Dapecol was surrounded by an impenetrable swamp that served as an intimidating deterrent to any escape plan. Stretching for nearly twenty miles in all directions, the swamp was a mosquito-infested miasma. Although tribes of headhunters reportedly frequented the area, little else but giant insects, poisonous snakes, and Philippine crocodiles lived in the swamp. The colonos and inhabitants of fringe barrios who combined Spanish Catholicism with indigenous beliefs perpetuated the myth that the bog was an evil, supernatural entity. Myth or not, despite the fact that there was no fence ringing the colony’s outer perimeter, not a single colono was believed to have escaped from Dapecol in the camp’s ten-year existence.
The war, however, brought about a unique, converse phenomenon: fleeing what was essentially a Japanese prefecture, thousands of Davaoeños seeking food and shelter broke into Dapecol. While the Japanese army later evicted most of the evacuees, as well as nearly 800 inmates (who were transferred to Iwahig Penal Colony on the island of Palawan), a skeleton crew of agricultural agents and 150 colonos was left behind and tasked, according to the orders of Gen. Hideki Tojo, with teaching 2,000 American POWs how to work the colony.
Forcing POWs to labor for the benefit of an enemy’s war effort was forbidden by the Geneva Convention, but Tojo had deemed POW labor essential to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A telegram relayed by the Swiss government to the United States in February 1942 stated that, “ALTHOUGH NOT BOUND BY THE CONVENTION RELATIVE TREATMENT OF PRISONERS OF WAR JAPAN WILL APPLY MUTATIS MUTANDIS PROVISIONS OF THAT CONVENTION TO AMERICAN PRISONERS OF WAR IN ITS POWER.” By definition, the Latin expression mutatis mutandis represents a substitution of terms; the Japanese translation was that Nippon would observe the convention only insofar as it did not clash with the existing Imperial Way. Tojo had communicated this caveat to the generals who had been assigned responsibility for POW camps during a July conference in Tokyo:
In Japan, we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war, which should naturally make their treatment more or less different from that in Europe or America … you must place the prisoners under strict discipline and not allow them to lie idle doing nothing but eating freely for even a single day. Their labor and technical skill should be fully utilized … toward the prosecution of the Greater East Asiatic War.
There was perhaps no better place for an implementation of this ideology, no other corner of the empire where war prisoners could be more secretively hidden away and their labor more effectively exploited with such minimal investment in their welfare and supervision, than the Davao Penal Colony. In fact, Dapecol was so isolated that many POWs had no idea where on earth they were. Some, judging by what their officers and smuggled maps told them, knew their present location only as a point somewhere seven degrees north of the equator.
And yet, despite Dapecol’s seclusion and reputation, the Japanese were taking no chances with their American slaves. Inspecting his surroundings, Jack Hawkins found that the prisoners were being housed inside a heavily guarded rectangular stockade sited at the epicenter of Dapecol—a prison yard within a prison. Hawkins’s view, however, was limited to the 72,000-square-foot pen. If he had stood in one of the guard towers that loomed above the thirteen-foot, triple-fenced wall of barbed wire, he could have seen the entire colony in a broad, daylit panorama.
Dapecol was an open, largely treeless compound encircled by an infinite green sea of banana trees and coconut palms. A mile-long main thoroughfare stretched alongside a pair of narrow gauge railroad tracks on a west–east course that ran parallel to the prisoners’ barracks. Lining this road were a number of wooden and nipa structures, mostly warehouses called bodegas, and the colony’s machine shop and diesel power plant. At the first intersection was the northern extension of Zamboanga Avenue, where the Filipino administrators’ homes were located. A row of administration buildings, as well as guards’ quarters, straddled the main road opposite the baseball diamond, which was adjacent to the POW compound. Giant, petrified kapok trees anchored the edge of right field while a burbling stream snaked along the left field boundary and through the prisoners’ mess area, separating the POW compound from the Japanese officers’ billets. Further east, Dapecol’s main thoroughfare abruptly ended, leaving only the steel rails, which followed a tapered furrow into the unfathomable depths of the jungle.
