Note 35 — Chapter VIII · Southern Leyte Valley: Part Two
Reading edition
On the following day, 27 October, the time for the attack was set an hour earlier in the hope that the Japanese would be caught off guard. At 0700 the 32d Infantry moved out, with the assault battalions in the same formation as on the previous day.35 To their happy surprise the troops encountered little opposition as they readily secured bunker after bunker. The 20th Infantry Regiment had spent its strength. The American troops found enemy dead “in every bunker, trench, foxhole and bush,” and wreckage of enemy 75’s, machine guns, grenade launchers, and rifles was scattered about. More than 400 Japanese dead were found in the sector of the 1st Battalion.36 The infantrymen encountered only an occasional rifleman while mopping up. By 1130 the Buri airstrip was secured.