Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  Nearly everything in the prison camp had its price. Just about the only thing that no amount of cash, rank, or influence could purchase, however, was freedom. Some would pay the ultimate price making that discovery.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27–FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1942

  Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

  Though the entertainment value was admittedly low, Steve Mellnik was curious to learn the reason for the cancellation of the evening’s prisoner production. “Our three escapees are back,” a passing prisoner informed him. “The Japanese are making them put on a show.”

  The three escapees were Naval Reserve ensigns who had fled from Cabanatuan before the five-strand barbed wire fences and four-story guard towers had sprouted from the abandoned paddies. After more than three months on the lam, the fugitives had turned themselves in, for reasons no one yet knew. “We did not know what turn this ‘show’ would take, and we looked forward to it with foreboding,” said Mellnik.

  A hush fell over the audience as an odd procession mounted the outdoor stage later that afternoon. Leading the way was the camp commandant, Lt. Col. Shigeji Mori, followed by bodyguards and an interpreter. To some, Mori was faintly recognizable; he had reportedly owned a bicycle shop in Manila before the war. Next came the escapees, their hands bound behind their backs. Another failed escapee, a prisoner of Hispanic or Native American descent who had attempted to pass himself off as a Filipino, was led to the stage with a rope. “He had been kept in solitary confinement for months now and he was always led like a dog on a leash when he made his infrequent walks from his cage,” said Hawkins. The “show” commenced with Lt. Col. Mori’s words, followed by those of his interpreter.

  “Colonel Mori, he say, escape is a crime,” crooned the interpreter, accenting the word “crime” with an excited inflection. “Colonel Mori, he say, Japanese are kind to you. Japanese give you food and mediseen. When war over, we friends.”

  A low grumble rippled the audience, but the “show”—and the

  interpreter—went on.

  “Colonel Mori, he say, you not escape. Japanese keep you good, after war send you back to wife. Colonel Mori, he say, if you escape, you will die. Then wife have many tears. Colonel Mori, he say, escape is a crime.”

  Finally, the three ensigns were summoned to the dais. They spoke, each in turn, of their failed attempt to survive in the wilds, of being beset by starvation, sickness, and poisonous snakes and of the hostility of the Filipino populace. They concluded that they were blessed to be back inside the camp where they could receive the “benevolent kindness of the Japanese.”

  “We were both amused and disgusted at their speeches,” said Hawkins. From the cuts and bruises exhibited by the prisoners, it was obvious that the statements had been composed under duress. But the men in the audience also saw that the escapees were otherwise in good physical shape.

  “That gives me a laugh,” said Dobervich as the Marines walked back to their barracks. “Starvation outside! Why those boys are as fat as pigs.”

  The true story, the prisoners discovered, was that the escapees had lived comfortably as free men, and had turned themselves in only to prevent the executions of their benefactor, a teniente del barrio, or Filipino mayor, and his family. “Colonel Mori understood little of American psychology or he would never have staged the show,” said Hawkins.

  Escape may not have been the most discussed topic in prison camp (food was), but it was the most contemplated and controversial of subjects. Some prisoners, mostly officers, held a vague belief that escape was their sworn duty. For most, the desire to escape was a simple matter of self-preservation, even in light of the infamous Japanese directive that surfaced as a result of the flight of the Navy ensigns. The edict, dated July 10, 1942, grouped the prisoners in “shooting squads” of ten men. It threatened that if any one prisoner escaped or attempted escape, the remaining nine men were liable to be executed. To the Americans, this was a clear violation of Article 51 of the Geneva Convention, which stated that, “after an attempted or accomplished escape, the comrades of the person escaping, who assisted the escape, may incur only disciplinary punishment on this account.” But to the Japanese, it was a method of deterrence that ingeniously joined the Americans’ burden of conscience with Japanese partiality to mass punishment.

