Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  peninsula.

  But it was no sightseeing tour—the pace was maddening. Successive sets of impatient, time-conscious guards incessantly spurred the prisoners forward with unintelligible Japanese and commands of “Speedo! Speedo!” Growing progressively more frustrated, they breached the language barrier with pricks and puncture wounds from their bayonets. Prisoners were also punished for their lethargy with fists, clubs, and rifle butts, and had no choice but to absorb the blows and trudge on in silent misery. Talking consumed energy, of which they had little. It also produced a need for water, of which they had even less, despite the artesian wells scattered about the war-torn jungle wasteland.

  Even rest breaks, which were few and far between, sapped vital energy. With a flash of their steel bayonets, the guards would occasionally prod the columns of gaunt, stubble-bearded prisoners off the East Road, usually to make room for the never-ending convoy of Imperial Army tanks, trucks, and troops slithering through the smoldering jungle. As if by design, the Japanese chose canebrakes, fields, or vacant lots that offered little or no protection from the searing rays of the soul-scorching sun. There the men would sit, sometimes for hours, and for seemingly no good reason, enduring what they would call the sun treatment—brutal sessions of prolonged exposure that left them mentally, physically, and spiritually drained.

  The passing motorized processions stirred ashen clouds of powder, which settled upon the prisoners, lending a spectral appearance to the shuffling masses. Near Little Baguio, Dyess and Grashio watched in horror as the Japanese swept sick and wounded prisoners from Field Hospital No. 1 into the march. For nearly a mile, these men—some of whom were amputees—hobbled along, their bloody field dressings unraveling with each excruciating step. Grashio saw one legless Filipino dragging himself forward with his arms. “I can never forget the hopelessness in their eyes,” Dyess would write.

  While most of these hapless prisoners inevitably and perhaps mercifully fell victim to bullets and bayonets—groups of guards called “buzzard” or “clean-up” squads trailed the columns—some met more gruesome fates. One wobbly, disoriented patient, flung into an onrushing column by a cruel guard, was struck down in a grotesque crush of metal, rubber, bones, and flesh. In the subsequent procession of squealing steel treads and tires, his clothes—all that remained of the man’s existence—were embedded into the oil-slicked thoroughfare. One prisoner, Sgt. Mario “Motts” Tonelli of the 200th Coast Artillery, a former standout football player at the University of Notre Dame and with pro football’s Chicago Cardinals, recalled the sound of hundreds of hooves rumbling the ground like an earthquake. A raucous troop of cavalrymen soon galloped past, a Rising Sun flag flapping in their midst. Tonelli spied a barely discernible object bobbing above the ensign and the loud, jumbled mass of horses and humanity. Abruptly, it came into full, horrific view: a mutilated human head, skewered atop a pike and veiled with a swarm of fat black blowflies and maggots crawling from vacant eye sockets and nostrils. “We’re in trouble,” Tonelli would say.

  While their minds struggled to process the macabre, waking nightmare, Japanese soldiers leaned from trucks to spit on them or clobber them with rifles and bamboo poles. Others mockingly threw up their arms in imitation of the surrender motion. For Dyess, the ultimate insult was seeing hundreds of Fords and Chevrolets idling on the congested road. “It is hard to describe what we felt at seeing these familiar American machines, filled with jeering, snarling Japs,” he wrote. “It was a sort of super-sinking feeling. We had become accustomed to having American iron thrown at us by the Japs, but this was a little too much.”

  The demoralized, dehydrated prisoners, further weakened by hunger and disease—each prisoner was estimated to have carried between one and four diseases on the march—predictably began to stumble. Temperatures soared and discipline all but evaporated. Men slipped from the columns and lunged for the artesian wells, others for roadside carabao wallows, the scum-covered puddles of brackish, bacteria-laden water in which floated the carcasses of dead animals and bloated corpses. Few reached either. Fusillades of gunfire reverberated, and, with measured proficiency, guards slashed stomachs with a sequence of Z-shaped cuts. After jerking their dripping bayonets from the slashed bowels, the guards wiped the instruments clean of the fresh blood.

