The whole affair looked to be part of some sinister plan; the prisoners had watched, dejectedly, as Red Cross trucks carrying food and medical supplies were turned away at the gates. The death rate would peak at fifty corpses every twenty-four hours; nearly 2,000 of the 9,000 Americans that had crossed O’Donnell’s infernal threshold in April would be dead by June. Segregated in another compound, the Filipinos fared worse. Endless, dawn-to-dusk funeral processions would ultimately bury 20,000 men, or half of the Filipino contingent. “Many Nippon die Bataan,” the guards told prisoners, “we let just as many prisoner die here.”
Starving, surrounded and stalked by death, the prisoners congregated in forlorn clusters, suffering through their surreal existence in a somnolent, hunger-induced daze. Men became so lethargic and pulse rates dropped so precipitously that it was hard to tell who was dead and who was merely asleep. Inanition, the word scrawled on so many makeshift death certificates, was the biggest killer. Many despondent prisoners, unable to stomach the nauseating rice ration or endure the omnipresent stench of pestilence and human waste any longer, simply gave up the will to live. “A person had to keep his hope and courage up,” said Dobervich, “for to lose hope was a way of signing your own death warrant.” Dobervich spoke from experience; if not for his attitude and some quinine given to him by some Czechoslovakian civilian prisoners, the former boxer would not have survived a brutal bout with malaria.
The Japanese had mostly forbade religious services. Many men recalled long-dormant faiths and personal prayer. Older men with families endured in the hope of seeing loved ones again. Others, like Tonelli, engaged in symbols and ritual. Once finished with his grisly burial labors, Tonelli would dig up his Notre Dame class ring, which he buried in a metal soap dish beneath his barracks to confound would-be thieves. After having been stolen by a guard during the march, it had been miraculously returned by an English-speaking Japanese officer who had been educated at the University of Southern California and had seen Tonelli score the winning touchdown in the 1937 game between the two schools. The ring momentarily transported Tonelli far from O’Donnell, to a stadium full of cheering people, reminding him of better days. Complementing his strong Catholic faith, the ring became an existential talisman. Perhaps never would the school’s Latin motto—Vita Dulcedo Spes, “Our Life, Our Sweetness, Our Hope”—which was inscribed on the ring, mean so much to one alumnus.
Each night, as the searchlights swept the dark compound and the mournful, tinny clinking of the canteens of men waiting in the water lines sounded through the rows of shabby barracks, many struggled to find something similarly worthwhile to hold on to. And for an explanation. “We used to lay in the bunks and guys would say, ‘God, why are You doing this? I never did anything wrong.’ These young guys would be praying to God out loud,” said Tonelli.
Many prisoners, likewise whirling in emotional and spiritual vertigo, had other troubling questions. “Where was America?” asked Capt. Bert Bank. “America’s abandoning us. We live in the greatest country in the world and here we are, prisoners of the Japanese.” The myth of American invincibility had been shattered. Bataan “was one time,” commented one American officer, “that the cavalry didn’t come over the hill to the rescue.”
As the reality of the surrender sank in, the prisoners’ morale plummeted. Fear and doubt permeated the camp. Tsuneyoshi had boasted to Sam Grashio’s group that Japanese forces had bombed California and even Chicago. Though skeptical, their spirits were so low that they half-believed the bombast. “We had heard no war news for so many days so we feared that the whole tale might be true,” said Grashio.
It had once been inconceivable to think that in this epic conflict of contrasting cultures Japan could ever, even temporarily, hold the upper hand. But now it did. The taunts of English-speaking guards communicated that notion. “The Japs kept asking us where the wonderful American Army and Navy were and where was the Air Corps about which we boasted so much,” wrote Bank. Numbed by the trauma of their defeat, the prisoners had no reply.
