At dawn on April 13, the first rays of the sun began to incubate the distended cesspool, intensifying the stench. Feces, urine, and legions of gray, squirming maggots from the overflowing straddle trench that served as the prisoners’ latrine spilled across the ground. The shouts of starved, hallucinating prisoners filled the compound. Feverish POWs screaming obscenities at the Japanese had to be subdued. Many dehydrated men, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets and their lips blue, lapsed into comas. The Japanese ordered the prisoners to carry the dead outside the wire and bury them in shallow graves. “The strain was telling even on the strongest men, or rather we ceased to be men—more like filthy, starving rabble,” said Dyess.
Finally, after being fed a small ball of sticky gray rice, the prisoners resumed the march at dusk the next day. It was about midnight when the rain first started falling—solitary droplets pattering into the dust. It soon fell in wet, chilling, God-sent sheets, cleansing the crust of blood, human waste, and grit from the prisoners’ bodies. With trembling hands, men clanged canteen cups, mess kits, and cupped hands into the air. Though the downpour lasted only fifteen minutes, it provided many weary prisoners with the strength to continue. “I felt like a fighter,” Dyess would write, “who has been saved by the bell.”
Wednesday, April 15, 1942
San Fernando, Bataan Province
The march would proceed north from Orion to Abucay and then on to Highway 7, which funneled the filthy, starving prisoners into the sugar mill town of San Fernando. There, the train depot buzzed with insects and rumors, the latter, of course, regarding the POW’s ultimate destination. Sam Grashio did not have enough energy to mull over the future. Only a few hours removed from a terrifying nightmare spent with 1,500 other prisoners in a squalid, sheet iron warehouse near Lubao, he was chiefly concerned with getting his bearings. “I was so close to total physical and mental collapse during the latter part of the march that half the time I did not know where I was,” he admitted. As he understood it, the prisoners were supposedly headed via train to a prison camp somewhere in central Luzon. Regardless of the destination, most were relieved to know that they would not have to walk. They believed that the worst was behind them.
Then several ramshackle, steel-sided boxcars began reeling down the narrow gauge tracks. Most were World War I–era “Forty and Eights,” so nicknamed because they were designed to ferry forty soldiers or eight horses. But the Japanese jolted open the cars’ rusty doors and prodded the prisoners inside with bayonets and rifle butts, sadistically forcing in dozens of men until movement was virtually impossible. The doors then slammed shut in a series of concurrent, metallic shrieks. Latches clanged. Padlocks clicked.
Temperatures in the poorly ventilated cars reached in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and a dreadful odor quickly filled the rolling kilns. The POWs had not bathed in weeks and their bodies stank. Floorboards were soon smeared with urine, feces, and vomit. “The stink was so overpowering, I feared I would suffocate,” said Grashio. Soon after the cars lurched forward, some men fainted. In some cars, men died upright, unable to slump to the floor.
The door to Grashio’s boxcar had not been completely closed and, unlike in other crammed cars where the strongest prisoners or those nearest the door refused to budge, men rotated positions for fresh air. As the cars clicked and crawled through the sugarcane fields, dried-up dikes, and sunken rice paddies of Pampanga Province into the great, flat emptiness of central Luzon, Grashio contemplated both his future and his destination. A desperate man in a nearby car, however, had already given thought to his next stop: Grashio watched him commit suicide by jumping from the train as it crossed a trestle.
The train panted to a stop as the doors of the sweltering, swollen railcars screeched open. Prisoners gasping for air tumbled out of their shadowy stupor into the blinding sun.
Having not eaten in two days, Ed Dyess emerged disoriented and weak. The days had melted together, grisly atrocities fused by the stultifying heat. His only recollections of the past seventy-two hours were a handful of haunting images, a Filipino hanging on a fence, his entrails hanging from his slashed abdomen like “great, grayish purple ropes” … three Americans savagely lashed with a horsewhip … six thirst-mad prisoners dashing for an artesian well as guards raised their rifles and in a hailstorm of bullets two men, fatally wounded, crawled determinedly toward the water until additional volleys stopped them.