Conditions were spartan, but Dapecol was an improvement over Cabanatuan. Spigots and wells provided plenty of water for drinking, bathing, and laundry. There were three large, peculiarly ornate latrines. Just outside the fence, to the right front row of the barracks facing north, was a kitchen and mess hall. There were nine barnlike barracks allotted to the POWs on the basis of rank, starting with enlisted men in Barracks One and progressing to field-grade officers in Barracks Nine. In each, between 150 to 200 men were sardined into fifteen-foot intervals of space called bays. There were approximately sixteen bays per barracks, eight on each side. The Marines had laid claim to a section in the rear corner of Barracks Five called Bay Ten. Hardened by the Darwinian, dog-eat-dog existence at Cabanatuan, Hawkins was caught off guard by the friendly prisoner staring at him from across the aisle.
“How ya doin?” inquired the stranger, extending his hand. “My name’s Sam Grashio.”
“Jack Hawkins,” he replied, noticing Grashio’s wings. “I see you’re a flier.”
“Yep, I was in Ed Dyess’s squadron. Twenty-first Pursuit. Do you know Dyess?”
“Yes, I just met him on the ship the other day,” replied Hawkins. “Fine fellow, isn’t he?”
“You bet he is; finest in the world. There’s nothing the boys in the Twenty-first wouldn’t do for Ed.”
Grashio then mentioned that he was going to fill his canteen, and offered to do the same for Hawkins. Hawkins handed his over with no hesitation—something he would not have done at Cabanatuan, a place where there was little honor even among thieves. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he sensed that there was something different about Grashio.
For the circumspect, close-knit Marines, only time would tell if Grashio was someone who could be trusted with more than a canteen. And time, as any colono could tell them, seemed to stand still at the Davao Penal Colony.
Before dawn, brassy bugle calls blasted across the colony, commencing a tedious routine that would be replayed nearly every morning of every day throughout the next two months. After a breakfast of rice flavored with oleomargarine and starchy, carbohydrate-rich cassava roots, the prisoners were stood at attention, forced to salute the Rising Sun flag—the “flaming asshole,” it would come to be called—and counted out for work details. It was an egalitarian system; almost every POW—even the sick and near-crippled, as well as aging officers—was mustered.
Once a detail reached its manpower requirement, it joined the others marching out into the rising daylight. Prisoners went to the bodegas, and to the garage. Others were assigned latrine duty, to chop firewood, or to repair roads and fences. Many labored in the orchards—which overflowed with lemons, limes, papaya, bananas, coconuts, star apples, and jackfruit—or the south fields full of cassava, camotes, corn, peanuts, and sugarcane. Plowers were introduced to a herd of ornery Brahma steers while yet further south thousands of clucking chickens welcomed those assigned to the poultry farm.
Most climbed aboard rickety flatcars hitched to a small diesel engine waiting on the narrow gauge track. With a jerk, the tiny, overburdened train—it was soon christened the “Toonerville Trolley,” in honor of the popular cartoon strip—rolled away, clicking past abaca and banana groves into a dank jungle where monkeys cavorted. Twenty minutes later, the passengers disembarked at the Mactan rice fields and plunged, barefoot, into the watery squares to plant, weed, or reap the rice crop. Rice was Dapecol’s “cash crop” and much of the colony’s labor pool and acreage—depending on the season, between 350 and 750 prisoners and as many as 600 paddies—was devoted to its cultivation. The rice detail was undoubtedly the dirtiest, most demanding, and perhaps the most dangerous. The sunk
en paddies were filled with cobras and rice snakes, but an invisible predator called Schistosoma japonicum, a parasite that penetrated sores and cuts, would prove to be their most sinister enemy.
Just beyond Mactan, POWs hauled wet gravel in five-gallon cans from a creek bed onto flatcars. Seven miles down the rail line, others grunted and pulled in two-man teams felling mahogany behemoths with long buck saws. The trunks of these ironlike hardwoods were so wide that when lying on their sides some were taller than the lumberjacks. The giant logs were shipped by train to the Japanese outpost at Anibogan and then floated downstream on the Tuganay River to the same saw mill whose pier the Erie Maru had tied up to.
After spending nearly a week on a buck saw with Mike Dobervich, Jack Hawkins noticed that Major Maeda possessed a special interest in the logging detail. Upon learning that the Lasang Lumber Company was owned by a Japanese civilian, Hawkins understood why Maeda had been so angry during that first assembly—and why he had promised the prisoners more food. What Tojo called ideology, Maeda considered income. “No doubt by utilizing the free American and Filipino labor to furnish the valuable hardwood logs to the Japanese-owned saw mill down the river, he was finding a very convenient way of augmenting his meager salary,” said Hawkins.
