Author's Note: This is the unit I've been writing about in my fiction novel, and, due to the location of their battles, a unit to whom I probably may owe my physical existence, or at the very least, that of my parents, who were children at the time.

This is a draft, which I hope to send to a newspaper publisher friend of my family, and I think it might be a bit wordy; I may have used too much quoting from my primary sources. Also, my structure, intending to focus on 3 troopers, failed a bit due to the lack of written documentation about one of them. Would appreciate constructive criticism. --J



Calling All Angels: the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 11th Airborne in the Philippines

By jtag


The 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment was formed on January 5, 1943, at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. Its commander, Colonel Orin T. Haugen, known by his troops as "Hard Rock", wanted an even higher standard in his regiment than that already established by the all-volunteer Airborne, instituting a second, more detailed screening process, with every prospective volunteer being personally interviewed, and no one with an IQ lower than 100 accepted. Among those accepted were Deane Marks, an observant, methodical young man from St. Paul, Minnesota; Charles Sass, a sharp, thoughtful boy from New York; and Robert Sprague Beightler Jr., a West Point graduate from a military family, whose father was leading the 32nd Infantry in New Guinea and who became a platoon officer in the 511th's Company B.

Becoming paratroopers

The home of the airborne equivalent of "basic training" since the U.S. military started the airborne program, Camp Toccoa had played host to a series of parachute infantry regiments, all of which were pushed to prove themselves by daily runs up and down the camp's dominant feature, the rocky hill called Mount Currahee. The 511th continued this practice, running through the Georgia winter literally in the footsteps of the other regiments who had preceded them upon the mountain called "stands alone".

Training was unforgiving. Charlie Sass recalled as an instructor demonstrated how to arm a mine, first pulling one ring, arming it, and then explaining that pulling the second ring meant "blowing your f----ng head off."

"He 'accidentally' pulled that second ring. 'Incoming!  Take cover!' Pandemonium. The stands cleared. Many of us who went through basic infantry training will recall similar first hand experiences.  This one was staged with a deactivated personnel mine. A dummy.  There was smoke, jittery laughter, little reasoning or learning. In another camp, thirty men died. The mine was live. The instructor was the dummy."

The risks had to be taken. By 1943, the United States was engaging both major Axis powers, Germany and Japan, across two oceans, not just with air and sea power, but with fighting men, against the two powers whose armies had been battle-trained for years.

"Imagine going into combat with high spirits and eight weeks of training under playground rules—against armies with five to ten years of bloody experience, dug deep in their home turf," wrote Sass.

From Toccoa the 511th moved to Camp Mackall for basic training and then Fort Benning for their specialized airborne training and qualification jumps. At Benning they earned their coveted "wings", the parachutist's badge, and were united into the latest of the U.S. Army's airborne divisions, the 11th Airborne, nicknamed the Angels, under Major General Joseph M. Swing.

But the continued existence of any airborne division was in question. Due to the difficulties encountered by the 82nd Airborne in North Africa and Sicily, there was sentiment among many in the top brass that division-sized airborne operations did not work. To counter this argument, Swing devised a massive exercise to prove the worthiness of the airborne division as a unit. From December 6-11, the 11th Airborne, augmented by the 501st PIR and the 874th Airborne Engineers, staged a complex series of maneuvers designed to seize four airports centered around Knollwood, North Carolina, held by a regimental combat team from the 17th Airborne and a battalion from the 541st PIR. Before an audience including U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of the Army Ground Forces Lt. General Lesley M. McNair, the 511th, along with its fellow regiments in the 11th, the 187th and 188th glider infantry, and the other units, took off from multiple airstrips in North Carolina, flew over the Atlantic for three to four hours, deployed by chute and glider onto the objectives, and with only air supply drops, took and held the objectives. The success of the Knollwood Maneuvers convinced McNair, a proponent of disbanding the airborne divisions, to change his mind.