Unbeknownst to Dyess, he had endured the most infamous war crime in the annals of American military history, a survivor not a statistic. Others were not so lucky; nearly 700 Americans and perhaps as many as 10,000 Filipinos were believed to have died throughout the three-week-long nightmare that they would call, simply, “the Hike.”
Upon regaining consciousness, he learned that the three-hour trip had brought him to Capas, in Tarlac Province, the location of a prison camp named O’Donnell. After a requisite session of the sun treatment, the prisoners were rousted to their feet for the final leg of their journey. Soon after reaching the crest of a small knoll, Dyess squinted through the dazzling glare to spy clusters of squatty shacks and tumbledown buildings teeming with what looked like thousands of people. The enclosure
was ringed with silvery strands of barbed wire and cornered by guard towers that loomed out of the thick rug of cogon grass. Atop each of the crude timber parapets was a large Rising Sun flag. The real sun plunged behind the craggy peaks of the Zambales Mountains, bathing the bleak, rambling plain in a foreboding shadow. Dyess shuddered.
“As we stood, staring dazedly, there came to me a premonition that hundreds about to enter O’Donnell prison this April day never would leave it alive,” he said. “If I could have known what lay in store for us all, I think I would have given up the ghost then and there.”
CHAPTER 6
Goodbye and
Good Luck
Then came the bitter days when those alive
Fought in a vicious struggle to survive
When we begrudged the little strength we gave
To dig our withered dead a shallow grave.
Wednesday, April 15, 1942
Corregidor, Manila Bay
Our flag still flies on this beleaguered island fortress,” General Wainwright had reassured President Roosevelt from Corregidor after Bataan’s surrender. But not for much longer, thought 1st Lt. Jack Hawkins. Through his field glasses, Hawkins had seen the enemy columns snaking into southern Bataan and knew that the Japanese would now focus their attention—as well as their full arsenal—on the Rock. And, as Hawkins had also seen, the notion of defeat was a distasteful one. Hundreds of Bataan refugees had washed up on Corregidor, including three haggard, half-drowned soldiers he provided coffee, food, and medical attention. “They were soon revived enough to talk, but still they were hesitant,” he recalled. “A dreadful haunted look was in their darkly circled eyes.” Eventually, one managed a whisper: “It’s awful to be licked.”
Yet Hawkins was confident that Corregidor would not go without one helluva fight. The resilient garrison had adopted a molelike routine of repairing and rebuilding at night. Ammunition was plentiful and there was enough food, theoretically, to last through June. Though they had no radar, they had Private Soochow, the Marines’ Shanghai mascot mutt. Whenever he tore across the beach for cover, the Marines wisely followed the canine’s lead because Japanese bombers were certain to appear. Many “shelter-shocked” soldiers, however, avoided the relentless bombardments by refusing to leave the island’s tunnels and bunkers. Recognizable by their pallor, they were disparagingly diagnosed with “tunnelitis.”
Hawkins, who rarely left his dugout command post overlooking the foxholes in which his men were burrowed with their water-cooled Brownings, could handle the bombs and the shelling. He hated the waiting, which was reminiscent of the tension in the tinderbox of Shanghai, where the 4th Marines believed that any small spark would ignite a war. Continuing to surveil the swells of Manila Bay, Hawkins knew that the marines and the Japanese woul
d soon finally tangle. His thoughts, as they often did, drifted to home and to his fiancée. And what of his best friend, Mike Dobervich? “Is he still alive?” Hawkins wondered, “or would he be better off dead at any rate, than alive in the hands of the Japs?”
Thursday, April 16–Thursday, April 23, 1942
Capas, Tarlac Province, Luzon
Not a single prisoner suffering inside Camp O’Donnell would dare consider himself lucky, but Mike Dobervich might have been the luckiest man in the whole squalid stockade. The charmed Marine had not only recovered from cerebral meningitis in time to leave Shanghai, he had also survived three months on Bataan. Providence had shined on Dobervich once more, when a Japanese officer ordered him behind the wheel of a GMC truck loaded with sugar, thus saving him from experiencing the Death March on foot.
