Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  whoops.”

  Nine pilots contributed to the success of the raid—including Lt. Sam Grashio, who, after a locked release handle prevented him from dropping his bombs, skillfully landed with the bombs dangling from his wings, thus saving his P-40 for another mission. But Dyess’s individual exploits were staggering. His score included one 12,000-ton transport destroyed, one 5,000- or 6,000-ton vessel burned, at least two 100-ton motor launches, and a handful of smaller barges and lighters sunk. It was impossible to estimate the full extent of the dockside damages, but the cumulative Japanese losses were so severe that Radio Tokyo reported that fifty-four American four-engined bombers and swarms of fighter planes were responsible. One can only imagine what George and his pilots could have done with such a force.

  This soon-to-be-famous raid on Subic Bay would cement Dyess’s legend—one that had been created by his leadership of a landing party of twenty airmen on the beach at Agloloma Bay to root out unsurrendered Japanese and finish the Battle of the Points in February—among all troops and commands in the Philippines. The price of the victory, however, was steep. Only Dyess’s P-40, Kibosh, remained operational. Crellin’s death and the wrecked planes left George without an air force, but he rallied his men with a quart of whiskey. “At least the death of our little air force was one of unmitigated glory,” Ind would write. It was later discovered that George had not been speaking to Sutherland, or to a representative of USAFFE that morning, but a messenger from 5th Interceptor Command headquarters relaying intelligence. The whole conversation, said Ind, had been a quirk, “one of those impossible coincidences which led to a series of impossible coincidences.”

  George wasted little time assigning Dyess a new mission: he wanted the pilots to invite the nurses from nearby Field Hospital No. 2 to a party. “If this war is going to be fought by our boys and girls, Ed,” he said, “they might as well have what little good times they can.”

  That evening, a silvery tropical moon bathed the jungle in a soft, blue light. Nervous pilots in wrinkled uniforms squired a dozen nurses wearing dresses and rationed cosmetics through the entrance to their clubhouse—a bamboo shack on stilts decorated with Japanese helmets and swords—under a set of mounted carabao antlers and a placard that read: “THE DYSENTERY CROSS, Awarded to the Quartermaster by THE MEN OF BATAAN FIELD.”

  It must have been some sight. “Had forgotten what a white woman looked like,” wrote Lieutenant Burns. Aided by some libations—medicinal alcohol mixed with lemon powder and juice—and boogie-woogie played by Cpl. Robert L. Greenman, an accomplished concert pianist banging on an upright rescued from the ruins of a bombed-out barrio, the pilots loosened up. With each dance, they temporarily escaped the war in a catharsis of candy, alcohol, and conversation.

  As Greenman pounded the keys and the accompaniment of female voices and laughs filtered into the Bataan night, mechanics and repair specialists in a revetment on the other side of the field slapped patches of sheet metal onto Kibosh’s bullet-riddled fuselage. Cut from glistening slabs that had been treated with a violet-hued, anticorrosive paint, the patches contrasted noticeably with the plane’s olive drab skin. By Dyess’s accounting, there were perhaps seventy of them. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a laugh, “my airplane has the measles!”

  Surveying the scene, UPI’s Frank Hewlett got an idea. He tore a piece of paper from his notepad, and grimy, callused hands passed it around the revetment to a chorus of laughter. Written as a faux telegram from the defenders of the Philippines to the White House, Hewlett’s terse words found their way onto a bulletin board and, eventually, into campaign lore:

  TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

  DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

  PLEASE SEND US ANOTHER P-40. OURS IS FULL OF HOLES.

  CHAPTER 4

  God Help Them

  I felt my way with weary stumbling feet,

  Between the broken fragments of defeat

  There was a home-made flag of dirty white.

  Monday, April 6, 1942

  Corregidor, Philippine Islands

  Amid the twilit comfort of the cool tropic winds blowing in from the South China Sea, 1st Lts. Jack Hawkins and Mike Dobervich, USMC, sat in Hawkins’s command post, a dugout chiseled into a chalk cliff near Corregidor’s south shore, full mess kits of chow in their laps. After a few bites, Hawkins decided to break the pregnant silence and pose the question to his best friend. And, for better or worse, put the rumors to rest.