  As morning melted into afternoon and the fabric of reality unraveled before his eyes, Dyess could not shake the story of the beheaded Air Corps captain—he had known the man personally. Dyess’s own head whirled in delirium and throbbed with splitting headaches. With each step, the normally cool, collected Texan grew dangerously more flammable. He longed to strike out against his captors, but quickly pulled himself out of the emotional nosedive. “By going berserk now,” he understood, “I would only lose my own life without hope of ever helping to even the score.” Until the situation improved, Dyess could only ball his fists and continue along the East Road, all the while making a vow to live—and fight—another day.

  In either direction, as far as Sam Grashio could see, the sad columns of shadows stretched along the East Road and vanished into the coppery twilight. Grashio prayed that one of those shadows was Dyess; they had been separated hours earlier when Dyess was beaten into a ditch by a hysterical Japanese soldier. Now he had only the charismatic officer’s words to sustain him. “Dyess … told me we had to survive if only to someday gain revenge on our torturers. As always when I was around Ed, some of his spirit rubbed off onto me.”

  Though there was no logical explanation for the madness Grashio had witnessed, some predictable patterns and concrete constants were revealed. The earliest lesson involved the frequent inspections: the tremulous chorus of whispers that floated through the ranks—“Get rid of your Jap stuff, quick!”—would have to be acted upon immediately. And Grashio’s separation from Dyess revealed the guards’ penchant for committing acts of violence against tall prisoners. Insignias of rank also made inviting targets for torment: officers were forced to bow before Japanese privates. And Americans were often humiliated in front of Filipinos.

  Grashio could see that in the eyes of the Japanese, stragglers were viewed not as sick, starving men who needed assistance, but as noncompliants and weaklings. Because of a scarcity of oil (most fuel was usurped by the Imperial Navy for its ships and planes), Japanese soldiers were conditioned to march long distances, and therefore few had sympathy for an enemy they regarded as lazy and decadent.

  Since it certainly seemed as though the Japanese had no intention of providing food or water, the POWs would have to fend for themselves. Jack Donohoe of the 21st Pursuit, for instance, found a moldy, weevil-infested sack of horse feed that he and another POW devoured. They would attempt to eat at their own risk. Grashio remembered seeing a case of PET evaporated milk fall off a passing truck. “Prisoners swarmed over it like ants,” he said. “The Japanese leaped in among them, swinging their fists, kicking and flailing with rifle butts until all the parched and famished wretches had been pounded back into line.”

  There were, however, no absolute certainties when it came to the mercurial Japanese. No two guards seemed or acted alike. An incident that might drive one into a rage could simply amuse another. To Grashio, there seemed to be only one plan of action: “Realists learned early … that it was essential to be obedient and submissive…. Any captive who was undisciplined, uncooperative or rebellious rarely survived to boast about it.”

  The POWs themselves were even less predictable. Out of the fiery Philippine blast furnace came the worst by-products of humanity. Before the Japanese segregated the prisoners, they marched together, Yank and Filipino, officer and enlisted man, dogface and bluejacket, pilot and Philippine Scout. When permitted, stronger prisoners bore wounded on their shoulders or on litters. Water and food were shared. But as the hours and days dragged on, an “every man for himself” attitude gradually prevailed. The command structure—the cornerstone of military discipline—

  crumbled. In some cases, it took days. Others, merely hours. Homogeneous
groups fared best; individuals separated from their units and friends struggled to survive. As the mercury rose, the situation worsened. Some officers shirked their leadership responsibilities. Enlisted men, blaming officers for their current predicament, refused to obey orders. Canteens were stolen. Food was hoarded. Tempers flared. Pickpockets prospered.

  At least they could count on the Filipino civilians, most of whom were Catholic and for whom the march seemed a horrifically real senakulo, a passion play depicting the Stations of the Cross, the sufferings endured by Christ before Crucifixion. Civilians hid cans of water in clumps of cogon and flung rice balls, cookies, and cigarettes into the columns. Children bounded alongside, pressing fruit, sugarcane, and cassava cakes, as well as bottles of water, into prisoners’ hands. Women shuttled fish, chicken, and rice wrapped in banana leaves and merchants opened their carinderias, refusing payment. Others discreetly called to the prisoners—“Hey, Joe”—and flashed their index and middle fingers in the universal “V for Victory” sign.

