Philip Schweitzer served as a combat medic with the 11th Airborne Division. Schweitzer was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and graduated in January 1943. That February, he volunteered for the Army. Schweitzer was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey for orientation and then to Camp Mackall, North Carolina. Schweitzer saw a bunch of airborne unit signs there and was afraid that he had accidentally volunteered for the airborne. After completing basic training, Schweitzer got a 30 day leave then reported back to camp. When he reported back, the announcement was made that the Army was forming the 11th Airborne Division. The commander asked anyone not interested in joining the Airborne to step forward. Anyone not interested would be immediately shipped overseas. Schweitzer looked around and did not see anyone step out of line. They then underwent more training at Camp Mackall before being sent for parachute training to Fort Benning, Georgia. They were given a furlough around Christmas, 1943. When they returned they went on maneuvers in Louisiana. After that they shipped out to San Francisco. They spent 30 days on a troop transport on the voyage to New Guinea. They had several submarine scares on the passage over. They did some jungle training on New Guinea and did some mop up duty on bypassed Japanese positions for a bit of combat experience. After that, they headed for Leyte for the invasion of the Philippines. The 11th Airborne Division was not involved in the initial landings but they functioned as a barricade. The Japanese were falling back and the best way to do so was through a narrow strip of land known as the Ormoc Corridor. It was an easy spot to defend. There were three trails that led to the area. Three groups, of roughly 130 men each, were sent down the trails. They did not realize that 10,000 Japanese soldiers had already gotten through the trail. The Filipino guides were Japanese sympathizers and they led the Americans into an ambush. They found out the day before that a plateau they passed only had one way up. After being ambushed, they fell back to the plateau. Schweitzer's unit got trapped there and ended up spending 30 days atop the plateau. During the rainy season, supply efforts were difficult. Parachuted supplies would often fall into the hands of the Japanese. Schweitzer helped out a native guide who stayed with them. The guide remained close with Schweitzer after the war. The guide once went hunting and brought back a monkey. They were trapped on the plateau from just before Thanksgiving until after New Year's Day. One pilot could land on the plateau to deliver medicine or take anyone seriously injured out on a stretcher. Around Christmas time this pilot brought a chaplain who held Christmas services for everyone. The chaplain tried to leave but the weather would not permit it. He brought some canned turkey with him and they had Christmas dinner. They were attacked by the Japanese almost every morning, usually in the form of banzai charges. Eventually, they were relieved and taken behind the lines to rest. They were never taken to proper rest areas like Australia and New Zealand because they were the only Airborne unit in the Pacific and they did not want anyone to know where they were. One day while they were swimming in the ocean they were told to get back under the trees. After they all got back on land, a landing craft came to shore and General MacArthur stepped off of it. This scene was photographed and became the iconic image of MacArthur making good on his promise to return to the Philippines.

After that [Annotator's Note: the 11th Airborne Division's combat operations on leyte], they headed for Luzon on a landing craft. Philip Schweitzer was on a LCM [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft, Mechanized]. It was meant to be a three day voyage. While underway, a typhoon struck the area and a howitzer broke free of its moorings and started bouncing around the ship. The Navy got it tied down and they continued on their way. The 11th Airborne Division landed on Luzon and then moved to capture Nasugbu. They got into the town hall there and found a blown open safe full of Japanese occupation money. They burned it to make hot coffee. They found out later it was actually real Japanese money. Schweitzer figures that he burned about a million dollars that night. They made a beachhead about eight miles deep and 500 yards wide. The 11th Airborne Division's objective was to keep the Japanese attention focused on them instead of on the main arm of the American troops approaching from the north. The commander of the 11th Airborne Division, General Joseph Swing, believed that a general had to be close to the front to understand the situation of his troops. Swing once crossed a river and found himself on the Japanese side without realizing his mistake. They advanced quickly until they reached the Tagaytay Ridge. They pulled some of the men back and put them on planes and they jumped behind the ridge and managed to knock out the position. When they landed, they found Filipino civilians who were happy to see them. The soldiers loaded their heavy equipment onto a water buffalo. This made the trip up the ridge a lot easier. Later, they had a makeshift hospital in a church and a priest used to come down to see them frequently. One day, under heavy shelling, many of their ambulances were destroyed. Another priest showed up and revealed that the original priest that they had met was a Japanese sympathizer. It turned out that this man, masquerading as a priest, had been the one who gave the fire coordinates to the Japanese who had been shelling the church. One day, Schweitzer was ordered to report to the company commander. He was told to resupply before reporting to a lieutenant named Ringler [Annotator's Note: unsure of spelling]. Schweitzer did so and was told that he was to take part in a secret mission to liberate the prisoners of a Japanese POW [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war] camp at Los Banos. An escaped prisoner revealed that the Japanese underwent calisthenics every morning at seven. MacArthur [Annotator's Note: General Douglas MacArthur] signed off on the attack and a few units were sent on a diversionary attack to keep the Japanese 19th Division occupied. They assumed that the 19th Division would be more interested in the fake attack. They also had guerilla units with them and their job was to approach unseen and then take out the guard towers once they saw the parachutes open up. The guerillas were also focused on making sure no one escaped. They parachuted in and took out the camp's defenders. The night before, another unit had landed nearby in amphibious tractors. None of the prisoners were wounded in the attack. All of the prisoners wanted to get stuff out of their barracks. They eventually set fire to the barracks to get them moving. One of the amtracs was attacked by the Japanese and one soldier was wounded by a burning shell hitting him. The 11th Airborne Division was nicknamed the Angels and Schweitzer says that there were two possible stories about where the name came from. The first is that shortly after landing on New Guinea, some of the men of the 11th Airborne Division helped unload the supply ships. Some of the supplies went missing and when a supply officer complained to General Swing he said that his boys were angels. The other story was that nuns held at Los Banos thought that they would only be freed by angels. Eventually they got the prisoners back. They never heard what happened to them after they parted.

