Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  life preservers. The plane finally slipped the searchlights’ grip and lumbered away from the embattled peninsula.

  Thursday, April 9, 1942

  Bataan, Philippine Islands

  An aurora swirled in the night skies above Bataan, radiating around the smoke-shrouded peaks of the Mariveles Mountains. Intermittent flashes from phosphorus bombs and incendiary shells bathed the jungle in blinding bursts of white light. The rumbling, subterranean tremors had scarcely subsided when American stockpiles of TNT and ammunition dumps were detonated, causing the peninsula to convulse. Thousands of rounds of projectiles, from artillery and mortar shells to rifle bullets, streaked across the sky in arcing rainbows. “Never did a 4th of July display equal it in noise, lights, colors or cost,” observed one officer.

  Surrender orders had begun to trickle down from command posts to foxholes, and so across Bataan the implements of war were euthanized. Field pieces were double-loaded and fired, blowing the breech blocks and splaying the barrels. The engines of tanks, half-tracks, and trucks were sabotaged. Codebooks, maps, and cash were buried. The Navy scuttled the sub tender Canopus, the largest vessel remaining in Philippine waters, and its shore installations. The bulging mushroom clouds and ghastly, ruby glow of burning fuel tanks were visible for miles.

  Lt. Sam Grashio had never seen anything like it. As the convoy rumbled through the “Dantesque” landscape toward Mariveles in the early morning hours, it seemed as though “the end of the world had come.” Surrender, though no one could actually utter the word, was no longer a rumor, but a reality. Had he been a fool not to leave Bataan? Less than twenty-four hours ago, Dyess had ordered Grashio to fly a reconnaissance mission for the purpose of establishing safe routes of transit for evacuated VIPs. As he had drowsily strolled to the revetment, a family of monkeys that had eluded the mess cooks skittered out and disappeared single file into the brush. Everybody, it seemed, was bugging out of Bataan. But the jungle omen was lost on Grashio.

  Once airborne, he disconnected from the conflict. “The sky was clear and blue and the air was balmy,” Grashio noted. “No bombs were falling, no artillery shells were bursting overhead…. Nobody, racked with awful cramps of dysentery was racing or crawling for a vacant space at a latrine.” Grashio spied several ships and recorded the data before glancing at his fuel gauge. With exactly one-half tank remaining, he could have returned to Bataan or continued south, to safety. Pulled between an instinctive desire for self-preservation and his devotion to duty, Grashio thought about what Dyess would have done. The decision made itself.

  Dyess had created a cult of personality during the last days on Bataan, but his actions were not contrived; he was simply trying to fill a giant void. When MacArthur left on March 11, by way of an executive order issued by FDR, he was rumored to have taken with him—in addition to his wife, son, and Chinese amah—valuables ranging from a cash-stuffed mattress to a refrigerator. Although MacArthur did not take any such items, he did take General Hal George. After a harrowing journey, MacArthur’s party arrived in Australia six days later. At a remote rail station, MacArthur would announce famously that Roosevelt “ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American

  offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”

  But whereas MacArthur’s pledge was largely met with derision—the standing joke, at least among American troops on Bataan, was that upon leaving his foxhole for the latrine one soldier would dutifully inform his comrade that he was going to the head and “shall return”—George’s commitment to return with planes “even if he had to go all the way to the States to get them” was taken at face value. But he was also a realist. “Tell the boys,” he told Dyess privately, “that if I’m not back pretty soon it will not be because I don’t want to come back.” (George would not survive the first full year of the war. The brigadier was killed in a freak accident when an American plane attempting to take off crashed into George’s parked C-40 transport on April 29, 1942, at an airport in Darwin, Australia.)

  Though outranked by several remaining officers, Dyess essentially became George’s successor. It was a daunting task. His pilots barely had enough strength to climb in and out of their cockpits, which, because of dysentery, often had to be cleaned of human waste after flights. Dyess exhausted himself by remaining conspicuously in command. And he expected no special treatment. In late March, the brass had decided to increase the rations of the pilots—and not the enlisted men—to build their strength. Dyess told his sergeants that he would not accept the food unless it was okay with the men. Though resentful of officer’s privilege, they assented because it wasn’t just any officer asking them—it was Dyess.

