The U.S. Army 5217th Airborne

Around December 1943, I received Top Secret orders sending me to the South Pacific to a unit that was initially called the 5217 Reconnaissance Battalion. Then it was changed to 1st Reconnaissance Battalion Special ... God I don't know where they got all these names. We had well over a thousand people. We had a Scout Company and a Signal Company. The reason for the Signal Company was to teach radio procedures and this type of thing. And the scout company was used to furnish men for what we called ‘advance missions.’ An advance mission usually was made up of 5 to 8 men in a team who were dispatched on a submarine and would be landed on places like Palawan, Mindanao and Leyte in the Philippines. The missions were mostly in the southern islands. They had one station on Luzon.

The unit was the brainchild of Colonel Whitney who was on MacArthur's staff. He later became a Brigadier General in the Korean War. Whitney had this idea and he spoke to General MacArthur about it and the General thought it was a hell of an idea and they formed a Philippine subsection on his staff. It was a permanent part of his staff and our unit was under the Philippine subsection. Most of our people were Filipinos who volunteered from the original 1st and 2nd Filipino Regiments, which was mostly formed from California's Sacramento Valley. Almost all the men were American Filipinos who [had] lived in this country quite a while. Then the brass came up with the idea that the 5217 could augment their intelligence work with parachute training.