In January 1944 the 511th at Camp Polk in Louisiana underwent basic glider infantry training, according to General Swing's conviction that all his troops be both parachute- and glider-proficient. After further training and personnel evaluations, the 511th traveled by train to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, California, to prepare for shipping out to the Pacific.

The 511th passed through the Golden Gate in May, 1944, on the SS Sea Pike, their trousers unbloused to disguise their identity as a paratrooper unit. The Sea Pike sailed a solitary course far from land or any other ship for 28 days, zigzagging to throw off Japanese submarines, running blacked-out at night except for faint red lights, avoiding all other contact, until arriving at Oro Bay, New Guinea, in late May. There they trained in jungle combat and acclimatized to tropical warfare as part of the strategic reserve being assembled by General Douglas MacArthur for the liberation of the Allied nation from which he had fled in 1942—the American commonwealth of the Philippines.

Leyte

The 511th landed at Bito Beach on the island of Leyte on November 18, 1944, and spent three days there waiting for orders before being trucked inland to the town of Burauen, commanding three airstrips in the high, mountainous interior. There they were tasked with securing the eastern exits from the mountains to the populous Leyte Valley, cutting off the Japanese supply lines from the city of Ormoc in the west, and clearing out the mountains themselves of the Japanese. They set off into the war accompanied by a driving typhoon.

For a month they fought a twilight war through the rain forest, seldom in groupings larger than company level, sometimes splintered down to subsquads of six men. Swing boasted that his men would play "the Japs' game" better than the enemy did themselves. In this land of towering hardwoods, tangled vines, isolatedf farmsteads, narrow trails, rushing rivers, steep gorges, and endless, torrential rain, the paratroopers of the 511th dueled with the Japanese in a war of ambushes, sneak attacks, suicide charges and siege tactics. Locations and dates were impossible to ascertain. Days and nights passed one after the other, all alike, all rain and mud, green forest and red blood. Supply drops were few and random; one precarious drop killed the best friend of HQ-3/511th mortar man Rod Serling. Malaria was always a threat. Dysentery was a matter of course. The soles of their jumpboots pulled away from the soggy leather. They were never dry. At night, the damp chilled them to the bone despite the muggy climate.

Years later, Deane Marks of St. Paul would write of Leyte: "Up and down the mountain trails we went. Wet to the bone and being ambushed just about daily. Bumbling into the Nips here and there. As we hiked along the trails, we noted many dead Japanese and also some Filipinos. We passed a Filipino farmer laying along the trail, with a couple of half dead chickens tied to him. Laying next to the farmer was a basket full of the largest bananas. This was a case of someone being in the wrong place when the Nips went by; or perhaps he was a mortar victim."

They suffered substantial casualties. On November 27, C-511th along with elements of Regimental HQ including Colonel Haugen, were ambushed in a blind draw outside the village of Lubi, costing more than thirty casualties. Marks, a machine gunner with the headquarters company of the 511th's second battalion, recalled the scene, as HQ-2 came to Charlie Company's aid:

"It was still daylight, but raining as we moved along. To keep my old M-1 rifle dry, I slung it upside down with a condom over the muzzle. We were relatively dry, our feet were dry, but we stunk, mainly from sweat and mosquito repellent. The trail was heading up a slight grade, that was muddy and slippery, but the smokers kept puffing away. Some of the guys were eating jungle tropical chocolate bars from 'jungle rations', issued the day before. It was still raining. We had no idea of where we were going. Someone mentioned Ormoc, wherever that was. Now, we heard that somewhere ahead, part of C-511th was surrounded by the Nips. We didn’t have any idea of what the hell was going on.

"After a day or two of walking, sleeping along the trail at night, we arrive to where C-511th had been. Now, I see my first dead man. I didn’t know who he was. All I heard was that, he was a C-511th trooper, just laying along the trail face down in a crawling position. One pant leg had come out of his boot and his calf was laid open. Probably from a mortar shell.

"Now, I realize what was going on. It was real, real real. Somehow, the mud seemed wetter, the rain colder and the stomach emptier."