  Dyess’s convoy motored into Mariveles at dawn and found no B-17s. Patching in to FEAF headquarters at Little Baguio on the Mariveles radio net, Dyess discovered that a boat would take the pilots to Corregidor, from where a submarine would spirit them from the Philippines. But by the time they reached the chaotic dock area, it was too late. Their boat had been filled with nurses and the men had no choice but to wave to them, stoically and gallantly, as if watching loved ones row away from a sinking ship in the last lifeboat. At that moment, Sam Grashio and the other pilots turned to look at their commanding officer, in hopes that he would do what he always did: come up with a solution to their

  problem.

  • • •

  As his two-jeep caravan, adorned with flapping white bedsheets, crept through the battle-scarred jungle and past the foxholes and bivouacs of his weary men, the charred metal skeletons of vehicles, the mountains of stacked arms, and weaponry, Maj. Gen. Edward Postell King, Jr., could not help but think how familiar it all seemed.

  On April 3, Japanese guns had boomed a barrage of high-explosive shells into the center of the skeletal Fil-American lines, and the shells, coupled with incendiaries dropped by bombers, cut a flaming swath nearly two miles beyond the southern slopes of Mount Samat, the anchor of the main line of resistance. Through this gate, thousands of fresh troops—Imperial GHQ had reinforced Homma with air reinforcements from Malaya and also several detachments of men and artillery from China—sluiced into Bataan. By April 7, Homma had cleaved the Fil-American forces. The entire Japanese 14th Army was racing toward Mariveles and there was nothing Ned King could do about it—not even surrender.

  King, a former lawyer in his late fifties with a bushy, auburn mustache, had been USAFFE’s chief artillery officer. After MacArthur’s exit, Gen. Jonathan M. “Skinny” Wainwright, a lean, leathery and unpretentious old cavalryman, was promoted to commander of USFIP—the newly designated United States Forces in the Philippines. King, in turn, inherited the troops on Bataan, now known as Luzon Force—and a nosurrender mandate from FDR and MacArthur. Ignorant of the miserable state of the Allied war effort, MacArthur intended to immediately return to the Philippines with reinforcements and wanted an army there when he did. Accordingly, though thousands of miles removed from the reality of the situation, earlier he had ordered a breakout operation to secure supplies from the Japanese base at Olongapo. To order weak men who could barely walk to disengage from a fight, march several dozen miles, and take a fortified supply depot was lunacy; King rightfully ignored the

  order.

  As the embers of April 8 crumbled into the ashes of morning, King’s agonizing dilemma remained. He could destroy his distintegrating command in a bloody last stand or else entreat with the enemy in the hope of saving his men, though at the likely cost of a disgraceful court-martial. King chose the latter option. That, after all, was what Lee had done. A descendant of Confederate officers, King was acutely aware of the significance of the date. Exactly seventy-seven years to the day earlier, on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his starving Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively endi
ng the Civil War. Lee’s words haunted King: “Then there is nothing left to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

  King arrived at the town of Lamao and, at 1200 hours, sat down at a table to surrender the largest force in American military history. Seated across from him was Homma’s senior operations officer, Col. Motoo Nakayama. Nakayama, angered that King did not have the authority to surrender all of the Fil-American forces in the Philippines, was truculent and condescending. He was further insulted when, after demanding King’s sword, he learned that the general had left his saber in Manila. King convinced Nakayama to accept his pistol instead, but was unable to convince the Japanese to agree to his plan to use USFIP trucks to transport the surrendered troops to a place of Homma’s choosing. Nakayama refused to address King’s concerns about Japan’s treatment of prisoners, instead issuing only a brief, nebulous reply.

  “The Imperial Japanese Army are not barbarians.”