Bert Bank’s enlistment in the Army ROTC battalion at the University of Alabama in the mid-1930s, he would claim, was attributable to friends who thought he looked good in uniform. But it was no secret that Bank, intensely patriotic, possessed a deep love of country. He also needed a way to pay for college. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bank
grew up in the coalfields of Tuscaloosa County near the mining town of Searles. Jovial and dynamic, he possessed the makings of a successful lawyer—a friendly face with a permanent smile, a politician’s handshake, and the chatty charisma of a Southern raconteur from the pages of Twain or Faulkner. But after enrolling in law school, Bank was called up to the AAF’s 27th Light Bombardment Group and assigned to Savannah, Georgia, where he drilled by day and romanced his share of Georgia belles—including Miss Georgia, 1939—by night.
Just as he would never work a courtroom, Bank would never sit in a cockpit. The ship carrying the unit’s A-24 dive bombers was rerouted to Australia, and Bank, forced to join the ranks of planeless pilots, received a rifle and infantry training. The twenty-seven-year-old’s most valuable contribution to the war effort was his contagious sense of humor. While bathing in a jungle stream, he amused his comrades by posing for a photograph wearing nothing but a palm frond. Nothing bothered the affable Alabaman. Not the lack of food—Bank’s nickname was “Garbage Mouth” because he ate everything—nor the wound he received from a strafing Japanese plane. Every war cloud over Bataan had a silver lining. “If this damn war keeps going on,” he told his comrades after a promotion, “I am going to be a general pretty soon.”
All Bank had now was his sense of humor and his fellow prisoners. Thankfully, making friends had always been easy. He had had no shortage of friends in college, including one notable classmate, a gangly football player named Paul Bryant who would become the celebrated coach of the Crimson Tide. Bank had befriended Ed Dyess on the third day of the march, when both had attempted to drink from an artesian well and were almost killed for their temerity. Dyess and Bank navigated the remainder of the march together, during which time Bank procured a piece of sugarcane that Dyess later credited as having energized him to finish the ordeal. They would continue their friendship in captivity.
The Death March had proven the necessity of solidarity, a message Dyess intended to convey to the men of the 21st Pursuit—if he could find them in the chaos of O’Donnell. Other than segregating the Americans and Filipinos, the Japanese had made no attempt to identify or group the prisoners according to their units or ranks, toppling the hierarchy so essential to order and discipline and thus eroding conditions even further. Although he was near a state of collapse, Dyess’s sense of military propriety stirred him to shepherd his squadron. He and Grashio had been fortuitously reunited not long after their respective arrivals and the two officers, with Bank’s help, attacked the task together. Sadly, their efforts would be too late for many.
One man had been discovered, his naked skin yellow with jaundice and covered with sores and fecal matter, dying beneath a barracks. Dyess had the man cleaned up and installed inside. Procuring a tin of sardines, he plotted with Grashio to feed the man. “That our squadron leader would give away such a rare and precious commodity when he needed food badly himself, and would trust me, also half-starved, to deliver the can intact, show what kind of man Ed Dyess was,” said Grashio. The man later died, but “the whole episode,” Grashio noted, “bolstered my own faith in humanity at a crucial time in my life.”
Though more dark days undoubtedly lay ahead, Grashio and a handful of others had begun to harness the powers of faith, solidarity, and hope, guiding forces that would mean the difference between life and death in Camp O’Donnell—and conceivably beyond. “It may seem ridiculous, but in the face of all our adversities, we continued hopeful and optimistic during the first month of our captivity,” said Dyess. “Indeed, there were many of us who never despaired of regaining our freedom.”
Their com
patriots on Corregidor, however, had yet to experience the crucible of captivity. If the distant rumble of artillery and the formations of bombers above O’Donnell each day were any indication, their time was near.
Sunday, May 3, 1942
Corregidor
The concussions rocked the reinforced concrete recesses of Malinta Tunnel in mad, seismic tremors. Flickering lights splashed shadows across the shuddering walls as pieces of concrete fell to the floor. Choking dust wafted through the crowded laterals fetid with the odor of gangrenous flesh and gasoline fumes. Men and women rushed about the steamy subterranean maze, shouting above the din of diesel generators and the beeping and gear grinding of the jeeps and ambulances crawling through the crowded corridor. Such distractions, compounded by a pounding heart and trembling hands, made even simple tasks—like writing a letter—difficult. Strangely, Maj. Steve Mellnik, struggling with a letter to his wife, Thelma, was not preoccupied with his present surroundings. It was his future that concerned him.