  Nevertheless, there were escapes. And after each incident, the prisoners waited with trepidation. Eighteen men from the shooting squads of two hospital patients were collected for execution, but the delirious, terminally ill patients had merely wandered off and were found nearby, dead. After a prisoner escaped from a work detail, the Japanese decided to execute five prisoners, picked at random from a group of 100 men, in retaliation. One soldier, recounting the incident for Dobervich, told how he watched, powerlessly, while his brother was selected. Then there was the case of the five American black marketeers who had temporarily escaped and were caught sneaking back in with sacks of canned goods. The members of their shooting squads were pardoned, but the five were punished for their recklessness with a firing squad.

  The inconsistency with which the Japanese dealt with these incidents was maddening, but with escape no longer an individual risk, the American camp administration was forced to take preventive measures. Escape attempts were expressly forbidden and to enforce the ban, POWs were assigned to patrol the inner perimeter. It was a divisive decision.

  Rain-laced winds rifled the camp on the impenetrably dark night of September 30. It was so dark that one of the perimeter guards, Motts Tonelli, could not see the three men crawling through the drainage ditch that bisected the camp’s inner and outer fences. It was a perverse quirk of fate that one of the men passed directly beneath Tonelli as he stood, yawning, at the lip of the trench answering nature’s call. What happened next was a blur.

  Cursing loudly, the angry man leapt out of the shadows and lunged for Tonelli. Stunned, Tonelli screamed for help. Shots fired by a tower sentry ripped through the mist as prisoners rushed from a nearby barracks to help the American guards subdue Tonelli’s attackers, Army Lt. Cols. Lloyd Biggs and Howard Breitung and Navy Lt. Roy Gilbert. The scuffle was short-lived, but Biggs hotly denounced the perimeter guards, saying that it was the duty of the Americans to assist him in his escape, not stop him. Biggs refused to calm down, even as a searchlight illuminated the mob for the squad of Japanese guards arriving on the scene.

  Remanded to the American headquarters, Biggs continued to rail against the American administration and the perimeter guards. Tonelli denied the accusation that there had been a deliberate attempt to prevent his escape. The noncom was not a member of the officers’ shooting squad and had no stake in the group’s escape. At any rate, Biggs had used the word “escape” so often in his recriminations that the eavesdropping Japanese stepped in. At 2300 hours, he was marched to Lieutenant Colonel Mori’s headquarters. There, Biggs lost both his temper and his mind. He threatened Mori that he would personally see to it that the Japanese officer himself was punished after the war. It was a fatal blunder. Just hours removed from his speech and now insulted in front of his men, Mori had no choice but to make an example of these men. Tonelli’s involvement was inconsequential. “There is but little doubt that had it not been for Biggs’ loud voice and arrogant attitude, the affair never would have come to the attention of the Japanese authorities,” said McCoy.

  The next morning, Hawkins found a modern Golgotha atop the hill near the Japanese headquarters. The three would-be escapees had their hands bound behind their backs, and ropes leading through pulleys affixed to a crude scaffolding above their heads had hoisted their arms behind them at such an angle as to make standing normally impossible. They were forced to lean forward, balancing on their toes, to relieve the agonizing pressure on their arms. Yet it was likely that the battered men, hanging quietly cataleptic amid the sounds of creaking wood and twisting rope, were beyond feeling any pain. Hawkins saw that their arms and legs had been savagely bashed and broken and their faces beaten beyond
recognition, “to a bloody pulp hardly resembling anything human.” He watched in horror as the prisoners were doused with water and summoned back from unconsciousness. Unable to stomach anymore, Hawkins retreated to his barracks.

  Beatings of the three men continued, growing with ferocity as the day went on. Japanese sentries forced Filipinos passing along the road to pay a cruel toll: those that refused to beat the prisoners were beaten themselves. “The Japanese never missed a chance to try to drive wedges between the Filipinos and Americans,” noted Grashio, watching the sordid scene from his barracks. Each blow, each thud of timber on bone and flesh, resounded throughout the compound. Despite the cold, wailing wind, Dyess could hear the beatings, occasionally varied with the “slither and slash” of a whip. Hawkins covered himself with a blanket in an attempt to muffle the sounds. The noon sky turned dark. “The tropical typhoon which had been gathering,” said Hawkins, “broke in all its fury.”

