As dawn lightened the skies on January 31, 1945, a naval flotilla of more than a hundred vessels held station in the dark waters off Nasugbu Beach on the Philippine island of Luzon. The convoy was poised 40 miles south of Manila, ready to land 6,462 troopers of the 11th Airborne Division. But first came the air strikes: 18 twin-engine Douglas A-20 Havoc medium bombers zoomed over Red Beach, chewing up suspected Japanese positions with their forward-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Nine Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters followed them in, repeating the performance.
At 7:15 a.m., two American destroyers rotated their 5-inch guns into position and began hurling 55-pound shells at the shore, tearing apart the tree line in a series of shattering explosions. Simultaneously, rocket-equipped landing craft angled to align their rudimentary launchers with the landing beach. The rockets lifted off with deafening whooshes as paired salvos arched across the pink sky.
An hour into the bombardment, boatswains gunned their landing craft toward the beach to land the first wave of infantry. Intelligence suggested there were 7,000 Japanese soldiers south of Manila, with 500 guarding the beach itself. By this point the battle for Luzon had been raging for three weeks, so keeping track of enemy units was difficult at best. Ten days into the campaign General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had complained about the slow pace of his field commander, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, whose Sixth Army was plodding south toward Manila despite light enemy resistance. To spur Krueger forward, MacArthur authorized a second landing south of the capital city. The operation, code-named MIKE VI, fell to Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army. Eichelberger proposed to amphibiously land the 11th Airborne’s two glider infantry regiments and then airdrop the division’s parachute regiment farther inland a few days later.
The second landing was likely spurred by MacArthur’s desire to use the rivalry between his two army commanders to hasten Manila’s capture. There was a simmering antagonism between the two men, and Eichelberger, who believed MacArthur was “disgusted” by Krueger’s slow progress, referred to the Sixth Army commander as “old Molasses in January.” Eichelberger’s own Eighth Army was a skeleton organization,