In mid-December, battles east and west of the township of Mahonag for the Japanese supply line resulted in dozens more killed or wounded. Ormoc City's Japanese defense had fallen to the 7th Infantry to the west and the retreating Japanese ran directly into the 511th coming down from Leyte's mountains. The ensuing battles climaxed in a charge by D-511th up towards a Japanese position atop a hill, even as the 187th was told to pass through the 511th for the honor of being the first of the 11th Airborne to pass into th Ormoc Valley.

The 511th finally emerged from their mountain campaign on Christmas Day, 1944, haggard, filthy, ill, and transformed by what they had endured in the rain-drenched highlands of Leyte. "I’ll never forget the agony caused by the rain, mud and terrain of the Mahonag trail," wrote Marks, "and the troopers who gave their lives, to an enemy suffering just as much as we were."

They returned to Bito Beach to rest, recuperate, and absorb some scant replacements, for a month. At this time, 1st Lieutenant Robert Beightler, who had led B-511th's First Platoon across the fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains of Leyte, was separated from his platoon via promotion, becoming battalion S-2. He had not yet run into his father, who was marshalling the 32nd Infantry, as part of Lt. General Walter Krueger's Sixth Army, for the invasion of Luzon. But father and son would soon be within miles of each other in Manila.

Luzon and the Battle of Manila

On January 27th, 1945, the 511th, in a convoy of 20 Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) ships, set off for the island of Mindoro, just off the southern chin of Luzon, recently taken from the Japanese. Upon landing they marched directly to San Jose airstrip, where they rested for the night as C-47s assembled outside and chute-packers readied their gear.

In the dark tropical dawn of February 3, 1945, the 511th picked up their parachutes from the tarmac of the airfield, boarded the C-47s, and set off for the short flight northeast, towards Tagaytay, a cool, evergreen-forested ancient volcanic ridge, overlooking the slate-gray waters of volcanic Lake Taal, dominating the southern edge of the plain upon which Manila was built.

Deane Marks described the flight. "We were over the ocean almost instantly. It was very hard to determine our altitude, with it being just dawn and over water, but I judged 1200 to 1500 feet, no more. The planes formed up in a 'V' of V's. It was daylight soon. You could glance out 150 feet or so and see the other planes in formation during the trip. The flight was short, very short, maybe 45 minutes to one hour.

"We were now over the southern tip of Luzon and time had now run out for us. The fancy boots and wings toted on furloughs and weekend passes didn't mean much now. Was it all worth it? Someone had to do it."

He added, "Going to Luzon was just one more step closer to home."

They jumped at a thousand feet. Marks had been staring at the two red lights on the side of the plane, one, red, announcing the imminence of the drop zone, the other, green, the signla to jump. The red light came on as they neared Tagaytay and the paratroopers stood and hooked their static lines to the plane, hearts pounding.

"A split second before the green light went on I signaled 'Go!'," related Marks. His buddy "Dub Westbrook halfway turned around and said, 'Well Harpo, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into.' Before I could laugh, the green light went on. We all started yelling, 'Let's go!' and shuffled towards the door with our left hand pushing the hook of our static lines as we went. It couldn't have been more than three, maybe four seconds and I made a turn to the right and took that long step out of the door."

They met no resistance at Tagaytay, and despite the misdrop of half the regiment a few miles east of the designated DZ at one of the scenic ridge's abandoned resorts, assembled quickly and proceeded down the well-farmed slopes to rendezvous with the rest of the 11th Airborne, which had landed amphibiously along the spectacular capes of Nasugbu to the west.

Climbing aboard the deuce-and-a-half trucks fresh from the landings, the 511th and the rest of the 11th Airborne proceeded north along Highway 17 along the southern shore of Manila Bay. They were met by jubilant crowds along the way through the farmlands of Laguna province and into the old Revolutionary heartland of Cavite.