Rumbling in a slow convoy of captured vehicles, he had watched
helplessly—the guard riding next to him pointed a bayonet at his side—
as the parade of beatings, torture, and death unfolded. He saw an American colonel shot down while dashing for a spring and bristled with rage seeing staff officers run through a looting gauntlet at Balanga. He, too, would lose his wristwatch, two fountain pens, 500 Philippine pesos and 40 U.S. dollars on the trek, but his uncanny good fortune had enabled him to keep his life. Yet such sights and experiences would not stay in
Dobervich’s rearview mirror. Nor would his incredible luck last.
Braking at the gates of O’Donnell on April 11, he must have felt like Dante entering the fiery depths of Inferno. The heat and the camp’s desolate location made the comparison appropriate. “The infuriating, obtuse guards looked to us as though each had horns and a tail and was carrying a pitchfork instead of a rifle … it quickly became apparent to all of us that we were doomed to eternal hellfire,” said one Filipino. The reception awaiting the prisoners augured as much.
Dobervich was one of the first to experience the infamous “welcome” speech of Capt. Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, the camp’s commandant. “We were herded in front of the Japanese headquarters building and from general down to private, we all stood at attention and had to salute the camp commander who had us stand at attention for 16 hours in the terrific heat,” wrote Dobervich, recalling his first dose of the sun treatment.
After a long wait, Tsuneyoshi, a stumpy, middle-aged man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a Hitler mustache, and a baggy uniform with a sword dangling from his belt, strutted onto a canopied platform, where he commenced a rambling tirade. Behind Tsuneyoshi was a youthful, fat, Filipino-Japanese who translated the rants.
Many prisoners, too tired, too thirsty, and too miserable to listen, sat stupefied in the sun, their heads bowed, their backs turned to the unintelligible shouts. One intuitive American officer sensed that the orator “breathed the very essence of hate.” Ed Dyess, who endured a similar harangue upon his arrival, speculated on Tsuneyoshi’s mental competence, remarking that the disheveled, would-be dictator “roared at us with a pomposity reminiscent of Mussolini’s. But the loose-lipped vacuity of his expression was that of an idiot.”
“The captain, he say Nippon has capture Javver, Sumatter and New Guinyah,” droned the interpreter. “Captain, he say we soon have Austrayler and New Zealyer.”
There were several variations of the sulfurous speech, but a gloating summary of Japanese victories was standard. Tsuneyoshi declared that he cared little whether the prisoners, whom he referred to as “dogs,” lived or died. He recited a long list of regulations—from the necessity of saluting all Japanese to the prohibition of escape attempts—all of which seemed to be punishable by death. His tone, his theatrical delivery, and his message ultimately remained the same.
The interpreter continued: “The captain, he say America and Nippon enemies. Always will be enemies. If Nippon do not defeat America this time, Nippon fight again and again until America is defeated. Always will be war until America is Nippon’s.”
Reaching a crescendo of hysterics, Tsuneyoshi spewed forth such a volume of verbal venom that even the most exhausted prisoner was forced to lift his head and take notice.
“Captain, he say you are not prisoners of war. You are sworn enemies of Japan. Therefore, you will not be treated like prisoners of honorable war. Captain, he say you will be treated like captives.” The interpreter, himself worked into a frenzy, spit a final promise: “Captain, he say you will have trouble from him.”
Satisfied with his performance, Tsuneyoshi clicked his spurred boot heels and stomped off the stage. Many things could and would be said about the diminutive Japanese despot, but it could not be said that he was not a man of his word.
Although most prisoners would spend less than two months in O’Donnell, the experience would provide a lifetime of horrors. “Words cannot describe the conditions,” Dobervich would later say. “Only the eye could appreciate the seriousness of it all.”
The Japanese would attempt to cram 50,000 prisoners into the half-finished Philippine Army recruit depot originally intended to house 9,000 men, to catastrophic results. Roughly 600 acres, or just under one mile square in total area, with no electricity or sanitation, the enclosure was nothing more than an ever-expanding coop of men. Subject to the temperamental whims of an asthmatic gasoline pump that broke down every few hours and sadistic guards that shut off the water main at irregular intervals, the parched prisoners waited around the clock in meandering lines at two small spigots to fill their canteens with tepid water. Bathing was possible only when it rained. The prisoners were fed tiny portions of lugao, a pastry rice gruel full of floor sweepings and weevils that tasted like glue, plus occasional helpings of rotten camotes, mango beans, and other cast-off vegetables. Ravenous men were soon reduced to stealing food, scheming other prisoners for their rations, and scrambling to catch grasshoppers, rats, and stray dogs. Many traded or deferred their rice rations for cigarettes, transactions that the Grim Reaper would ultimately collect on.