[Annotator's Note: Philip Schweitzer served in the Army as a combat medic in the 11th Airborne Division and took part in combat operations in the Philippines, including the liberation of the internment camp at Los Banos.] Their other big mission on Luzon was an attempt to slow down the Japanese retreat. After they landed and cut off the retreat they were sent for some rest on Luzon. While there, some of the men were playing volleyball out of uniform when General Swing walked past with his Chief of Staff. Swing asked if they were having fun and then asked if he could join them. When the men said yes, Swing also took his shirt off and joined the game. A little later, a second lieutenant came by, fresh out of the states, and accosted them for being out of uniform. He asked them who their commanding officer was and they all looked at Swing who winked at them. The lieutenant ordered them all to get dressed so the men huddled up around Swing and his chief of staff so that when they broke ranks the lieutenant immediately saw a major general and a brigadier general standing before him. The lieutenant was rendered speechless and Swing ordered the lieutenant to report to his office at five the following morning. Swing thought that no officer should ask anything of his enlisted men that the officer was unwilling to do himself. Schweitzer recalls that during training, the men had to run five miles every morning at six. The officers were required to run with the enlisted men, but Swing found out that the officers were taking turns. In response, Swing posted a notice that the officers were no longer required to take part in the run. Instead, they were all ordered to do a run at five in the evening and Swing posted the route so anyone who wanted to watch could do so. Schweitzer thinks that he got the better part of the deal because there is a big difference in temperature between six in the morning and five in the evening in North Carolina. After the Luzon campaign, they had some rest time before they headed for Okinawa. There, they trained for the invasion of Japan. They had been told that they would be jumping at a place called Sendai on northern Honshu. They were on the airstrip waiting for the mission to begin when the Japanese sued for peace. That night, the replacements went crazy and started firing their guns into the air. Schweitzer and two of his friends stayed in their foxhole all night and several people were wounded by falling bullets that night. In Schweitzer's company there were 15 people who had trained together at Camp Mackall and only three of them made it back.

[Annotator's Note: Philip Schweitzer served in the Army as a combat medic in the 11th Airborne Division and took part in combat operations in the Philippines, including the liberation of the internment camp at Los Banos. Following the Japanese surrender, Schweitzer was part of the army of occupation in Japan.] The 11th Airborne Division was the first troops to land in Japan and they touched down at Atsugi Airfield just outside of Yokohama. They did not know if it was a trick or not so the soldiers came out of their planes combat ready. They fixed bayonets. There was a Japanese greeting party there and when they saw the soldiers come out ready for fighting many of them panicked. Eventually everyone calmed down and troops were sent to the naval base nearby to make way for MacArthur's [Annotator's Note: US Army General Douglas MacArthur] boat. Some members of the Airborne made a flag welcoming the Marines to Japan. After this, they headed up to Sendai to look at their planned drop zones. They found spikes driven into the ground. In order to get discharged, any soldier had to have a certain number of points. The members of the 11th Airborne Division were always being declared essential but by December 1945 they were sent to Tokyo to be returned to the United States. New recruits were drafted for the duration plus six months but the duration did not mean the end of the war. They started doing two year tours around this time. They took a troop transport to Seattle, Washington and were processed. They spent 12 days on the ocean and arrived in Seattle on 12 December 1945. Schweitzer was at the camp until New Year's Eve. Schweitzer and his two friends went out on the town shortly after arriving. At this point, none of the three of them were old enough to drink. The bartender asked them how old they were and refused to serve them when he learned that they were not 21. A man at the end of the bar then ordered the bartender to serve them stating that if they could wear their ribbons they could drink. He then said that anything they wanted was to be put on his tab. The man then left before they could thank him. The bartender came over and apologized and said that he was afraid to do it because the man who had just defended them was the police chief and he was afraid to break the law in the police chief's face. Schweitzer's two friends, Sam and Sid, were sent home but Schweitzer was still hanging around. A family came to the USO [Annotator's Note: United Services Organization] and asked if three soldiers would join them for Christmas dinner. The family had lost their son in the Pacific. Schweitzer agreed and he and two other guys ate dinner with this family. Schweitzer spent New Year's Eve on the train heading back to Fort Dix, New Jersey and that was it for Schweitzer's time in the Army.