  Ed Dyess was seeing otherwise. He had been resigned to gather his squadron and surrender in an orderly fashion, but that was before he watched enemy planes strafe the unarmed troops waggling bedsheets, towels, and other makeshift surrender flags. The piercing, frightened cries of civilians and children, heard above the thunder of shellfire and bombs, rang his ears in a “symphony of despair.” Dyess first considered joining the guerrillas rumored to be operating in Luzon, but the distance was too great. He also knew that Americans could not take to the hills without quinine to protect themselves from malaria. Peering through the smoke-filled haze suspended above Mariveles Bay, he saw hundreds of desperate men—some swimming, others paddling on rafts or clinging to oil drums, crates, and various pieces of debris—struggling toward Corregidor, but he could not, in good conscience, order his men into the oil-slicked, shark-infested waters.

  Time, however, ran out on Dyess and his men. The Japanese army had metastasized across Bataan, closing all possible escape routes. Near Little Baguio, Dyess’s car found three enemy tanks blocking the road. Nervously, the pilots thrust their hands into the air, waving white handkerchiefs. A Japanese soldier motioned them forward, but, noticing their sidearms, quickly halted them. Frantically unholstering their .45s, the Americans again raised their arms. As the ranking officer, Dyess was punished for the transgression in a torrent of scalding Japanese and blows to his face. “The jig certainly was up,” wrote Dyess.

  Luckily for the passengers of the Duck, now skidding across Manduriao Field with an empty gas tank, Carlos Romulo’s briefcase had not been a casualty of the airborne purge. Searchlights from Japanese ships had sparkled the sky above Cebu Harbor, forcing Romulo to produce a map of secret airfields, thus landing them here, two miles northwest of Iloilo, at dawn. They blinked in disbelief while gazing upon the flowers, green rice fields, and efflorescent splendor of an Iloilo untouched by war. And then the Victory Restaurant, a tiny shack on the field just opened for breakfast, came into focus.

  While downing eight fried eggs and six cups of coffee, Romulo watched Barnick finish eleven eggs, bacon, and biscuits. Boelens ate four orders of ham-and-eggs. One passenger guzzled ten cups of fresh hot coffee. With each guilty bite, they saw the gaunt faces of friends left behind on Bataan.

  Not long after the sumptuous breakfast, they gathered around a radio. Romulo recognized the voice as that of one of his assistants with the Voice of Freedom, Philippine Army 3rd Lt. Norman Reyes. Reyes’s voice quivered amid the crackling static:

  Good evening everyone, everywhere. This is the Voice of Freedom broadcasting from somewhere in the Philippines. Bataan has fallen. The Philippine-American troops on this war-ravaged and bloodstained peninsula have laid down their arms. With heads bloodied but unbowed, they have yielded to the superior force and numbers of the enemy…. All the world will testify to the almost superhuman endurance with which they stood up until the last in the face of overwhelming odds…. Men hedging under the banner of unshakable faith are made of something more than flesh, but they are not made of impervious steel. The flesh must yield at last, endurance melts away and the end of the battle must come. Bataan has fallen, but the spirit that made it stand, a beacon to all the liberty loving peoples of the world, cannot fail.

  With tears in his eyes, Romulo looked away. Though a quiet man who favored an economy of words, Leo Boelens was the only one in the group capable of a response.

  “God help them.”

  PART II

  HELL

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hike

  There was a blazing road that had no end

  Eight thousand captives—not a single friend …

  Friday, April 10, 1942

  East Road, Bataan Province, Philippine Islands

  The story seemed too far-fetched, too irrational—too disquieting—to be true. According to a witness recounting the story in savage detail for Ed Dyess, an American officer was being searched by a Japanese three-star private. “All at once he stopped and sucked in his breath with a hissing sound,” Dyess was told. The soldier had found a crumpled wad of yen, a seemingly trifling offense. But Japanese logic dictated that a prisoner in possession of currency, Rising Sun flags, or any Japanese objects must have taken the items from the body of a dead Japanese. The price for such dishonorable behavior, Dyess learned, was steep.