At Cavite, however, they ran into the first Japanese resistance. A garrison in the ancient town of Imus holed up inside the old church and had to be bombed out and engaged in the streets. As they drew nearer and nearer to the southern outskirts of Manila, the resistance grew harder. A gigantic air bomb used as a mine hidden beneath a paved road annihilated a tank attacked to the advance. Bridges across small rivers and creeks had to be seized before they were destroyed. As they dug into positions in the small city of Las Pinas they had to deal with both night-time infiltration as in Leyte, and artillery fire from the Manila Polo Club grounds.

The fighting between the Japanese and the Americans was not the only violence around. Deane Marks described a scene during the march up from Imus:

"We went through a small town called Zapote. In the church yard there were five or six dead Makapilis hanging by their necks. A Makapili is a Filipino civilian, who collaborated with the Japanese during the occupation. Very quick justice by the locals."

The next day the 511th fought all the way to Paranaque, the southern suburb of Manila, where the Japanese had partially succeeded in destroying a major bridge. As the regiment prepared to cross the partially destroyed bridge by foot, an artillery barrage fell and killed Colonel Irving Schimmelpfennig, the 11th Airborne chief of staff.

Crossing the broken bridge, the 511th, with elements of the 187th, set out for their main objective: the seizure of Nichols Field, the main military airfield serving the Manila area, from whose twin runways Japanese planes had controlled the Philippines and farther still in the days of occupation. The former USAFFE airfield now formed the major coastside component of the fearsom Genko Line, a series of interconnected walls, pillboxes, obstacles, and artillery emplacements forming the southern edge of Manila, including the giant naval guns stolen from Cavite Naval Base after it fell in 1942.

The location of the 511th's Second Battalion including Deane Marks's HQ-2 company took them along the expensive coastside mansions of the wealthy, now abandoned and transformed into opulently macabre places of death. There his machine gun squad was asked to retrieve the body of a trooper from the 511th's E Company, killed the day before.

"When we arrived over by the beach area, we came upon a large ornamental concrete and tile patio. By the side of the patio, there was an ornamental tile and concrete walk which looked down on the beach.

"At the north end of the patio, there was a stairwell which went down six or seven steps, took a turn left and then went down another three or four steps to the beach. In the past, this route provided access for swimming and sunning on the beach. Wilson's body was laying face down on the landing.

"We had a difficult time getting the litter under his body, because it had swollen to twice its normal size and his uniform acted as a rigid envelope. His skin had already turned black, from the sun, and his helmet strap had cut through his chin and cheeks. As we wrestled his body on the litter, the skin broke and gas and fluids flowed out.

"Someone threw up and that made the other three of us to do the same. We picked up the litter, with Westbrook and Porteous leading the way, followed by Guetzko and myself. As we moved up the stairwell, body fluids ran down the litter on Guetzko and myself."

Meanwhile, the realities of hard combat was not lost on Charlie Sass, with the 511th's First Battalion in B Company. The wily New Yorker had become a sergeant, but retained his peculiar sensitivity and humor. He recalled lying, facedown in a ditch, during the fighting for Nichols Field.

"First, understand that the groove, as I fondly recall it, was a shallow space between two mounds of plowed dirt, in a field ready for planting," he recalled.  "Probably bananas. I'd guess there were thousands of Japanese ahead of us, dug in deep at Fort McKinley and a few thousand Americans behind us. That would make us the middlemen, and quite uncomfortable.

"Halfway across the soft field at a quick jog, I realized that somebody was whizzing small, sharp projectiles at me and I hit the groove in a flat dive. It wasn't as deep as I'd hoped, so some part of me must have been visible to the Japanese rifleman, somewhere distant. Had he been closer, this tale could not be told."