Philip Schweitzer's training was heavy on hiking, running and jogging. When they returned from furlough, some of the men who wanted to join the Airborne were refused because the officers did not think that they could take the training. The men had to be young. The average age in the division was 20 years old and that included the officers. In the battle of Manila, the division had about 90 percent casualties. They constantly had replacements coming in who were undertrained and a lot of them did not survive their first jump. Schweitzer received training in medicine during his advanced training. He spent some time in the hospital assisting the camp doctor. Schweitzer was in charge of the treatment section and that is why he was a sergeant. The camp doctor was a surgeon who volunteered because he recognized that by the time the wounded got back to the hospital it was too late to do anything for them. This doctor volunteered and he performed surgery out in the field. He was later wounded by a sniper. In the Pacific, the medics did not wear armbands and they were armed. Schweitzer carried a carbine and a .45 [Annotator's Note: M1911 .45 caliber pistol] and had to use them. At Los Banos, Schweitzer had two jobs. He was assigned to take care of prisoners. They had to fight off the Japanese who tried to attack the barracks. When they went on maneuvers they had to take care of those who were injured. They went to Maxton Air Force Base and saw two planes taking off towing gliders behind them. They were supposed to take off, fly around for a couple hours and then land in the dark. The gliders got their lines tangled and the pilot of Schweitzer's glider had to cut free and land. It was a foggy night and the pilot could just barely see the ground. They hit a tree head on about 25 feet above the ground. Schweitzer and several others were in a jeep when they crashed. Schweitzer was knocked out. He awoke to find a dent in his steel helmet and his legs were soaked. His water can had ruptured. The copilot had been killed and the pilot was seriously wounded. The captain had sustained significant injuries to both of his knees. The jeep driver had a broken arm and a broken leg. Schweitzer got out of the jeep and started treating the wounded until medics arrived on scene and took over. The captain was discharged. That same night, another glider landed in the wilderness. Some people came at them with shotguns and took the soldiers prisoner. There was a still in the area and the moonshiners thought that the troops were from the IRS [Annotator's Note: Internal Revenue Service] and were raiding the still. Another glider flying over the ocean got lost and saw a convoy below them. They cut loose and landed in the water and a ship picked them up. The convoy would not break radio silence so no one knew what happened to the glider until they landed in England weeks later. Only two of the gliders made it back.

Philip Schweitzer's first time away from home was his trip to basic training. Schweitzer thinks that at the time, the military was something that needed to be done. No one felt that it was being forced on them. People were not angry about it, they just accepted it. Schweitzer's first combat experience was on New Guinea. They had some native guides there and the soldiers were told to not touch the native women. Several troops were actually hanged for this offense. The plus side of this for the soldiers was that they could get the women to do anything they wanted as long as they negotiated with the native men first. At the time, Lucky Strike cigarettes had a big red ball on the logo. If the soldier gave the husband the red disk, the native would get his wife to do that soldier's laundry for a week. On missions, these men would lead the soldiers through the jungle. There was also kunai grass on New Guinea. The kunai grass had deadly insects in them. The men had to cover themselves in insect powder before going into the fields. The Japanese would set up machine gun nests in the grass and mow down unsuspecting soldiers. When they came to the edge of the field with their guides, the natives would signal them with hand signals and then go off into the field. They would later come back with Japanese heads and give the all clear. That was why the Army was so insistent on staying on the New Guinean's good side because the Japanese had abused them when they landed and the New Guineans were potent allies. After a while, Schweitzer started to think that nothing he did really mattered and that when his time was up it was up. Watching snipers just pick off one guy in a line made everyone else wonder why not them.