The prisoners, in turn, exploited their jobs to supplement their rations. Although the Japanese instituted searches to prevent them from pilfering fruits and vegetables, many poured egg yolks into their canteens and used secret pockets in their uniforms and musette bags, as well as hollowed-out heels of wooden shoes, to conceal food. None of these would-be thieves and smugglers became as accomplished as the Marines, whose potluck assignments had taken them to all corners of Dapecol, enabling them to sample nearly every type of food grown there. Not only did they cure their scurvy with stolen lemons, limes, and papaya, they gained weight. Hawkins gained an incredible thirty pounds in six weeks by scarfing down contraband bananas and Dobervich gained even more, so much that his bulging waistline became a source of amusement for Shofner. Claiming that Dobervich’s waist was thirty-nine inches, Shofner goaded the latter into a bet then magically produced a measuring tape. The end result added one more “steak dinner, Frisco” to the list in his notebook. The unselfish Marines also shared the fruits of their labors with those who were less fortunate: one-fourth of their smuggled food was donated to the patients in the POW hospital who were unable to forage for themselves.
Relationships with the Filipinos, both civilian and convict, were additional fringe benefits of their labors. The Americans were understandably wary of the convicts in the bright orange fatigues, but “the gentlemen prisoners,” as the colonos called the Americans, soon learned that they shared a common enemy. The colonos despised the Japanese not only as invaders of their homeland, but also because they had not fulfilled their promises of amnesty. To spite their deceitful new wardens, they taught the Americans the art of goldbricking. “They showed us how to appear very, very busy without actually doing anything,” said Ed Dyess. “We mastered the trick.” Grateful, Dyess would pay his new friends the highest possible compliment: “They were the grandest bunch of murderers and cutthroats I have ever known.”
Though all civilians, even women and children, were subjected to beatings if they were caught aiding the POWs, many accepted the risk. Prisoners working in the jungle often found fried bananas mysteriously packed in their belongings and their canteens filled with coffee and sugar. Other civilians slipped cigarettes and rice cakes to prisoners working near their homes.
And there were special patriots like Fely Campo. Not long after the Campo clan evacuated to Dapecol, the nineteen-year-old nursing school graduate was called by the Japanese to work at the Filipino hospital. When the Americans arrived, the eye-catching, raven-tressed Campo responded to her own orders. She threw quinine pills into the wire stockade and smuggled needles to doctors by sewing them in the hemlines of her skirts. She conspired with a chaplain to clothe the prisoners, giving the priest shirts, which he layered beneath his cassock and distributed during services. Few prisoners learned her real name, but Campo’s sobriquet—the “Florence Nightingale of Dapecol”—proved that her daring efforts were greatly appreciated.
Not all of the aid, however, was material. One day, a little girl and boy, only three or four years old, toddled out to the spot where Hawkins and Dobervich were cutting grass in a ditch and spontaneously broke into a rendition of “God Bless America.” Their Formosan guard, a choked-up Hawkins noticed, paid no attention to the performance because he did not understand what the children were singing. “But Mike and I did,” said Hawkins. “This was the indomitable spirit of the Philippines, alive and dominant even in its tiny children.”
Their itinerant labors also more closely acquainted them with their jailers. Because of rampant disease and the awful odors, the Japanese had mostly stayed on the periphery of previous camps. But at Dapecol, captors and captives regularly mixed, creating a unique new vantage point.
The prisoners rarely saw Major Maeda. And what they did see was hardly impressive. Five feet tall with horn-rimmed glasses, a single gold tooth and a double chin, Maeda “looked the nearest thing to a pig for a human being that I ever saw in my life,” recalled one POW. The fifty-three-year-old officer was also reportedly a heavy drinker. A 1910 graduate of the Imperial Army Academy at Ichigaya, Maeda preferred to while away the war in a beer- and sake-soused state of seclusion, making rare public appearances clothed in rumpled fatigues or a kimono.