  Often, the aid came with consequences. At Limay, a farmer and his wife were burned at the stake for aiding the POWs. Elsewhere, a pregnant Filipina who had thrown food to the Americans was bayoneted through her womb. Though Homma had advocated a policy of rapprochement with the estimated seventeen million Filipinos, there were some members of the Japanese military who felt that the Filipinos should be punished for their desertion of the Asian cause and their loyalty to the United States. As those sentiments became reality, the Filipinos saw that for them, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere meant anything but prosperity. They had heard stories of Japanese brutality in Manila and now saw their fathers, sons, and brothers bayoneted and left to slow deaths writhing in the Bataan dust. Until the day MacArthur made good on his promise—and they believed firmly that he would—they were determined to share with their allies the burdens of occupation and captivity in the best spirit of balikatan, a Tagalog word meaning “shoulder to shoulder.”

  But for men hoping and praying just to survive another minute, or another hour, to make it to the next rest stop, the next town, even the next palm tree, that day seemed hopelessly distant. At midnight, after an exhausting, circuitous march, Grashio’s group was herded back into a rice paddy not far from Cabcaben Field. He collapsed onto the ground and fell asleep. If he was lucky, another day—and more survival lessons—would greet him in the morning.

  • • •

  Contrary to popular belief, the evacuation of Filipino and American prisoners of war from the Bataan Peninsula was not an atrocity of deliberate design. Based on poor intelligence, plagued with breakdowns in leadership and discipline, and launched in a chaotic environment made combustible by a broiling tropic sun, cultural clashes, and ethnic enmity, the operation was, quite simply, a catastrophic masakozi—the Japanese equivalent of an American snafu.

  As a military plan, the Bataan Death March was conceived in 14th Army operations tents in March at the order of Gen. Masaharu Homma. On paper, the plan to evacuate the prisoners from Bataan to a prison camp in central Luzon appeared humane and logistically sound. The majority of the prisoners would march up the East Road, but vehicles would convey sick and wounded incapable of making the roughly sixty-five-mile journey on foot. Food was to be distributed and medical aid stations would be set up along the route. At the town of San Fernando, the prisoners would board railcars for a twenty-four mile train ride to Capas, in Tarlac. Homma even requested that his men treat the POWs with a “friendly spirit,” in loose accordance with the Geneva Convention articles that Japan never officially agreed to observe. (Japanese delegates to the Geneva conference had signed the document standardizing the treatment of prisoners of war in 1929, but Tokyo never ratified the pact.) The directive was no surprise, considering that at the outbreak of hostilities, the emperor himself had decreed that enemy POWs were to be handled “with utmost kindness and benevolence.”

  Homma’s intentions were most likely sincere. The tall, powerfully built fifty-four-year-old officer was considered one of the most principled strategists in the Imperial Army. His foreign postings included duty as an observer with the British Expeditionary Force during World

  War I and later as a military attaché in London. The pro-Western officer had suppressed a pamphlet accusing America of exploiting the Philippines while head of the army’s propaganda corps in the 1930s. Even as the ultranationalists swept to power, Homma never embraced their beliefs, reportedly even criticizing Japanese atrocities in China. Called the “Poet General” because of his habit of composing verse to ease the tension of battle, Homma was a “brilliant, passionate, unpredictable, and slightly unstable” fantasist given to flights of whimsy, who, according to British historian Arthur Swinson, was straitjacketed by “the iron discipline of the Japanese army.” Homma’s weaknesses included egotism and acute affections for drink and women, but his tendency to become immersed in strategy and delegate details to subordinates was perhaps his greatest flaw.

  That flaw, combined with one fatal miscalculation, a change in Homma’s chronology of conquest and subsequent breakdowns in communications and discipline, would doom the evacuation operation to complete, calamitous failure. Homma’s command had underestimated the number of prisoners it would become responsible for by nearly half. Though Tokyo’s Domei news agency announced the capture of 60,000 Fil-American troops, the actual number was closer to 70,000; Homma’s staff had expected and made provisions for only 40,000 prisoners. Compounding the problem, the 14th Army had these additional prisoners on its hands three weeks earlier than anticipated—Homma had not expected Bataan to fall until late April. Instead of modifying the plan, Homma characteristically became engrossed with the details of the planned invasion of Corregidor and the conclusion of the Philippines campaign.

