortification;
it was easy to just climb up and peek over the top and this was the way we
spent the night.
February 8, 1945
Aside comment the following incident is, depending
on you point of view, either the
Anyhow, very shortly after first light the next
morning, Mother Nature "gave me a call." The only way that I could
answer was by digging a small hole where I was and going at it. When finished,
and with my pants still down around my ankles, I stood up and happened to
glance toward the front. At that exact moment, an enemy soldier walked out of
the other side of the bunker where we had spent the night; he had been all of
ten feet from us. I reached down, picked up my carbine and pushed every button
that I could feel. The safety came off and the magazine fell out!!!
At that time, nearly everybody carried a round in the
chamber, so I was able to get off one shot. The Jap ducked back into his dugout
on the back side of the slope and, after tossing over a few grenades, some of
the riflemen crept around to see if he was still alive. He was and was promptly
taken prisoner. (Heard that he was one
of two captured by the entire division up to that point.) He was also drunk as
a skunk. The noises were his, made while sucking on a couple of canteens
originally full of saki. Immediately after being captured, this fellow
demanded to be taken to the first sergeant and even called him by name. Maybe
we should have been more cautious, too. Final note if you ever see a little,
old Japanese man with a 30 caliber chunk taken out of his nose, tell him that I
said "hello." The remaining
part of the day was spent in the same bunker, banging away at whatever could be
seen (and keeping our heads and other appendages down.)
Aside comment
surprisingly, we had plenty of some food at this time. In their infinite
wisdom, someone had decided (rightly?) that the ideal way to feed combat troops
was to make one supply run per day with single big box of a whole day's rations
for ten men (10-in-1's). These contained a K-ration per man for breakfast (with
the entrιe of a small can of "ham, eggs, and potatoes"- yuk) a lunch
K (with a nice little can of cheese and bacon) and the evening meal which
consisted of large cans of enough meat, vegetables, and fruit cocktail for ten
people. Each squad was given one box and, since we were down to five in our
group, there was more than plenty for supper. Emily Post or someone would
probably have had a heart attack seeing it, but this was "communal"
feeding nobody had anything other than a G.I. spoon (sharpened on one side to
do double duty as a knife) and a canteen cup. The bigger cans were just opened
and passed around with each of us taking a turn at the contents.
Another aside since
we're on the subject of army food, it would not be improper to mention one of
the most talked about (and universally detested) products of World War II. This
was the most infamous "beef and pork loaf." To my knowledge, this was
never voluntarily consumed by any American soldier unless he was, literally,
very close to starvation. It was double-barreled, industrial strength "yuk,yuk,yuk." In all
probability, wherever it was made is now a dog food manufacturing plant. (This
is on the presumption that the dogs didn't also reject it.) Guess what we don't
eat at my house
..
February 9, 1945
About ten in the morning, we started to move further
out into the open part of the airfield. Up with the lead group were two
self-propelled 75's. After the initial shock of seeing what could pass for
tanks, the Japanese must have licked their chops when they realized that these
were just big, lightly armored half tracks. In short order, both came under
tremendous fire from the anti-aircraft guns and within minutes were stopped and
on fire. I still remember seeing a couple of our guys leading one of their
crewmen, confused, burned, and bleeding, back towards an aid station. By the end of the day, we had advanced a
couple of hundred yards across fairly open terrain towards what we later found
out was
February 10, 1945
This day was not unlike the previous. The total
advance was about three hundred yards to a dirt road along the edge of a brushy
area. As we dug in, it was painfully apparent that if there were to be trouble,
it would come from that sector. At this
point, two man trenches were the order of the day, with one man trying to stay
awake while the other tried to sleep. Emotions were mixed hen it was your
turn, you did your best to keep away "uninvited guests", and when it
was your partner's shift, you hoped he would do the same. Lurking in the back
of your mind was the sneaky idea that, if he dozed off (because we were so
tired), maybe the fellows in the next hole wouldn't and you could possibly just
get a little extra sleep without dire consequences.
Training and experience said that, at night, you
always threw grenades; the muzzle flash of a rifle was a wonderful way to
expose yourself. In very short order though, there weren't any grenades left
and no re-supply was possible. Like it or not, it was bang, bang, bang,
particularly at the one place where it looked like line after line of Japanese
soldiers were silhouetted against the sky. Their rounded helmets were
constantly visible in a nice neat line on the horizon. When it became light,
our enemy squads turned out to be the bogey wheels of an upside-down tank and
we had done our part for the ammunition makers of
February 11, 1945
After the previous night, it was a relief to be able
to just sit in a fox hole and semi-doze off. Everything was awfully quiet and,
from where we were, we could see a water tower at what someone said was our
known destination of
Although not well kept, the area wasn't overgrown
either - there were regular headstones and quite a number of mausoleums that
were easily visible in the shade from the big trees. On the other side of this,
there was another one of those "big weeds/little trees" patches and,
after getting through without problems, here we plunked down to find out what
to do next. For some weird and unknown reason, one of the BAR men decided that
he should now have a look into one of the mausoleums. As he went in, he found
that there were four or five Japanese soldiers who were there ahead of him he
fired a quick burst and turned to make a hasty exit. By doing so, he exposed
one of his most vulnerable areas, namely his backside, and he promptly received
a bayonet in the fanny. (Aside this guy was a real comedian. I would have
loved to hear him telling everybody in his home town how he got the Purple
Heart and possibly even trying to show them the scar.)
For about twenty minutes, there was the most wicked
fire fight that you could imagine; everything that could make any kind of noise
was going full blast. Our people were running around all over the cemetery, and
theirs were, literally, coming out of the graves. When it was over, it was my
understanding that we had three or four wounded and that forty-three enemy
bodies were counted. Late in the
afternoon, a new group moved in and we fell back to the previous night's
position. It was a pretty anti-climatic
night after the afternoon's activity.
February 12, 1945 to February 16, 1945
Today, trucks took us to the town of
Stacked up outside of the church was a large number of
weapons and web equipment. In view of recent events, I selected the nicest M-1
that I could find, together with a rifle belt and a few bandoleers of ball
ammo, and bid my carbine farewell. (Think it found a good home with a Filipino
scout who had been assigned to us.) In
relays, jeeps would take four of us out to maintain roadblocks on the small
bridges in the area. These were over the
little creeks and lagoons around
Aside- somehow or other, I had gotten an old Colt
Model 1917 revolver. It had either had thousands of rounds put through it or
someone had spent years snapping blanks. The result was that the cylinder would
properly align with the firing pin and the gun would fire on only about every
third pull of the trigger. Nevertheless, this relic was my pride and joy. We
were sitting at "our" bridge one morning when one of the guys picked
it up and began pulling the trigger two of us went into a state of shock,
literally trying to speak but unable to do. After the third pull, the gun fired
and we got an amazed comment on the fact that it had been loaded. The other
three of us very impolitely informed the culprit that this was a combat zone
and that most, if not all, weapons were loaded and then followed with pertinent
remarks regarding both his mental ability and his ancestry.
As you can infer, after the previous couple of weeks,
we now felt that our current circumstances were nearly like a rest camp. There
were still the 10-in-1 rations and there was plenty of water for both drinking
and washing and it was "four hours on, eight off." The time to just
relax, look around and do nothing was a great.
After a day or so of this, a small group of us began going down to the
Bay to try to improve our skills (and show off) by taking our rifles and
"plinking" at whatever we could find that would float. It was here, on the morning of the 16th, that
we were given a ring-side seat for the jump on
About the Author: Carl served in E-188th Para Glider Infantry Regt.
in 1944-46, he retired from General Electric Co. and currently
lives in