  The Japanese officer supervising the shakedown forced the American to his knees, unsheathed his sword and raised it above his head. “There was a swish and a kind of chopping thud, like a cleaver going through beef,” said the witness. “The captain’s head seemed to jump off his shoulders. It hit the ground in front of him and went rolling crazily from side to side between the lines of prisoners.” The headless body, spurting blood, flopped forward and the dust at the prisoners’ feet coagulated into scarlet mud. The dead man’s hands opened and closed “spasmodically.” The executioner then hovered over the body, wiping his sword clean, before strutting off. The private, after collecting the deceased’s possessions, continued down the line. “Now, as never before,” seethed Dyess, “I wanted to kill Japs for the pleasure of it.”

  Dyess had been simmering ever since his first, foreboding encounter with the Japanese near Little Baguio, but his blood had really begun to boil when he and the remnants of the 21st Pursuit were assembled near Mariveles the following morning. The sun had burned off the dawn mist, revealing a mob scene of vehicles, refugees, surrendered American and Filipino soldiers, and swaggering Japanese troops. “A Philippines Times Square,” recalled one American. The POWs were corralled in sun-splashed staging areas and forced to stand at attention. Some Japanese soldiers, similarly exhausted and hungry, offered cigarettes or food from their bento boxes. But few were in a magnanimous mood. They had not conquered Bataan quickly or with impunity; by late April, roughly 40,000 patients suffering from everything from malaria to combat wounds would fill Japanese hospitals. And though they despised their adversaries taking so long to surrender, their full fury was reserved for a greater affront: the fact that the Americans and Filipinos had allowed themselves to be captured at all.

  According to the code of Bushido—“The Way of the Warrior”—in which all Japanese personnel had been indoctrinated, the paradoxical, paramount goal of life was death in all its glorious fealty and finality. One who surrendered, therefore, defied his destiny of death, betrayed his emperor, his country, his family, and his comrades. In essence, he betrayed yamato damashii—the very soul of Japan.

  In the oppressive heat, the Japanese had searched the POWs, ostensibly for weapons or items of military intelligence value, but really for loot. They worked efficiently and forcibly, taking jewelry, Parker ballpoint pens, Zippo lighters, and American cigarettes. The Japanese had a fancy for wristwatches—many strutted around, their forearms decorated with a half-dozen Timexes, Hamiltons, and Elgins. Malicious guards shredded photographs of prisoners’ loved ones. One seized a pair of eyeglasses, smashed the lenses, and walked away, leaving the prisoner to grope around. Another furiously tugged at a West Poin
t ring on an officer’s swollen finger. Undaunted, he held the man’s hand to the trunk of a tree and, with one, swift slice from a bolo—a Philippine machete—separated both the ring and the finger from the American. Determined not to let his Randolph Field ring become a Japanese souvenir, Dyess defiantly hurled his into Manila Bay. Sam Grashio, taking his cue, tore up a photograph of his wife before the Japanese could do so. “There still was plenty of fight left in us,” said Dyess. “We were prisoners, but we didn’t feel licked.” Their fighting days were finished but, as time would tell, they could ill afford to surrender their fighting spirit.

  Flanked by soldiers wearing tropic field caps with cloth sun flaps, prisoners began marching out of Mariveles, three or four abreast, in long, mosaic columns of blue, khaki, and olive drab. They moved up the steep grade of the serpentine East Road, its white, partial asphalt surface cratered and shimmering with heat waves, their eyes widened to a bewildering panorama. Guided by rays of sparkling sunlight filtering down through the jungle canopy, they passed twisted old banyan trees grotesquely splintered by shrapnel. The mangled metal hulks of fire-gutted vehicles, some licked by dying flames, littered the battle-scarred landscape. Swarming with hordes of insects, decaying bodies clogged ditches and thickets of bamboo and ipil-ipil. The impenetrable walls of steamy emerald jungle receded, revealing a hissing, crackling funeral pyre of corpses, timber, and cogon grass. Clouds of acrid, brooding smoke, mixed with the pungent perfumes of cordite and rotting flesh, wafted across the