Sass, thinking fast, decided against taking the logical course, which he knew the Japanese rifleman watching him would expect. He recalled the standoff wryly:

"He was probably named Suzuki or Shiguro or Muzashi. He was a great, dead-pan poker player, and I wasn't too bad myself. I suspect he was furious and exasperated when he saw my dead body get up and run like that. Maybe he cursed and kicked himself. I wish I could talk to him about it. I'd tell him that I realize now that he was just doing his job, as I was doing mine. I didn't hate him then, or now – I just didn't want him to cut my notch into his gunstock. Maybe, when I did that fast forward, he said to himself, 'Go for it, and good luck, you American bastard. Sayonara. See you later' – or something." Sass's unpredictable thinking got him out of that tight spot.

Fighting for the airfield raged for days as the Japanese forces, under the command of Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji, fought a suicidal and pointless defense of a city that overall Japanese commander General Tomoyuki Yamashita had already abandoned. While fighting in the city itself raged, razing the massive American-built government buildings to the ground, the Japanese naval defense troops, many marooned sailors rescued from the sunken Musashi at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, massacred the civilian population, for no particular reason. Finally the 511th took control of Nichols Field and promptly engaged at the Genko Line itself, breaking briefly into the city and drawing fire from the cavalry and infantry units in the city center to the north. Then they were sent east along the Line and Highway 54 to help retake the vast former USAFFE Filipino Division headquarters, Fort McKinley, in the township of Taguig on the shores of the even vaster lake called Laguna de Bay, which eventually was retaken on February 29th; but not before the leader of the 511th, its founder and guiding hand, Colonel Haugen, was killed by artillery fire during the battle of Nichols Field.

The Los Baños Raid

Before the recapture of Fort McKinley, the First Battalion of the 511th was withdrawn from the line and given a special mission: the rescue of over 2,000 Allied civilian prisoners in an internment camp in the resort city of Los Banos, on the southern shore of Laguna de Bay. With the 672nd Amphibian Tractor Battalion armed with amtracs, and the invaluable intelligence provided by Filipino guerilla units, the First Battalion was to save every prisoner they could. Being the least badly depleted of the 511th's companies, Company B was given the task of executing their part of the operation, by jump. A parachute infantry company typically counts 150 men; B Company, on February 21, had the most manpower remaining, at 80. Led by Lt. John Ringler since Mindoro, they were taken from the front to the very place they had bled to capture, Nichols Field, where parachutes were flown in from Leyte. They slept beneath the wings of the planes that would take them up.

On February 23, 1945, the prisoners of Los Banos CIC looked up at dawn to see the paratroopers of B Company, including Charlie Sass, along with a weapons platoon from battalion headquarters and nine engineers from the 127th Engineering Battalion, leap from low-flying planes and descend upon the camp with their parachutes lit by the morning sun. As the 511th's Recon platoon and Filipino guerrillas—the Marking group, President Quezon's Own, the Hunters ROTC, the 48t Chinese—engaged the Japanese guards at the camp perimeter and the surrounding area, and the rest of the First Battalion steamed across Laguna de Bay in the engineers' amtracs, B-511th shepherded the captive men, women, and children from their huts and barracks and onto carabao carts to take them to the lakeshore.

Then came an unforeseen problem: the internees refused to leave. Convinced that the coming of the paratroopers and the destruction of the guards by the Filipino guerrillas meant that the whole area was liberated, the civilians wanted to stay, or at least collect the belongings that survived their long captivity. This was not the case. Only a few miles away, some thousands of Japanese troops were ready and waiting to engage any American drive south. It was the existence of this force that convinced the 11th to undertake the rescue in the first place, fearing that the prisoners would be moved, perhaps all the way to Japan on the slave ships, or possibly liquidated. Faced with the unexpected intransigence, Ringler ordered the barracks torched, and the civilians bodily herded onto the 672nd's amtracs, for the risky daylight crossing of Laguna de Bay. They assembled at the area prepared by the Marking group of guerillas at San Antonio, and set off across the lake to Mamatid Beach. There, trucks ferried the prisoners to quarters prepared for them at New Bilibid Prison south of Manila within the 11th's area of control.

