Down From Heaven - The 11th Airborne Division in World War II & Beyond · Jeremy C. Holm

Manarawat: The 11th Airborne's Plateau in the Pacific in WWII

January 15, 2026·52 min·10 clips

Jeremy Holm opens by framing the episode around the 11th Airborne Division’s first combat jumps in World War II. He presents Manarawat as the forward position that let the Angels keep operating in some of the harshest jungle conditions imaginable. His narration is both personal and historical, tying the unit’s story to his grandfather and the men who served with him. He also places himself as a historian of the 11th Airborne and as someone who has traveled to meet active-duty Arctic Angels. The episode then turns to the practical challenge of reinforcing the plateau before the Japanese could take advantage of the division’s exposure. The 511th had been tasked with leading the division’s push across the island and engaging the enemy. 1st Battalion was preparing to move out, while 3rd Battalion would not remain there for long. That left someone else to help the 457th hold the plateau. Japanese troops quickly made their presence felt, and attacks, sniper fire, and night infiltrations became a steady threat. Bringing reinforcements inland from Barawan would have taken about two days. Because of that delay, the better option was to drop men directly onto Manarawat itself. The episode explains that artillery men were hard to insert that way, so the plan shifted toward using liaison aircraft and dropping a platoon one at a time. A platoon from the 187th Glider Infantry’s Company C was assigned to secure Manarawat until about December 18. Those 24 men were commanded by Lieutenant Chester Kozlowski, a paratrooper from the 503rd PIR. The rest of Company C arrived on December 5 under Lieutenant Charles Pop Olson. Holm describes the jump method in plain terms, with the men clipping static lines to a D-ring inside a Piper Cub and stepping out when the pilot gave the signal. He notes that the opening shock from an L-4 was much softer than from a C-47. Once that platoon was on the ground, 1st Battalion of the 511th could keep moving forward. On December 2, the 511th’s 3rd Battalion attacked an enemy force just west of Manarawat and killed 25. Among the dead, they found American jump boots, likely taken from troops who had recently been killed in the area. The episode ends by stressing that the Company C jump made the platoon the first tactical reinforcement on the plateau. Holm closes with the broader project of the show and his books, but the heart of the episode stays the same: a tight battlefield problem, solved by airborne improvisation, under constant pressure in the Pacific.

As heard by us

A tactical account of the 11th Airborne's first combat jumps and the struggle to hold Manarawat.

The episode frames the 11th Airborne Division's first combat jumps in World War II as a hard tactical problem: a jungle plateau, four 75mm pack howitzers, and a forward position that had to stay secure while Japanese attacks, sniper attacks, and night infiltrations kept coming.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story of the 11th Airborne Division's first combat jumps and the forward plateau position blasted out of the jungle.

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