Mellnik, a onetime USAFFE staffer, was used to being in the know. Though currently a member of the Harbor Defenses staff, he continued his conversations and chess matches with high-ranking friends who had convinced him of the hopelessness of the situation. His own inspections of the island, as well as other ominous events—he had recently helped dispose of several million dollars of U.S. paper currency in an
incinerator—served as additional proof. Corregidor’s “clock,” Mellnik
realized, “was approaching midnight.”
As Corregidor’s fate went, so went that of Mellnik. Realizing that this letter was perhaps his last message to his wife and two young daughters, the thirty-four-year-old labored to camouflage his dread thoughts. But he did not have much time: a submarine was scheduled to dock at Corregidor shortly to evacuate VIPs and nurses, as well as important documents and a few sacks of mail. All he could do was steady his heart and his
hand.
3 May, 1942
Hello, darling—
Won’t have a chance to get another one of these very soon dear—so, I just want to remind you that I love you just heaps & heaps, and that the past year has seemed like ten years…. The radio has kept you in touch with what is going on here, so there is little I need say.
Corregidor’s defenders had been living on a six-square-mile bull’s-eye since Bataan’s fall. The daily attacks resembled a weather pattern: clouds of Japanese bombers hovered out of the reach of the Rock’s antiaircraft guns to loose torrents of bombs; thunderous hailstorms of mammoth artillery shells whooshed across the sky like roaring freight trains before gouging the island and tossing hunks of concrete and the barrels of Corregidor’s giant cannons about like toys. An estimated 1.8 million pounds of shells, not to mention countless bombs dropped during thirteen separate air raids, had fallen the day before. In the next twenty-four hours, 16,000 shells would flay the Rock in what would ultimately be the heaviest bombardment of the campaign and, in some experts’ estimation, the most vicious concentrated artillery barrage of the entire war. The bombardments had decapitated hills and denuded Corregidor of its lush vegetation, turning the green island into a smoky landscape of craters and charred trees, and its once proud structures into knots of rebar and piles of pulverized cement.
Yet Mellnik was still there. He had been aboard the Don Esteban with MacArthur and his family as the steamer churned away from war-ravaged Manila en route to Corregidor on Christmas Eve 1941. And nearly two months ago, on a gloomy night in March, he was one of several men to shake MacArthur’s hand before the general departed for Australia.
There would be no dramatic flight from Corregidor for Mellnik. If anything, the percussion of armor-piercing shells echoing outside Malinta Tunnel likely persuaded him that his own life’s journey was nearing its end. He could not possibly have known that his personal Philippine epic had barely begun.
The ship carrying Tekla Mellnick and her two young sons docked in New York harbor in 1911, four long years after her husband, Maxim, a tenant farmer, had left the Ukrainian village of Nevir to cultivate a better life for his family in America. The family reunited in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, a town of smokestacks, company houses, and church steeples built above thick seams of hard anthracite coal in the foothills of the Poconos. Their American dream was painfully short-lived. The influenza epidemic of 1918 took Tekla Melnick’s life, spurring both sons to strike out on their own after receiving U.S. citizenship. Changing the spelling of his last name, eighteen-year-old Stephen Mellnik joined the Army in
1925.
An ambitious private in the 12th Coast Artillery Regiment, Mellnik watched his sergeant on the gunnery range and set his sights on stripes of his own. Upon gaining the promotion, he then coveted a commission, a distant dream for a noncom with a faint Ukrainian accent who had not even finished high school. The five foot seven Mellnik did not possess an intimidating command presence either, save for a scar on his left cheek from a childhood accident. West Point is your only chance, his comrades told him, half in jest. But it was Mellnik who got the last laugh. After persevering through pounding migraine headaches at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to win a competitive appointment, Mellnik graduated from West Point in
1932.