With the prisoners safely on the amtracs, the Japanese garrison was destroyed, and the entire raid withdrew, their mission accomplished, with only 2 KIA, four WIA, all enemy destroyed, and every prisoner's life saved.

General Swing had itched to personally observe the operation that, he was convinced, would seal his division's reputation for years to come. Of all the junior staff officers who could have been chosen to escort the general to Los Banos, Robert Beightler got the job. "It was late at night and it was pitch dark," he would later recall.  "The major [Henry Burgess, commander of the 511th's First Battalion] advised me that somebody would be on the road to guide us back to the beach.  So away we went on a 5 to 8 mile trip to Division Headquarters."

They picked up Swing and made their way back along the coast of Laguna de Bay in the blacked-out roads. "On the way back in the darkness, on unfamiliar roads and driving with only blackout lights, the jeep suddenly came to an abrupt stop with tires squeaking loud in the silence of the night, stopping within 3 feet from the edge of a gorge, where a bridge was completely destroyed.  The drop would have been over 100 feet straight down and all three of us undoubtedly would have been killed.

"In my life time, I had never, ever seen a man quite so mad, before or after.  Since attending West Point, I had been looking forward to a career in the U.S. Army.  At that point, I felt my career was over.  Discretion prevents me from telling you some of the words the general used.  At that moment, I wished I had gone over the cliff!" They missed the amtracs departing for Los Banos and Swing continued to curse out Beightler, blaming him for the missed chance to be present at what he was certain would be a glorious mission.

And a glorious mission it was; however, it would be overshadowed by another event that occured that day, the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. The one became renowned throughout history as a symbol of valor; the other, a footnote, except perhaps for the 2,000 unarmed civilians whose lives were saved. It also came at a heavy price: the camp's sadistic second-in-command, Warrant Officer Sadaaki Konishi, had escaped, and returned to find the camp liberated. They turned their wrath on Filipino villagers in the area, killing almost as many as the 511th had saved. Konishi would later be captured and hanged for war crimes.

Batangas, Aparri, and Japan

There was no time to rest for heroes or anyone else. With the smoldering, blasted ruins of Manila declared liberated, the 11th Airborne was sent into the south, fighting all the way down into the narrow Bicol peninsula before focusing on the province of Batangas, directly south of the capital, a land of dark volcanic uplands richly planted with coffee and pastured by beef cattle, the home of the Philippine insurrectionists during the Filipino-American War of a generation before. As occurred throughout their former empire, the Japanese in Batangas, cut off and with no hope of victory, refused to surrender. The 11th, with the 187th in the west, the 511th in the south and the 188th in the east, liberated the cities of Tanauan, Taal, and the provincial capital and port of Batangas City, before finally settling to rest and recuperate in the city of Lipa.

In June 1945 the 511th took part in the operation to liberate the far north of the Philippines, jumping for their third combat jump on the town of Aparri on the shores of the South China Sea. Their focus was the airstrip at Camalaniugan, where they would close off the escape routes of the Japanese forces being chased from the south. The division coming up from the south was the 37th Infantry. Unfortunately it proved to be too late; the Japanese had already melted into the Sierra Madre mountains.

At Aparri, Robert Beightler Jr. was reunited with his father. General Beightler would soon accept the surrender of General Yamashita.

After the Aparri operation, the 511th returned to their headquarters in Lipa to prepare for Operation Downfall and the invasion of Japan.

However, that operation became unnecessary. The 511th finished the war as an occupation force, first in Tokyo itself, and then in the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido. They provided the honor guard for General MacArthur as he took over the administration of Japan, allowing them to grant themselves the motto, "First in Manila, First in Tokyo".

During their Philippines campaign, the 511th counted two recipients of the Medal of Honor, the United States' highest military award: Pvt. Elmer E. Fryar of Company E, for actions in Leyte, in which he covered the withdrawal of his company, single-handedly killing 27 enemy, and then interposing himself between his platoon commander and machine-gun fire while moving wounded, killing the enemy machine-gunner before succumbing to his injuries; and Pfc. Manuel Perez Jr. of Company A, for actions at the Battle of Fort McKinley, in which he stormed a pillbox single-handed, killing 18 enemy and freeing his company to move. (Perez later died from a sniper wound suffered on February 14.)

