The Forgotten Story of
the Most Daring Prison Break
of the Pacific War
ESCAPE
from
DAVAO
John D. Lukacs
Simon & Schuster
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lukacs, John D.
Escape from Davao : the forgotten story of the most daring prison break of the Pacific war / John D. Lukacs.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 2. World War, 1939–1945—
Philippines—Davao City. 3. Prisoner-of-war escapes—Philippines—Davao City—History—20th century. 4. Escaped prisoners of war—United States—Biography. 5. Escaped prisoners of war—Philippines—Davao City—Biography. 6. Davao City (Philippines)—History, Military—20th century. 7. Philippines—History—Japanese occupation, 1942–1945.
8. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Philippines. 9. Guerrillas—
Philippines—History—20th century. 10. Soldiers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
D805.P6L85 2010
940.54’7252095997—dc22 2010003238
ISBN 978-0-7432-6278-1 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-4391-8043-3 (ebook)
To the memory
of my father,
John F. Lukacs
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
PART I • WAR
1 Ten Pesos
2 A Long War
3 The Raid
4 God Help Them
PART II • HELL
5 The Hike
6 Goodbye and Good Luck
7 A Rumor
8 The Erie Maru
9 A Christmas Dream
10 A Big Crowd
11 The Plan
12 Cat-and-Mouse
PART III • FREEDOM
13 A Miracle
14 Another Gamble
15 Unexplored
16 Little Time to Rest
17 A Story That Should Be Told
18 Duty
19 Greater Love Hath No Man
20 Legacies
21 Conditional Victory
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
I had tried to put into words some of the things that I have experienced and observed during these past months, but I fail to find words adequate to an accurate portrayal. If any American could sit down and conjure before his mind the most diabolical of nightmares, he might perhaps come close to it, but none who have not gone [through] it could possibly have any idea of the tortures and the horror that these men are going through.
—MAJ. WILLIAM EDWIN DYESS, AUGUST 16, 1943
ESCAPE
from
DAVAO
Author’s Note
A verse from a poem written by Lt. Henry G. Lee, a junior officer in the Philippine Scouts, precedes each chapter. Lee, a native of Pasadena, California, was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan in April 1942 and endured the infamous Bataan Death March.
Throughout the ordeal of his captivity, Lee wrote approximately thirty poems in two canvas-wrapped notebooks. These notebooks were unearthed beneath the site of the Japanese prison camp called Cabanatuan in 1945. Lee had buried his works before departing the Philippines on an unmarked prison ship that was sunk by U.S. warplanes in December 1944. Lee was killed when the second hellship he was aboard, the Enoura Maru, was also bombed and sunk in Takao Harbor, Formosa, on January 9, 1945.
Several of Lee’s poems appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in November 1945 and all were later published in their entirety in a compilation entitled Nothing but Praise.
Throughout the book I refer to geographical locations by the name by which they were known at the time. Thus, the island of Taiwan is called Formosa, its Japanese name.
Prologue
MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 1943
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Maj. William Edwin Dyess, U.S. Army Air Forces, serial number 0-22526, was not officially here. Not in Washington. Not seated in one of the innumerable offices catacombed inside the vast reinforced-concrete bowels of the brand-new Pentagon building. For all intents and purposes Dyess’s presence in the United States was classified. Yet the dark cloak of secrecy, wartime protocol though it was, was perhaps unnecessary. After all, the mere supposition that Dyess was alive was almost unbelievable.
An exhausted apparition in loose, ill-fitting khaki, Dyess did not look very much like the dashing hero the newspapers had described him to be, a decorated pilot who wore some of his nation’s highest honors—including both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross—among the multicolored ribbons pinned to his lean chest. Right now he looked like a man who had been through hell and back, in his case a terrifying real place with a real name—the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands.
The tall Texan’s classically handsome face was sunken and weathered, a bronzed mask drained of its youthful vivacity. Withered muscles and wispy, thinning locks of amber hair bore witness to months of malnutrition, grueling slave labor, and the insidious form of torture that he and his comrades called “the sun treatment.”
A literal barefoot prophet, the erstwhile prisoner of war had carried with him throughout his odyssey few possessions: a Half and Half tobacco tin that was his billfold; a creased, Mobil Oil map of the Philippines; his rusty wings and captain’s bars. The Presbyterian also wore a crucifix and a medal of Saint Christopher—the martyred soldier and patron saint of travelers who, in the mythos of the Catholic church, was the bearer of Christ and heavy burdens—with his dog tags. The holy objects had been given him by a dying pilot from his shattered squadron, the 21st Pursuit. Dyess had knelt by Lt. James May as he choked out his final words: “Ed, take these and wear them. Take them back to the United States when you go.” It was as if May had somehow known that Dyess, unlike so many others on Bataan, would one day return home. Thus far, the items had proved a fitting bequest.