  “How are things going over there?”

  Unlike most of the 4th Marines, Dobervich had been on Bataan since mid-January with the Marine detachment guarding the forward USAFFE headquarters. His appetite had bridged their friendship across the North Channel—this was his third visit to Hawkins’s mess in as many months. Mashing his rice and corned beef hash, he did not mince words with his reply.

  “It looks kind of bad, Jack. The Nips are pushing hard.”

  “How much longer do you think Bataan can hold out?”

  “Not long. Seems to me the folks at home would get something out here to us. I don’t believe they realize what’s going on.”

  “Guess not,” mused Hawkins, a twenty-five-year-old, straight-shooting Texan barely three years out of Annapolis now in command of a reinforced platoon of four dozen machine gunners. “Looks like we’re the lost sheep…. I wonder if all these boys here realize what they’re up against. I know mine do. I don’t try to kid ’em along.”

  “I think most of them do, Jack,” said Dobervich. “I suppose a few believe in that bum headquarters dope about ‘Help is on the way,’ but not many.”

  “These boys out here deserve plenty of credit, don’t they?” said Hawkins. “To go on scrapping when they’re up against a stacked deck like this.”

  “You bet they do,” concurred Dobervich.

  Having reached their consensus, they returned to their mess kits.

  An Annapolis plebe deciding that he did not like ships or the sea—

  anything Navy, really—during his first summer cruise is quite a revelation. Such was the dilemma of Jack Hawkins in July 1936. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Hawkins’s ship, the USS Oklahoma, was ordered to Bilbao, Spain, to pick up American citizens. The student crew was transferred to the Wyoming, and it would take only a few days of rolling across the choppy Atlantic on the cramped older battleship for Hawkins to change his mind about the Navy. Nevertheless he was perhaps destined for a military career.

  While growing up in the northeastern Texas farm town of Roxton, then nearby Paris and later Fort Worth—like his English ancestors who arrived in Virginia circa 1707 and drifted west, Hawkins’s family relocated several times—Hawkins had several role models to emulate, including his future brother-in-law, a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, and his Civil War veteran grandfathers. He was, after all, named for Andrew Jackson Hawkins, a relative who had served in the Louisiana Cavalry. He was also a descendant of one of Queen Elizabeth’s famed Seadogs, Admiral Sir John Hawkins, the commander of the Victory in the sixteenth-century defeat of the Spanish Armada. Regardless of that portion of his pedigree, Hawkins knew that he did not have the salty sea air and cannon smoke in his blood. He also knew that he could not leave Annapolis, his chance at an education and a future. There was only one answer: the Marine Corps. With just twenty-five slots for Marine placement per class,

  it would take four years of dedicated scholarship and subterfuge—to mask his poor eyesight he memorized the eye charts used in physical

  inspections—but Hawkins earned a slot.

  For Mike Dobervich, the decision was equally simple: the military or the ore mines. In the early 1900s, many immigrants mined hematite and manganese from the northeastern Minnesota earth, sent for their families, and settled in the mining town melting pots of the Minnesota Iron Range. One of them, Obrad Dobervich, a Serb, settled in Ironton, where he and his wife Mara brought up eight children. All six of the Dobervich boys boxed; all would fight in World War II. They also
learned the value of an education—five, Michiel included, would attend North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo. Resourceful and hardworking—Austin Shofner would christen him “Beaver”—Dobervich lived with the mayor of Fargo while earning a reputation as an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer, honors as a four-year ROTC officer, and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1939.

  The “Minnesota Yankee” and the “Texas Rebel,” as Hawkins described them, would become best friends upon meeting at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1939. Standing at attention, they were a study in physical contrasts. Hawkins was six foot one and weighed 165 pounds, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion that amplified his boyish looks. A short shock of coffee-colored hair framed Dobervich’s ruggedly handsome face and flint-gray eyes, while his crooked nose and burly build betrayed his pugilist past. Gentle and generous to a fault, Dobervich did not fit the profile of the archetypical Marine officer. Hawkins also remembered a distinct language barrier: “He talked in the rapid staccato of the busy North, and I—well, it always did take me all day to say anything. We weren’t much alike,” he concluded, “but we looked at things the same way.”