In 1946, Charlie Sass sailed home, where he found his friends dead, changed, or unable to understand, his girlfriend wed to something else, and his uncle, his only family left, soon passed on. A year later than the veterans of Europe, he found little in the way of opportunities, either in education or work, that were not already filled by other veterans. Unmoored outside the service, he tried to re-enlist, to which he was given this reply:

"You had your chance, hero. Now you're nothing but leftovers."

Shaken, he decided to spite the world, and for the next six weeks, lived on the streets. As he put it, "A ragged Army shirt and a bereft look was worth a dollar a day." Finally one day he decided it was time to try again and move on, applied for benefits, rented a room and started looking for a job. The Veterans Administration who at first had failed him now found him a school to go to. Now a gifted writer in his retirement from sales, he lives in Florida.

Robert S. Beightler Jr. remained in the Army, serving throughout the world before becoming treasurer of West Point. His proudest moment, other than his service in the Philippines, was leading US forces that helped in the relief of the great Andean earthquake and flood of 1970. Beightler died in 2002 and his ashes interred at his beloved West Point. In an article written for the yearbook of the 50th anniversary of the West Point class of '03, he says of his Philippine experience, and the four friends and classmates who joined the 511th with him: "It was a tough, bloody war in Leyte and Luzon: two combat jumps and a Presidential Unit Citation later, only Tom Mesereau and I came back home alive."

Deane Marks settled in Milwaukee after the war, and retired to Columbus, Georgia, after retirement. His extensive and wrenching narratives of the battles of the 511th on Leyte and Luzon are pivotal testimonies to sacrifices and hardships endured by the young men of the 511th for the liberation of the Philippines.

Returning to the story of retrieving the body of Sgt. Wilson from Easy Company during the battle at the Genko Line, Marks wrote:

"The reality of war cannot be even imagined by anyone who has not been there. You see none of this in the movies, only from a poor sucker infantryman can you learn what it is like, and the infantryman will very seldom talk about it."



References
Astor, Gerald. Crisis in the Pacific: the Battles of the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them. Mass market paperback, Dell, 1996.
Rottman, Gordon L. US AIrborne Units in the Pacific Theater 1942-1945. Part of Battle Orders, Cowper and Bogdanovic, eds. Osprey, 2007.
Marks, Deane E. "No One Smiled On Leyte". Winds Aloft, republished at G-511th online.
Marks, Deane E. "The Day The Tank Blew Up." ibid.
Sass, Charles J. "The Infantryman's Steep Slope." ibid.
Sass, Charles J. "In the Groove (Sound Logic?)" ibid.
Sass, Charles J. "Six Weeks A-Bummin'" ibid
Beightler, Robert S. Jr. "A Swing and a Miss." ibid
Beightler, Robert S. Memorial article reprinting an autobiographical article he wrote for the 50th anniversary of the West Point class of '43. http://www.aogusma.org/class/1943jan/memorials/13252rsb.htm
Ringler, John. "The Los Baños Raid". ibid

Thanks to Leo Kocher, former G/511th and archivist of the 511th regimenal association, for making the articles of Deane Marks, Charles Sass, Robert Beightler Jr, John Ringler, and others available on his web site, http://groups.msn.com/G511thAirborne/home.msnw

Have not read it all but you said that they left California in May of '45. I think you mean May of '44. At one point you say "real, real real" but I think you may have meant, "real, really real," but it is a quote so i wasn't sure. My books say that the 511th didn't jump on Tagaytay Ridge on February 2 but instead it was delayed to the third because of heavy resistance near the dropzones. Will edit more as I read more but so far it is good.

Matt

Great, thanks, will edit.

The "real, real real" was a quote, so I left it like that. I wonder how far I can go in editing the quotes?