While Philip Schweitzer's unit [Annotator's Note: the 11th Airborne Division] was trapped on the ridge on Leyte, they were frequently attacked by banzai charges. One morning during an attack, a soldier was wounded and Schweitzer ran out to carry him back to safety. He was later told by the other men that they could see machine gun bullets hitting the ground behind his feet as he made his way back to safety. Later on, while in a rest area Schweitzer was awarded a Bronze Star. During the amphibious landing he just had to patch them up and leave them there for people coming later to pick them up. He mainly had to stop any excessive bleeding and give the wounded morphine if they needed it. Occasionally they discovered that some of the Japanese resorted to cannibalizing the dead. After they found this out it became difficult for anyone in Schweitzer's unit to take a prisoner. These memories are still difficult for Schweitzer to talk about more than 60 years after the fact. He does not like remembering them but acknowledges that there are plenty of things that happened to him over there that are fond memories. While Schweitzer was in the Pacific his mother received a visit from the FBI wanting to know where her son was. She did not know where he was because he was overseas and they threatened her with jail time if she did not reveal his location. At this time the mail man arrived with a letter from Schweitzer. His mother showed the letter to the FBI agents and they were stunned. She asked them if they could find out where her son was. The agent did not know what to say and apologized for the intrusion. Schweitzer's mother was still curious as to where her son was and kept calling the FBI every week asking if they found her son. It turned out that Schweitzer had signed up for the draft but then enlisted. The boards were never cross referenced and the FBI was investigating him as a draft dodger. Another guy, who was from Philadelphia, was out on the town with his girlfriend one night. There were police out checking the draft cards of all the young men. He had forgotten his at home. He was ordered to bring his card to the draft board the following morning. When he arrived there, the draft board was unable to find his card. It turned out that his draft card was filed under deceased. If he had had his card with him that night he would have never been called for duty and he would have lived.

In addition to his weapon, Philip Schweitzer carried two pouches. Because of his rank as a sergeant, Schweitzer carried a lot of equipment that other medics did not. He carried morphine, compresses, bandages, sutures, needles, scalpels and antiseptic. When he made a parachute jump he was carrying about 100 pounds of equipment. Normally, they jumped from about 800 to 1,000 feet off the ground. For the raid on Los Banos, however, they jumped at 400 feet. At 400 feet they did not even pack a spare chute because it would not have time to open. Schweitzer did not find the landing at 400 feet to be any harder of an impact than jumps from 800 feet. While flying over Los Banos, the paratroopers could not see much until they were standing in the doorway. Each paratrooper only spent a brief moment in the door before they jump out and each trooper was more concerned with hitting the right landing area than taking in the view. The main concern of getting into the camp was to get to the prisoner barracks. The paratroopers were concerned with blocking any attempted Japanese attacks on the prisoners as well as ensuring that any prisoners outside when the raid began would be shepherded into the barracks. Schweitzer saw emaciated people, living on little more than bugs and worms. These people were rationed nothing but water. There were a lot of nuns and priests in the camp. There was an area in the camp that was dubbed the Vatican where many of them lived. Many of the prisoners had to be carried to the amtracks [Annotator's Note: the Landing Vehicle, Tracked, or LVT, was an amphibian tractor]. One soldier carried a newborn baby in his helmet. Families were separated in the mad dash to the amtracks. Schweitzer still has some difficulty describing the scene of the camp when they arrived. It took between 15 to 30 minutes to secure the camp and another couple of hours to evacuate all of the prisoners. They could not fit all of the prisoners on the amtracks so some of them had to make two trips and some of the prisoners had to walk back to the beachhead. One nun came up to a soldier and told him that she did not want to leave. She said that she always dreamed that she would be saved by a Marine and since her rescuer was Army she wanted to go back and try again. Another prisoner came up and kissed a soldier. The soldier did not realize until later that it had been a nun who kissed him. The prisoners were a mixture of Americans and citizens from England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, and Italians, even though Italy was an ally of Japan. The camp was situated on the Los Banos Agricultural College. They used the soccer field as a parade ground. The camp held 2,200 internees.