  “I think I prayed that night that those men could die soon,” recalled Dyess. “I had no hope that they would survive. Yet, when morning came—after I had had an hour or so of tormented sleep—they were still there.” In a supernatural display of stamina, they remained for two more days, weathering the typhoon and the barbarous beatings. Naked and shivering, they leaned defiantly into the chilling downpours, half-erect and half-alive, while the typhoon blew buildings down around them. The rains cleansed the bloody gashes that had clotted on their bruised, purplish bodies “like clumps of tar,” but the Japanese quickly opened new ones. Sopping and awestruck, the POWs watched silently through the barbed wire. It was almost as if their own emotions, which had long ago been cauterized in order to survive, were being ripped open once again. “No one spoke,” said Dyess. “We watched these men … and could find no words.” The Japanese were equally incredulous—and impatient.

  On the third morning, the rains finally let up and commands set Japanese noncoms in motion. After a final flogging saw a hissing whip sever the ears of one of the colonels, suspending it on his shoulder by a long thread of skin, soldiers emerged from the guardhouse carrying rifles, shovels, and picks. The escapes were cut down and their lacerated bodies loaded onto a truck. A sword-carrying Japanese officer climbed into the cab and the truck rolled away in the direction of a nearby schoolhouse. Soon, the sound of two volleys of gunfire snapped across the paddies, shattering the silence in the camp.

  Twenty-four hours would pass before the men of the officers’ shooting squads learned their fates. Their lives were spared, but they were forbidden from leaving their barracks, except to use the latrine, for one month. Later, Dyess was told that a Japanese officer had done one of the Army colonels, presumably Biggs, the “honor of beheading him personally.”

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3–THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1942

  Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

  After the storm of the preceding week, the news that the Japanese were offering a ticket out of Cabanatuan was a ray of sunshine streaming into the prisoners’ bleak world. Remembered Shofner, “It began, as all big things do in prison, with a rumor.”

  It was twilight and Shofner was lying on the barracks floor, his head propped on his scarlet and gold football jacket—a relic of his playing days with the Marines’ football team in San Diego in the late 1930s—reading a medical text when Hawkins and Dobervich came in.

  “Come outside and get some fresh air, Shof,” suggested Dobervich, wary of eavesdroppers. “I’ve got some hot dope for you.”

  Dobervich revealed that 1,000 men—healthy, “literate laborers”—were being transferred to a new camp. This time, there was a precedent; the Japanese had issued a call for 400 POWs with technical skills weeks earlier. It was unknown, however, whether the new detail was destined for Japan, China, or Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines.

  “Any place would be an improvement on this hole,” said Dobervich.

  Hawkins and Shofner agreed. The three Marines were the first to submit their names.

  Though they were wary of being shipped to Japan, where there would be no chance of escape or recapture by friendly forces, many POWs felt that signing up was a necessary risk. In less than six months, nearly 3,000 of their comrades had died. But some prisoners were having difficulty making up their minds. Steve Mellnik waited for reasonably solid information from his high-ranking friends that the detail was headed to Mindanao before signing up.

  Dyess decided to put his fate in a deck of cards. He dealt himself two poker hands, the north hand representing Cabanatuan and the south hand the blind possibility of Mindanao. He laid the cards flat in front of him; north lost to a pair of aces. “My own choice was simpler,” said Grashio. “When Ed told me he had signed up, I did too.” Though his health was failing, Bert Bank could not resist the gravitational pull of Dyess’s personality, either. “Where he goes,” Bank explained. “I was going.”

  Examining the manifest, Hawkins noticed Melvyn McCoy’s name. He was not yet acquainted with McCoy, but he was well enough acquainted with the officer’s reputation to feel confident in his own decision. As Hawkins would learn, McCoy had his reasons for signing up. The promise of more food and the opportunity to escape Cabanatuan certainly were influencing factors, but for the shrewd logician, the decision was almost purely, and appropriately, a numerical one.