These items were not all that Dyess carried. Frozen in his crystalline, ice-blue eyes was a catalog of countless, soul-searing images, images that Dyess had purposefully and painfully carried through his waking hours and fitful dreams, images that could never be permanently laid to rest—images that no eyes should see.
Dyess had returned to the States exactly one week earlier, on Monday, August 9, his twenty-seventh birthday. But there were no throngs of relatives and well-wis
hers to welcome him, no popping flashbulbs and reporters waiting to chronicle the pilot’s first triumphant steps on American soil in nearly two years. Instead, he arrived anonymously in Washington, the only news of his arrival a telegram he had somehow secretly conspired with Western Union to send to his wife in Champaign, Illinois, a few days before.
WILL ARRIVE CHICAGO VIA UNITED AIR LINE 2:30 PM AUG 13. REMAIN 30 MINUTES. MY PRESENCE IN US SECRET TELL NO ONE NOT EVEN FOLKS.
According to a newspaper account published months later, Marajen Stevick Dyess received “little more than a glimpse of her young husband” that day. And only later, “from a certain room in a certain hotel at a certain time [Dyess] was able to talk to his parents in Albany [Texas] by phone.” It was perhaps the most bizarre, guarded homecoming ever afforded an American war hero.
But mystery had surrounded Dyess since the fall of the Philippines in early 1942. The last word anyone had received from him had been an Easter telegram sent from an overseas wireless station on the Philippine island of Cebu. In the succeeding months, as tales of Dyess’s battlefield bravery began to appear in publications small and large—from his hometown Albany News to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to Esquire magazine—Dyess’s legend grew. A correspondent from the New York Times, in an article detailing Dyess’s intrepid leadership and battlefield exploits on Bataan, referred to him as the “One-Man Scourge of the Japs.”
But since 1942 no one knew whether Dyess was even alive, not until a few weeks earlier, when a brief, cryptic message sent from a U.S. Navy overseas station arrived unexpectedly at the Dyess home in Albany on the 23rd of July to let his parents know that their son was safe. The message, however, revealed nothing of his whereabouts, nor the manner in which he had been returned to U.S. military control. Only a handful of men, some of the most important in the American military, were privy to such details, among them Gen. Douglas MacArthur; Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces; and Gen. George V. Strong, head of the ultrasecret Military Intelligence Service, who reported directly—and only—to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House.
MacArthur, the first to hear Dyess’s story in detail in Brisbane, Australia, just weeks earlier, had been so moved that his chop was immediately affixed to the freshly typed transcripts of Dyess’s debriefing, thereby assuring that the documents would be sent via special air dispatch to Washington. Strong, in turn, arranged for two stenographers and an officer from the adjutant general’s office to take an official statement from the pilot for the eyes of his superiors. And that was why Dyess, though weary, now sat in the inner sanctum of the War Department. As the stenographers readied to record Dyess’s words, the foundation of what the War Department would later call “the greatest story of the war in the Pacific,” Dyess exhumed the images—as well as the names, dates, sounds, smells, places, and faces that had been buried with them—and prepared to revisit the nightmare.
It was finally time to tell the story, the whole story, of everything that he and his eleven extraordinary comrades who had escaped with him had been through.
PART I
WAR
CHAPTER 1
Ten Pesos
… Soldierman, sailorman and pioneer
Get yourself a girl and a bottle too,
Blind yourself, hide yourself, the storm is near.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6–MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1941
Nichols Field, Luzon, Philippine Islands
It was late morning on Saturday, December 6, when they began filing into the post theater at Nichols Field, an American procession of sunglasses, swagger, Vitalis, and lit cigarettes with the brass insignia of Army Air Forces pilots, winged propellers, pinned to their collars.
An assortment of accents, body types, and backgrounds, the fifty-odd pilots of the 17th and 21st Pursuit Squadrons assembled in uniform fashion: clean khaki, college rings, and lieutenant’s bars, with overseas and crush caps perched rakishly on their heads. They carried photographs of their wives and sweethearts in their wallets, but each shared the same, seductive mistress: a love of flying. That love, as well as an appetite for adventure and a sense of duty, had brought them from all corners of the United States to this USAAF base in the Philippines. The 1939 Hollywood blockbuster Gone With the Wind was currently playing in the theater, but the lights did not dim on this warm, peaceful Philippine morning. These pilots were not here to see Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.
With crossed arms, Col. Harold H. “Pursuit” George waited for stragglers to take seats. George, the forty-nine-year-old chief of staff of the Far East Air Force’s 5th Interceptor Command, was a short, bespectacled, and brilliant officer with a magnetic personality. A decorated pilot in the Great War, he had piercing black eyes. Through the lazy gray haze of curling cigarette smoke, George made a sweeping reconnaissance of the room. Chatter ceased. Zippo lighters snapped shut with a clink. Pursuit George, as was his way, got to the point.