The starvation diet, begun on Bataan and continued into captivity, ushered in a slew of vitamin deficiency diseases. The worst was wet beriberi, a ruthless illness that shut down a man’s kidneys, causing body tissues to become repulsively engorged with fluids until the ballooned skin cracked into fissures oozing with yellow pus and the overtaxed heart failed. Slit trenches overflowing with excrement spawned swarms of green and bluebottle flies, humming airborne agents of contagion that flew from fecal matter to festering sores to rice, spreading a vicious cycle of diarrhea, amoebic dysentery, and death throughout the compound. The entire camp, lacking mosquito nets and blankets, convulsed with the spiking, sweat-drenched fevers and teeth-chattering chills of malaria. A hospital was set up, but without medicine, doctors were powerless to stop the plagues visited upon the POWs. Hopeless cases were sent to a ghastly vestibule to the hereafter known to the prisoners as “St. Peter’s Ward.”
Not content to let starvation and disease thin the prisoners’ ranks, the Japanese were responsible for additional deaths through abuse, torture, and outright execution. Those barely able to walk were forced into gangs for labor outside the camp. “Many came back and had to be carried to the hospital only to die in a few days,” said Dobervich. The Japanese dispensed brutal beatings for minor infractions and shot or beheaded those deemed guilty of more serious transgressions. They specialized in cruel and unusual punishments. Some prisoners were leashed to stakes like animals and left to die in the blistering heat. Another pitiless pastime was to place a hose into a victim’s throat or rectum and pump water until the entrails ruptured. One POW who escaped the barbed wire perimeter was immediately apprehended, flogged, and strung up in front of the Japanese headquarters. Amazingly, the delirious man escaped once more, only to be recaptured and whipped into a bloody, unrecognizable heap of shredded skin. “We never saw him again,” said Ed Dyess, “but we know he didn’t escape.” The message was delivered with terrifying, unmistakable clarity: there was only one way to truly escape O’Donnell.
It was not long before the corpses
began to appear everywhere. Stripped of their tattered uniforms—to be recycled for use by needy prisoners—the naked, emaciated bodies were informally stacked like cordwood. Sometimes, they blackened and bloated in the sun for days until men strong enough to dig graves could be found.
The burial details were hard, morbid, mind-numbing work. On average, it took four men to carry one corpse; more were required to haul the distended bodies of those who died of wet beriberi, which often weighed in excess of 300 pounds and were liable to burst if mishandled. Guided by guards, they trudged outside the wire and ascended a rise to a crude cemetery—“Boot Hill,” some called it—carrying the corpses by their bony arms and legs or else in litters, to the yawning mouths of mass graves. “Then you would take the dog tag, if they had one, and put it in their mouth for burial and cover them up,” said Motts Tonelli. There was no ceremony, no prayers, just corpse after corpse, sometimes twenty or thirty, little more than bones and skulls, the remnants of men who had fought for a common cause thrown together in a common pit.
As the deaths continued, the work became increasingly more macabre. Tales of men being buried alive were commonplace, including one told to Dobervich by a fellow Marine. “Before the covering process started one of the dead bodies began to move and there was a feeble effort to raise its head. The Jap guard ordered this Marine of mine to strike the head with a shovel,” wrote Dobervich. “He hesitated and that angered the guard so that the bayonet was thrust at him, so he was forced to obey.”
Because of the high water table, which filled the pits with seepage, floating corpses often had to be pinned with bamboo poles while weak men tossed weighty shovelfuls of dirt. Dogs and buzzards gnawed on the arms and legs, stiffened with rigor mortis and silhouetted in the milky moonlight, that poked through the thin blanket of dirt. Worse yet, the arrival of the rainy season in May caused corpses to rise from their shallow graves and float back to the camp in canals of blood-tinged water.
Escape from Davao Page 9