  And despite the vaunted Japanese notions of Bushido discipline and obedience, most commanders were unable to restrain their men. Consequently, the official orders and instructions, as prescribed by Emperor Hirohito and General Homma, never filtered down to the junior officers and foot soldiers who actually carried out the evacuation. These men instead resorted to their own brand of discipline to complete the task, a system of corporal punishment unique to the Japanese military hierarchy in which officers and soldiers could strike subordinates. So it was only natural that when the long-abused Japanese foot soldier finally had a chance to inflict blows on disgraceful POWs, the succession of institutionalized violence would continue.

  Certainly, beheading and running over men with tanks had nothing to do with disciplinary failures or administrative incompetence. Instead, virulent ultranationalism and racial hatred helped spiral the situation out of control. No doubt a direct malignant influence was the fanatical Col. Masanobu Tsuji, an iniquitous figure who reportedly dined on the liver of a dead Allied pilot in Burma and was responsible for myriad massacres and war crimes in Singapore and China. Lurking in the shadowy chaos following the surrender, Tsuji commenced a personal terror campaign, issuing false orders for mass executions and reportedly conducting demonstrations on the disposal of enemy POWs for Japanese troops.

  A final rationalization for the Death March holds that many Japanese, intoxicated with the speed and scope of their early conquests, believed that it was impossible to lose the war. The “victory disease” was pandemic. And whether by impulse or design, retribution was becoming the victors’ policy. On April 24, a rancorous editorial appeared in the Japan Times & Advertiser: “They cannot be treated as ordinary prisoners of war…. To show them mercy is to prolong the war…. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The Japanese Forces are crusaders in a holy war. Hesitation is uncalled for, and the wrongdoers must be wiped out.”

  Sunday, April 12, 1942

  East Road, Bataan Province, Philippine Islands

  For hours, Ed Dyess had stumbled along in the turbid darkness, mechanically placing one foot in front of the other, step after step, mile after torturous mile, somehow keeping the grueling pace while many, unable to will anot
her step, dropped around him. Their groans and screams were layered with the ripping sounds of bayonets piercing flesh, a contrast to the peaceful rustling of palm fronds in the night air. Muzzle blasts of orange flame ended the misery of countless others.

  Those that continued on did so in a half-conscious daze. They had seen comrades tied to trees and used as targets for bayonet practice. One American had started counting the decapitated corpses he had seen littering the road, but stopped at twenty-seven for fear of going out of his mind. “The bloodthirsty devils now were killing us for diversion,” said Dyess.

  The POWs were expected to maintain the relentless pace, regardless of whether the guards were on foot or bicycles, resulting in excruciating cramps. Many prisoners were forced to defecate in motion, further soiling their grimy bodies. Said Sam Grashio, who was marching in another column further north, “the imaginations of our captors were inexhaustible when it came to devising ways to increase our suffering.”

  For Dyess, the worst part of the ordeal began at sundown of the previous evening, when the prisoners were herded into the courtyard of a Spanish mission near Balanga. They had watched Japanese cooks dump soy sauce and cans of Vienna sausage into bubbling cauldrons of rice, but after the prisoners were searched they were marched away from the tantalizing food. “When you came here you were told you would eat and be let to sleep. Now that has changed,” bellowed a Japanese officer in English. “We have found pistols concealed among three American officers. In punishment for these offenses you will not be given food. You will march to Orani before you sleep.” Dyess saw through the thinly veiled ruse: “The Japs were simply adding mental torture to the physical.”

  After twenty-one hours and nearly thirty miles on their feet, they were prodded into a barbed wire compound at three o’clock in the morning. The enclosure, built to hold perhaps 500 men, immediately became a polluted prison yard filled with more than 2,000 POWs. They collapsed in an orgy of aching muscles; blistered feet; empty, growling stomachs.