It was during difficult times that he fondly remembered his family’s arrival in the islands in 1939, the excitement of his first command, the festive gaiety of dances, and teaming with his wife to win Corregidor’s 1940 mixed doubles tennis championship. But those halcyon days were gone. And so was the confidence and buoyant banter of previous letters and cables he had sent home. Distracted and unable to continue, Mellnik signed off.
Don’t feel like concentrating on writing sweet—just feel a bit too far away from you. Do take care of yourself & the children. I’d just about cry to think about anything happening to them.
By the time you get this, we will either be relieved or prisoners—
or—….
Steve
WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 1942
Corregidor
As noon approached, news of the surrender reached the Rock’s defenders in a variety of ways. Yet no matter whether one got the word from a battalion commander or a battery mate, through the Voice of Freedom or observation of the white flags that popped up across the fire-blackened island, it hit with instant, devastating ferocity.
It took General Wainwright less than twelve hours from the moment the Japanese landed on Corregidor just before midnight on May 5 to reach the heart-wrenching decision. Though the Marines of the 1st Battalion had destroyed many landing barges and fought valiantly with a largely punchless arsenal of 37 and 75 millimeter guns, machine guns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails, they could not stem the overwhelming enemy tide. As Japanese infantry determinedly clawed toward Malinta Hill with the aid of air and artillery support, daylight revealed a hopeless tactical situation: three enemy tanks had also rumbled off the beach and were clanking toward Malinta Tunnel. Fearing for the safety of the 1,000 patients in the hospital laterals—his troops had no antitank weapons—Wainwright realized the futility of further resistance.
The Marines, upon hearing the code phrase “Execute Pontiac,” which instructed them to destroy their guns and surrender, took the news the hardest. One tried to shoot a runner who delivered the order to his gun position. Marines in the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, having watched the tracer bullets and shell bursts of the previous night’s fighting with great anticipation and now denied the chance to prove their mettle, were especially distraught. After recovering from the initial shock, Lt. Jack Hawkins and his men channeled their roiling emotions into bending rifle barrels, throwing pieces of weapons into the surf, and rolling ammunition boxes over cliffs.
The surrender was doubly painful for Capt. Austin Shofner. A few days earlier, Shofner had suffered burns on his face and hands while rescuing survivors after a Japanese shell exploded the powder magazines at Battery Geary. After breaking his Marine sword over his knee, he watch
ed as men “wept like children. Stern, hard-bitten commanders threw their arms around private soldiers and bawled. The tears streamed down my own face and mingled with the grime and sweat and stubble of
beard.”
• • •
History, as well as the U.S. Navy’s new listening post at Wahiawa, Hawaii, some twenty miles north of Pearl Harbor, would record the last official message from American forces in the Philippines as having originated on Corregidor at 11:55 a.m., local time. The author of the message, Lt. Cmdr. Melvyn McCoy, probably should not even have been there.
McCoy had had several opportunities to flee Corregidor. A place had been reserved for him aboard the Lanakai, a 120-foot sailing schooner that had been used in the 1940 Hollywood film Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour, but the duty-bound officer was not aboard the two-master when it departed on December 26. Weeks earlier McCoy and several colleagues had begun outfitting a small sloop, the Southern Seas, for a last-minute flight from the Rock. The boat, however, was stolen from its moorings on May 4, thus marooning McCoy on Corregidor.
Having already supervised the destruction of all codes and equipment, McCoy concluded his last duty as radio matériel officer for the 16th Naval District by handing the simple written message, prepared on behalf of both himself and a fellow communications officer, to a radioman waiting at the last functioning transmitter.
“Beam it to Radio Honolulu,” said McCoy. “Don’t bother with code.” The clock in the Navy tunnel ticked toward noon as a series of electronic clicks and beeps sent McCoy’s words out into the ether:
GOING OFF AIR NOW. GOODBYE AND GOOD LUCK. CALLAHAN AND MCCOY.
Escape from Davao Page 10