Note 48 — Chapter IX · Northern Leyte Valley: Part One

Early in the morning of 21 October, the 2d Battalion, 19th Infantry, moved west through enemy machine gun and rifle fire and bypassed the enemy defensive position that had held it up the previous day. At 1155 the battalion reached the junction of the beach road and Highway 1. During the movement two men were killed and two wounded. At the road junction, the battalion dispersed with machine gun fire a column of about thirty-five Japanese moving south on Highway 1. Artillery fire was then laid on a grove of trees, west of the road, to which the enemy had fled. As the battalion proceeded south along the highway between the road junction and the bridge, it came under artillery fire from an undetermined source. The tempo of the march into Palo was accelerated—“the troops wanted to move as rapidly as possible from that vicinity. They double timed across the bridge.”48 At 1500 they entered Palo without further opposition.49