  “I was interested in Mindanao because, although I had had no news for some time, I knew that island to be just 600 miles closer to the Netherlands Indies, New Guinea and Australia,” McCoy later explained. “All areas in which I presumed United States forces to be operating.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Erie Maru

  Life is a morning breeze, cool in the hair;

  Death is an aged crone whose life is done,

  Life is a laughing girl, nude in the sun;

  Death gives release from barbs that fate may hurl—

  I’ll take the barbs, the breeze, the laughing girl.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 26–TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1942

  Cabanatuan

  They had converged into Cabanatuan individually, by chance, and now they were leaving together, by choice. But the sight of Lieutenant Hozumi, standing imperiously at the gate with a jewel-encrusted sword at his side, caused many to have second thoughts. “We thought it a bad omen that Lieutenant Hozumi should be in command of the operation,” said Sam Grashio.

  Under a steady gray drizzle and Hozumi’s watchful glare, the Iwanaka Unit’s 3rd Company marched the 969-man detail out of Cabanatuan. Among the anonymous “good lucks” and “goodbyes,” a familiar voice called out to Dobervich, Hawkins, and Shofner. It was that of a sergeant who had taken the young officers, as many seasoned noncoms often did, under his wing in Shanghai. “You three stick together now,” he said. “It’s three musketeers, you know, all for one and one for all.”

  The movement was a reverse of the route the prisoners from Corregidor had taken to Cabanatuan nearly five months earlier: they traveled by foot to Cabanatuan City and by rail to Manila, where they slept on the concrete floor of Bilibid Prison. But the Japanese had no parade planned for the following morning. Manila was a ghost town. There were more Japanese flags, which were displayed on nearly every building, than people. There were underfed calesa ponies clopping the empty streets, and gaping holes where lampposts once stood; every scrap of metal, as well as other valuables, had been carted off to Japan. “I can’t see much of this ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity’ here, can you?” crowed

  Dobervich.

  Prodded into the port area to Pier 7, they sat amid piles of rubble and waited as their ship—identifiable to most by only the number 684 painted on its side—was loaded with cargo. Only a few months earlier, the Erie Maru, a decrepit, coal-burning tub with a displacement of 7,000 tons, would have seemed out of place at this mooring, a long, expensive quay built to accommodate luxury liners and thus nicknamed the “Million Dollar Pier.” Now in October 1942, the bay was filled with sunken ships whose rusting superstructures and masts protrude
d up through the surface like so many crooked tombstones in a watery graveyard.

  Sam Grashio had not expected first-class accommodations, but he had been optimistic when boarding the ship. “It seemed wonderfully refreshing just to be out of camp and on a ship of any kind,” he said. “I should have known better. Anything connected with the Japanese that was half-pleasant or promising always had a catch in it somewhere.”

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27–THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1942

  At sea aboard the Erie Maru, Philippine Islands

  There were several catches. First of all, the vessel was carrying countless drums of aviation gasoline, meaning that one torpedo could turn the ship into a floating funeral pyre. The chance of such an attack was high because the Japanese had neglected to mark the ship as a prisoner of war transport. Viewed through the periscope of an American submarine, it would look like just another Japanese merchant vessel, an inviting

  target.

  The environment belowdecks was more immediately troubling. The prisoners were crammed into two sweltering, poorly ventilated holds, which had been partioned into sleeping compartments, ten feet deep, five feet wide, and three feet high, along the bulkheads. The Japanese endeavored to fit twelve men into these berths, which more closely resembled those on the African slave ships than anything offered by modern vessels. Similar, and, in most cases worse, conditions would cause their comrades on other voyages throughout the Far East to refer to these vessels as hellships.

  While most prisoners were forced to remain in this malodorous tangle of limbs and filth, some managed to sneak topside and escape the noxious gasoline fumes and colonies of bedbugs and lice. The Marines milled about the ship’s afterdeck with hundreds of other prisoners before spying a platform, twelve feet in height, of rice sacks. They scaled the canvas-covered mountain and, finding that there was enough room to lie down, claimed the high ground with nary a complaint from the guards. It was atop this perch that Jack Hawkins caught his first glimpse of Corregidor in nearly six months. The recuperative powers of time had all but healed the Rock’s war wounds. Hawkins hardly recognized the island, astonishingly verdant in the fading daylight.