Baptism of Fire, Part 2
Chapter 9 of Victory in Shanghai
Tension was high among the men of the 160th Infantry Regiment as they readied themselves for their first fight against the Japanese in the morning of “S-Day”—January 9, 1945. The prewar National Guardsmen among them had been waiting for three entire years for this moment. All of them had been cooped up on board the attack transport ships for nine days. The alarm to wake up and get ready for action blared through the ships’ loudspeakers at 1:00 AM, leaving the men with hours to kill before the amphibious operation began.
On Lieutenant James Kim’s attack transport, an uproar broke out when the loudspeakers barked out another order from the captain: all Army personnel were to clean their quarters before debarking from the ship. The Navy’s housekeeping instructions enraged men of the 160th Infantry who were already anxious about the imminent battle. Anger at the Navy further elevated the tension as the hours before the start of the amphibious operation—”J-Hour”—ticked down slowly.
At 6:00 AM, the order to “Form the Approach” went out to the attack transports of the first wave to hit the beach. The men of the 160th Infantry marched down the ship’s corridors to the rope ladders dangling down the sides of the hull, which they used to descend to their landing craft in the water below.
On James’s transport, the path to the rope ladders went past the air conditioning ducts that sent cool air to the ship’s quarters. Some of the passing soldiers pulled their bayonets—sharpened to cut through Japanese guts—out of their scabbards and stabbed holes in the ducts as they walked past them. The damage was their revenge against the captain whose orders had bothered them on the eve of their first battle.
J-Hour was 9:00 AM, leaving the men in the landing craft with more hours to wait before heading to the shore. The flat-bottomed boats pitched about in the waves and made many of the men on board seasick. James became so nauseous that he ceased to care whether the enemy met them on the beach; he just wanted the ordeal to end.
When J-Hour finally came, the landing craft carrying the 160th Infantry headed toward the shore. The first wave hit the beach at 9:36 AM. James’s landing craft seemed to hit the beach and lowered its bow ramp, but when he and his men rushed over the ramp, they plunged into water so deep that many of them had their heads pulled underwater. The boat’s hull had grounded on a submerged sandbar, and its ramp had dumped the men into the deeper water beyond it. James’s head went under, and he felt that he was drowning, weighted down by his weapon and gear, before he managed to fight his way forward and onto the beach.
On the beach the struggle ended. No machine guns opened fire at them. Not one artillery shell came their way. The Japanese were gone. American naval gunfire roaring overhead toward targets farther inland was the only sign that a battle was underway. Unopposed on their landing beach, James and his thoroughly soaked men collected themselves, got organized, and moved out.
The 40th Infantry Division’s history described the landing briefly: “At 0936 on January 9, 1945, S-Day, the first assault wave hit the beach at Lingayen in what turned out to be an unopposed landing. The Japs had destroyed all supplies and equipment they could not carry and cleared out of the area three days before when the first naval bombardment struck them.”
The 160th Infantry Regiment passed through the town of Lingayen and was crossing the adjoining Calmay River by 10:30 AM. By the evening its three battalions had reached the next river, three miles inland, and a patrol to the west had made the division’s first contact with the enemy, killing seven Japanese soldiers and capturing four Chinese men who had been working for the Japanese as laborers.
Moving forward the next day, the 160th Infantry Regiment ran into resistance from the reconnaissance unit of the Japanese 23rd Division, which was trying to delay the U.S. advance by destroying bridges and with harassing fire. As the 160th Infantry advanced and fought through this opposition, including destroying four small Japanese tanks (tankettes) south of the town of Bugallon, two battalions of the New York National Guard’s 108th Infantry Regiment went ashore at Lingayen and followed the 160th Infantry inland.
By the evening of January 11, elements of the 160th Infantry and 108th Infantry controlled the town of Aguilar at the Army’s designated beachhead line and were ready to begin the advance toward Manila, 100 miles to the south.
The beaches had been undefended, and resistance had been minimal in the first several miles inland, because the Japanese were now fighting U.S. amphibious operations differently than they had on Guadalcanal in 1943 and on Tarawa in 1944. Their forces had retreated from the coast when the naval bombardment and aerial attacks began. There would be no fight to the death on the shore, and no banzai charges at the beachhead. Instead they planned to lure U.S. forces into attacking strategically located hills made into underground fortresses.
Months in advance, Japanese army engineers had excavated tunnels in the solid rock of hills along the route from Lingayen to Manila. Cave mouths became artillery emplacements and machine gun positions, linked by the tunnels, which were practically impervious to artillery and aerial bombing. The Japanese defenses were a preview of what the U.S. Marines would find on Iwo Jima, most famously at Mount Suribachi, a month later. The California and New York National Guard units of the 40th Infantry Division were going to have to attack them first.
This series previews my upcoming book Victory in Shanghai: A Korean American Family’s Journey to the CIA and the Army Special Forces, whose publication is expected by June 1, 2025. You can pre-order it now through Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, at this link, or through your favorite local independent bookseller.
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