“Men, you are not a suicide squadron yet, but you’re damned close to it,” he said. “There will be war with Japan in a very few days. It may come in a matter of hours.”
George paused. The monotonous drone of airplane motors on testing blocks filled the dewy tropical air. Leather soles nervously scraped the floor.
“The Japs have a minimum of 3,000 planes they can send down on us from Formosa and from aircraft carriers. They know the way already. When they come again, they will be tossing something.”
There was church silence. None of the pilots, most of whom were rookies in their early twenties, had seen aerial combat. But George’s bombshell had not caught 1st Lt. Ed Dyess by surprise. Dyess, the twenty-five-year-old commanding officer of the 21st Pursuit, had watched the winds of war whip the wind sock at San Francisco’s Hamilton Field and for months had worked and prayed that his raw outfit would be ready. The odds, however, had been stacked against him long before he had descended the gangplank from the President Coolidge to Pier 7 in Manila back on November 20, 1941.
According to Japan’s militarists, the rising sun of Amaterasu, the ancient goddess of creation, was waking the Yamato race to its destiny. The annexations of Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria, followed by an invasion of China in 1937, signaled Japan’s desire to resurrect the holy mission of Jimmu Tenno—Japan’s first emperor circa 660 b.c.—called hakko ichiu, meaning to forcefully bring “the eight corners of the world under one roof.”
By the summer of 1941, the United States could no longer ignore the gathering Pacific storm. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commenced a diplomatic chess game with Japan, halting exports of American oil, iron, and rubber, freezing Japanese assets in the United States, and closing the Panama Canal to Nippon’s merchant vessels. Roosevelt then looked to America’s most distant ward and its most powerful overseas base, the Philippine Islands, which had been ceded to the United States by Spain after the Spanish-American War. He recalled to active duty sixty-one-year-old Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the former chief of staff, who since 1935 had lived in Manila while serving as military adviser to President Manuel Quezon’s nascent commonwealth government. MacArthur was given command of all forces in the islands, designated USAFFE—United States Army Forces, Far East—but before he could build a Pacific bulwark, he first had to reinvigorate a slumbering command and repair decades of neglect.
The relentless climate—MacArthur called it an “unchanging cocoon of tropical heat”—had gradually suffused the U.S. Army’s Philippine Department in a universal lethargy. There was a five-hour workday, from 0700 to noon. As the mercury rose, men retreated to their billets and barracks, tuned their radios to Stations KZRH, “the Voice of the Orient,” for news and KZRM for big band hits, and took siestas while the blades of electric fans moiled the languorous air. An exchange rate of two Philippine pesos per U.S. dollar ensured that Filipino houseboys kept their bunks neat and their shoes shined, that lavanderas kept their custom-made uniforms and sharkskin suits pressed, and that they could send a few dollars home. Though the islands were rumored to contain
a collection of aging and incompetent officers and enlisted eight balls, most were energetic young officers and soldiers using the assignment as either a career springboard or a means to escape the Great Depression.
Poker, baseball, and air-conditioned double features were pastimes for enlisted men; officers golfed or rode their ponies across the Manila Polo Club. At night men from Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg, the sprawling 150,000-acre U.S. Army complex seventy miles north of Manila in the foothills of the Zambales Mountains, slugged ice-cold bottles of San Miguel beer at the Star Bar while airmen at Nichols Field haunted joints like the Chicago Bar in nearby Parañaque. The real action, however, was found in Manila, a lively hive of culture and commerce abuzz with music from the nightclubs lining Rizal Avenue and the Escolta and aglow with the romantic incandescence of the neon signs advertising the Alhambra Cigar Company and La Insular Cigarettes. Soldiers caught furtive glances from raven-haired Filipinas, drank Tanduay rum, and danced at the Santa Ana Cabaret while sailors drank at the Silver Dollar and staggered out into the sultry night air redolent of jasmine, sewage, and burning incense. Officers mingled with Manila’s social elite in the Jai Alai Building’s Sky Room and debated the football fortunes of West Point and Annapolis at the Army-Navy Club. Any way one looked at it, from an officer’s privileged view or from the vantage point of those in the enlisted ranks, the Philippines seemed a serviceman’s Shangri-la.
But the combat prowess of U.S. troops was unknown. MacArthur also suffered a severe numerical disadvantage: he could oppose Japan’s military might with only the 22,000 troops comprising the U.S. Army’s Philippine Division: the all-American 31st Infantry and two regiments of Philippine Scouts, crack Filipino soldiers serving under U.S. officers. Ten Philippine Army reserve divisions would soon be available, but these troops, noted one observer, knew how to do little else but salute and line up for chow.
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