One of the worst times Philip Schweitzer experienced was the month that he spent on the plateau on New Guinea. Another event that ranks high on that list was the amphibious landing they made in the Philippines. These things bothered Schweitzer more after the fact than they did at the time because he was so busy during the events that he could not really think about anything. Schweitzer spent nights in his foxhole and could hear noises nearby. No one could verbally challenge whoever was in the darkness nor could they open fire because that would reveal their position so they just lobbed a grenade at the noise and hoped for the best. Every morning the soldiers took stock of who was still there. It was hard for the veterans to make friends with the replacements because they had seen so many of their friends die. When Schweitzer returned, he did not have many problems with bad dreams but he did nearly throw his wife through a window once. He knelt down to change the dial on their radio and his wife crept up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. Instinct took over and he grabbed her arm and nearly threw her over his shoulder. Schweitzer's other two friends, Sam and Sid, are now dead but the three of them kept in touch after the war. Schweitzer is still in touch with Sid's widow. A few years ago, while at an 11th Airborne Division reunion, Schweitzer was surprised to learn that he was the only guy there from World War 2. The reunions helped Schweitzer to talk about what had happened to him because he knows that they understood what he was talking about. Schweitzer still has some bad memories that he refuses to discuss. A couple of years prior, Schweitzer and one of the rescued prisoners from Los Banos got together. They all went to lunch together and later the local newspaper got wind of it and interviewed the two of them. The man had been 15 years old at the time of the raid. His father had been killed at Bataan. He, his mother and his little brother were all forced into the camp. He later joined the Army and retired as a colonel.

Philip Schweitzer cannot think of many other lighter moments than the ones he's already mentioned. He remembers one thing that he heard about on Luzon while waiting to go to Okinawa. Most of the men's jump boots were in a poor state. Every time the men went to the supply station they were told that the new jump boots had not arrived. One day, they saw rear echelon troops walking around wearing jump boots and they reported it to General Swing [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General Joseph M. Swing commanded the 11th Airborne Division]. Swing told the quartermaster to go and get the boots. The quartermaster told the general that he had been told that the boots were not in yet and that he is not being allowed inside. Swing then ordered a combat team from 511th Regimental Combat Team to accompany the quartermaster and to take the boots if they were not offered. The supply depot refused the quartermaster again and the team got out and fixed bayonets. They went in, got the boots and took them back to the camp. Later, they went into town and took the boots from the feet of the rear echelon troops. This was another good example of the man General Swing was in Schweitzer's mind. It is hard for Schweitzer to say if the war changed him because he went into it so young. He does not think that there was much for him to change. He does admit that the war made him a more serious person. When he went to college he was less concerned about enjoying his time there than he was about getting through it all. After the war, Schweitzer went to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to study chemical engineering. He had always wanted to be a chemical engineer. He found it to be an adventure just getting into the school. There was a good mix of people at the college. The kids fresh out of high school were interested in the social life. The veterans just wanted the free education. The school was beginning an ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] program at the time and the administrators tried to convince all the veterans to join it but joining ROTC would put them back on the hook for another military tour. The GI Bill paid for everything the veterans needed for school. Schweitzer graduated and went to work as a chemical engineer. For the last ten or 15 years, Schweitzer has written technical books. He has published 17 so far and is working on number 18. He has one son who lives nearby and two granddaughters. When Schweitzer first got into the service he made 21 dollars a month. When he left the service he was making 138 dollars a month. The first time Schweitzer came home, he took the subway to Penn Station but got on the wrong subway and started heading uptown. When he got home there were still some shortages from the rationing. The Army gave him two ration slips to buy a suit. It took him three weeks to find one that fit him. Several more weeks passed before he found another suit that fit him. It took some getting used to having to use ration slips to get everything that he needed. While going to college, Schweitzer worked in a grocery store on the weekends. During his senior year in college Schweitzer wrote letters to various chemical companies asking if they had any openings. Dow Chemical told him that they had none. Schweitzer graduated in June 1950, just before the beginning of the Korean War. A few weeks after graduating Schweitzer received a letter from Dow Chemical asking if his draft status was still the same. Schweitzer benefited from a change in the rules that made him free and clear while many other veterans were still in the reserves.

Philip Schweitzer finds it hard to describe the feelings he experienced when he returned home and saw his mother and his fiancee for the first time in a long time but he thinks the biggest thrill of all was the day he sailed into Seattle, Washington. That was the moment he felt like he was home. Schweitzer thinks that it is important that people continue to study World War 2 because a lot of people now do not understand what people in the past went through. Schweitzer acknowledges that even the civilians had it rough. He thinks that museums that commemorate these past events are important because they bring to the forefront what the people who fought in the war went through. Schweitzer went to the National World War II Memorial a few months after it opened with a church group. He found it to be a very moving experience. Schweitzer is aware that some people came out of the war bitter but he never experienced that. He assumes that it was this way because he was largely around people who had volunteered for service. Their attitude was very different than those who had to be dragged in. Schweitzer would like to tell future generations to remember that the people who took part in World War 2 were there because their country had been attacked. Schweitzer would tell people that people sacrificed everything to preserve the American way of life and that it is something that must be fought for.