Maeda’s nefarious subordinate, Hozumi, on the other hand, was sober and stern, obsessed with discipline and disconcertingly omnipresent; one never knew when he might strut out from the jungle for a surprise inspection. He regularly abused his guards, but there was no better indication of the terror he inspired among his own men than after one had been caught stealing a prisoner’s watch—Maeda, in one of his few admirable decrees, had prohibited thievery—the man preferred suicide to facing the tempestuous officer’s wrath. Just as his guards could never salute with sufficient smartness, the POWs could never work as productively as Hozumi demanded. “[Hozumi] seemed to be of the opinion that the prisoners could grow enough food for the entire Japanese Army,” said one American. According to the prevailing rumor, Hozumi had shamed himself in battle, hence his current assignment. “He seemed bent on proving his bravery by smacking around every American prisoner in reach,” noted McCoy.
Some Formosans shared cigarettes and pictures of girlfriends or turned their back so that the prisoners could steal food, but they were a distinct minority; most of the “Taiwanese yardbirds” shared Hozumi’s proclivity for violence and delighted in dispensing vicious beatings. “We have been waiting 100 years to do this to you,” one informed a POW. The abuse became so common that prisoners asked each other, “Did you make the ‘hit parade’ today?” Some guards preferred psychological tools of torture, such as a form of Russian roulette. A guard would place a pistol to a prisoner’s head and pull the trigger. The hammer always swung to a dead, relief-filled click and no prisoner was ever believed to have been killed by this sadistic game, but death was not the point of the exercise. “They had the power to kill you if they wanted to, and they kept your nerves on edge with all this harassing they’d do,” said one POW.
The only way the prisoners could strike back was with words, so they coined nicknames based on the guards’ distinctive physical traits or behavior. Hozumi’s dapper dress, vanity, and violent nature earned him the monikers “Tailor’s Dummy” and “The Crown Prince of Swat.” Maeda’s aide, Lt. Hiroshi Oura, aka “Five O’Clock Shadow,” always seemed in need of a shave. The prisoners dodged mud slung by an odious guard named “Skeleton Face,” and rulings from “The Judge,” a corporal rumored to have been a former justice of the peace. “Big Speedo” supervised work in the fields, as well as sadistic subordinates such as “Mussolini.” “Clark Gable” had big ears; “Betty Boop” plump cheeks and a bubbly demeanor. Dyess hated to admit it, but a well-built guard called “Robert Taylor,”
after the American actor, was “genuinely handsome.” Though only four foot ten, ninety pounds, Mr. Nishamura lived up to the reputation of his namesake, “Simon Legree,” the brutal slave dealer in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and grew to become a giant problem for the POWs. The civilian interpreter, who had reportedly once lived in the United States, enjoyed beating the prisoners with a riding crop or an iron pipe wrapped in leather. Interpreter Shusuke Wada could not match his colleague’s affinity for violence, but the bespectacled hunchback was no less animated in his hatred. Always on the move, rushing to order around POWs, he had the best epithet of them all: “Running Wada.”
But the guards would be the least of their worries. Impatient with the prisoners’ slow recuperation, Maeda rescinded his order for extra rations. He reduced the menu at the prisoners’ mess hall—some sardonic wit placed a sign over the entrance proclaiming the building “Ye Old Rice Bowl”—to a watery soup containing kang kong, a thin green weed, and rice ladled proportionally in different-sized scoops according to the labor they performed. Those who worked at Mactan received the highest allowance, 600 grams per day. The smallest scoop, reserved for nonworkers and hospital patients, contained only 450 grams and was called “The Death Dipper.” If they were lucky, the rice contained dried, wormy fish,
or stringy pieces of carabao that they derisively called “NRA” meat—meaning from the neck, ribs, and anus.
To put their consumption into perspective, consider that a soldier’s daily ration in the peacetime U.S. Army was four pounds, seven ounces, or 2,013 grams. At Dapecol, even the most well-fed prisoners were laboring on a fraction of the necessary nutritional requirement. And who could say what they really received since Lt. Sumio Shiraji, the corrupt, overweight quartermaster, often forced the POWs to sign for more supplies than were actually delivered.
They had lived with hunger for months, but it was not until they were literally surrounded by food at Dapecol that it became a universal psychosis. They traded recipes and arranged menus for the restaurants they were going to own at war’s end. Their lust was so intense that men no longer ogled pin-ups and traded tales of amorous liaisons. Instead, they fantasized about food advertisements from old magazines and told lurid stories of home-cooked meals.
Escape from Davao Page 15