  They would be roommates throughout basic school and their first overseas assignment in Shanghai. The 4th Marine Regiment—located in Shanghai—since the late 1920s—had lately been charged with protecting American interests and buffering the city’s International Settlement from the encroaching Sino-Japanese War. The two junior officers would spend seventeen months in the wild, decadent city. By late 1941, the Japanese had encircled the city and since the prevailing, yet impractical war contingency plan called for the understrength Marines to break for far-off Chungking and align with Nationalist forces, Col. Samuel L. Howard successfully lobbied to evacuate the regiment in late November. Though Dobervich had contracted cerebral meningitis, he, Hawkins, and Shofner would travel together to the Philippines aboard the President Madison.

  Now as they finished their meals, Hawkins sensed that Dobervich was not fully recovered.

  “Gee, that was good,” said Dobervich. “I’ll have to come back over to see you again soon, if you’ll promise to feed me like that.”

  “Sure we’ll feed you,” Hawkins said laughing. “When do you think you’ll be back again?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe in a few weeks … maybe never.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  A few minutes later, a gunnysack filled with cans and cartons of cigarettes was placed in the truck that Dobervich had driven up from the North Dock. It was a generous gift, “but we gave gladly, knowing that the boys in Bataan were suffering more than we,” said Hawkins.

  “Take care of yourself,” Hawkins called over the growl of the truck’s engine.

  “Okay. You do the same,” yelled Dobervich. “So long.”

  Hawkins watched Dobervich head down the dusty jungle alley toward the North Dock and the gray unknown beyond. After lingering for a moment in ruminative silence, he pivoted and began the walk back to his dugout.

  Wednesday, April 8, 1942

  Bataan, Philippine Islands

  Cabcaben Field, 2215 hours. The thunderclaps of a nearby 155 millimeter gun muffled the sounds of mechanics and pilots ratcheting the grease-slathered, metallic viscera of a single-engine Navy biplane known as a Grumman J2F Duck. The men had been working in around-the-clock shifts for the past forty-eight hours. As the chief mechanic, 2nd Lt. Leo Boelens had scribbled in his diary, “we must stay—get duck out.”

  It would not be Boelens’s first mechanical miracle. Since his reassignment from the 27th Material Squadron, the imaginative Boelens had not only kept the few remaining planes flying, he had also endeavored to create reinforcements, scavenging parts from cracked-up P-40Bs and P-40Es to build a hybrid Warhawk known to the pilots as the “P-40 Something.” Tonight, however, he would be working against more than a shortage of parts. During trips to requisition tools, the twenty-seven-year-old had encountered columns of troops straggling back from the front. “I predict the beginning of the end,” he jotted in his crude diary on April 7.

  Sunk in January off Mariveles, the Duck had been refloated, repaired, and returned to service with Bataan’s “Bamboo Fleet,” a motley air force including the two surviving P-40s, a 1933 Bellanca Skyrocket, a Beechcraft Staggerwing, and a 1934 Waco bi-wing that the pilots flew to the Visayas and Mindanao on evacuation missions. On their return flights, the planes’ fuselages were crammed with everything from batteries and quinine pills to cigarettes, cognac, candy—and the scarcest commodity of all, news from home. Capt. Joe Moore had discovered an RCA overseas wireless office on the unoccupied island of Cebu, 365 miles south, capable of communicating with California. If not for Moore, Sam Grashio would not have received the cablegram containing news that his wife had given birth to a baby girl.

  The Duck, though, had delivered little good news in the past two days. Following Moore’s mission on April 6, the plane had blown a cylinder. Boelens’s crew was now attempting an emergency transplant with parts from another sunken amphibian.

  The ear-splitting explosions seemed to amplify with each turn of a socket wrench, each bolt and screw tightened. Enveloped by the tumult, the mechanics continued to work as the concussions rattled their tools and their confidence. The battle for Bataan was hurtling inexorably to its terminus. Most certainly, the “pickens,” as Boelens and Dyess used to say, were not good.

  Leo Boelens, the youngest of eleven children born to an immigrant Belgian farmer, possessed an energy and ingenuity acquired in part from his environment. Historically, the inhabitants of northern Wyoming’s Big Horn basin—from Native Americans and frontier trappers to contemporary farmers and ranchers—were good with their hands. Centuries of evidence ranged from tribal petroglyphs pecked on sandstone walls to symmetrical rows of irrigated crops to the tanks and smokestacks of the Standard Oil refinery puncturing the big Western sky.

  At five foot seven and a half, 155 pounds, Boelens was an average-sized farm boy. He would never forget his agricultural roots—he humbly referred to himself in correspondence as “a farmer, L.A.B.”—but Leo Arthur Boelens’s hands were not meant to till the Wyoming soil. He dropped out of the University of Wyoming and joined the Army Air Corps in late 1940. Nine months of dissecting engines and learning airplane design, construction, and maintenance in the Air Corps Technical School’s aeronautical engineering program at Chanute Field near Rantoul, Illinois, awakened a latent talent. “I’m sold on this branch,” he wrote his kin.

  Boelens was commissioned in September 1941 and returned home just before shipping out. As a car waited to take him to Billings, Montana, and the transport that would fly him to San Francisco, shutters clicked, freezing the farewell in time, locking a smiling, broad-shouldered Boelens in his uniform, in his youth, in the permanence of black and

  white.

  No sooner had Boelens ducked into the car than an uncomfortable feeling swept over his older sister, Christina Snyder, who had raised him following the death of their mother in 1928. They shared a unique familial bond and at that moment she was overwhelmed with a sudden premonition. As the car carrying Leo Boelens motored toward Billings, an emotional Snyder turned to the rest of her family.

  “We will never see him again,” she announced.

  Boelens and his crew were just finishing repairs on the Duck when Ed Dyess’s Ford sedan arrived. Dyess, fresh from supervising the evacuation of Bataan Field, was leading a convoy of men to Mariveles Field. There was a rumor that B-17s would be arriving there to evacuate pilots, but Dyess had stopped to inform Lt. Roland Barnick, the pilot assigned to fly the Duck, that he was to wait until the last possible minute for a special passenger from Corregidor, Col. Carlos Romulo, MacArthur’s press officer and the man behind the Voice of Freedom radio broadcasts. The orders, Dyess said, came straight from MacArthur himself.

  Dyess then continued his own personal mission—the evacuation of all flight personnel from the peninsula other than himself—in
complete disregard of an official mandate from his superiors. Dyess had earlier objected to his inclusion on a list of pilots cleared for evacuation. “We haven’t surrendered yet; I can’t leave my men,” he protested. Unwilling to leave, but unable to disobey a direct order, Dyess was now stalling for time for his pilots. He sent Lt. I. B. “Jack” Donalson out on Kibosh; four other pilots on two old P-35s flown up from Mindanao. And, at midnight, Dyess issued one final, surprising order: that Leo Boelens take his seat on the Duck. When Boelens mentioned Dyess’s well-known departure order, Dyess balked. Boelens “was to go and that was an order.”

  Not long after Dyess’s convoy resumed its trek to Mariveles, a relieved Carlos Romulo arrived at Cabcaben. He had spent hours fighting through the “mad stampede” of vehicles and defeated soldiers. Romulo’s excitement, however, dimmed when he caught a glimpse of the Duck by the flickering light of the fires now engulfing Bataan. “It was the funniest-looking plane I had ever seen,” he later wrote. “It looked like something reclaimed from a city dump.” Romulo watched anxiously as the crew spun the propeller. There was a loud popping sound, a shower of sparks. “The engine choked and snarled, snorted and started,” remembered Romulo. The revetment erupted into cheers—Boelens had done it

  again.

  At 0118, gloomy clouds drew back to reveal a platinum moon. No sooner had the passengers boarded, a minor earthquake lasting approximately one minute rippled Bataan, the death-rattle of the peninsula. The overloaded Duck waddled down the quaking strip, spluttered skyward and struggled for altitude, hovering precariously about seventy feet above Manila Bay in the glaring streaks of searchlights. As flak bracketed the ship, the crew lightened the load, tossing out parachutes, pistols, and