Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  As the battle of nutritional attrition raged, the casualties continued to mount. The sick lay on wooden bunks or shelter halves filled with cottonlike kapok fiber, yet without medicine, the hospital staff could not stop or reverse the effects of the POWs’ steady deterioration. The Marines’ smuggled food and the clandestine help of Fely Campo and other Filipinos could not make enough of a difference.

  Unsanitary living conditions worsened the problem. Their barracks were infested by bedbugs and rats scampered over them while they slept. Dengue fever and malaria were unremitting tropical plagues, yet it was the appearance of some bizarre new illnesses that was most alarming. Those suffering from dry beriberi, an affliction that caused excruciating joint pain, massaged their aching hands and feet for days at a time without sleeping. Some hunched for so long that their nutrient-deprived bodies locked into a grotesque state of living rigor mortis. They were also plagued with numerous skin disorders, the worst of which was “rice rash.” The Schistosoma parasite caused men to scratch their itchy legs raw and bloody, then the parasite caused throbbing headaches and debilitating nausea.

  Some men awoke to find that they had lost use of their arms or legs. One POW suddenly and unexplainably lost the ability to speak. Those stricken with drop foot, a condition caused by paralysis of the flexor muscles of the leg, lurched around in a sad, shuffling gait. One prisoner endured a hernia operation with limited anesthetic only to have each of his 125 stitches burst open after a malaria attack. After forty-two days, the wound finally healed. Less than twenty-four hours after being discharged from the hospital, the POW was assigned to a work detail. Deferments, even for partially paralyzed men, were almost unheard of. American officers, protesting the forced inclusion of malaria patients on work details, were hushed by Maeda: “We treat you like we wish.”

  Such a policy looked to spell Bert Bank’s doom. Bank had lost fifty-five pounds; an attack of wet beriberi had swelled his feet so badly that he had been forced to cut off his shoes; and, worse, he was slowly losing his eyesight due to vitamin deficiency. Each day, his ability to move about, to work—and thus eat—diminished. His friends began dissolving into blurry smudges, recognizable only by their voices. Nevertheless, Bank worked the fields. “Well, hell, I was cutting, instead of the weeds and vines, I was cutting the vegetable stems,” he said. While most guards kept hitting him over the head, as if he were a broken machine, one perceptive guard realized Bank’s blindness and he was reassigned to a rope-making detail. Other ill or elder prisoners were assigned similar less-taxing tasks such as making straw hats or weaving baskets. One aging officer became Father Time at Dapecol. Since he possessed one of the few functional timepieces, his only duty was to ring the bell that dully heralded the hours throughout the day.

  Although the wanton cruelty of Cabanatuan—thus far, reportedly only six prisoners had perished and there were few incidents of outright torture—had as of yet not followed them to Mindanao, Dapecol was on the verge of becoming a death camp. Here, the Japanese seemed content to kill slowly, by starving and working their slaves to death. It was a case of simple, yet fatal, arithmetic: their forced labor burned more calories than they were consuming.

  Most prisoners, feeling powerless to alter the trajectory of their fate, continued to work, to waste away, and to acquiesce to the protracted lobotomy of their spirit. But a few, sensing that each POW was only marking time to an inevitable end, were stirred to action.

  Melvyn McCoy angrily plunged a handful of rice seedlings into the thigh-high mud and then wiped his furrowed brow. Each of the prisoners in the line mimicked McCoy until a signal from a Filipino adviser shifted them into a sluggish, one-foot retreat, restarting the routine. It was the same silent, choreographed misery on yet another steamy, sun-tortured afternoon in Mactan. Exasperated, McCoy turned to the sweat-drenched POW next to him, Steve Mellnik.

  “Steve,” whispered McCoy, “we’ve got to do something to get off this treadmill!”

  “Step on it, Mac,” warned Mellnik as a guard glanced in their direction and began tramping through the paddy. “The slave driver is coming.”

  The conversation would to have wait until the evening, outside Barracks Eight. After the workday ended, the two friends—they had met weeks earlier while digging a garbage pit—wandered off for some privacy.

  “Did you have anything in mind about getting off this treadmill?” asked Mellnik.

  “Nothing specific,” answered McCoy, “just an unhappy feeling that we’re marking time and getting nowhere…. To answer your question, step number one is to find food.”

  “Are you thinking of a second step?”

  “Hell, yes! Escape! I want out,” blared McCoy. “I’ve been watching the guards, I can lose them without half-trying!”

  “I’m sure we could give them the slip,” agreed Mellnik, but “we’d either starve in the swamp or return to … punishment. No, thanks.”

  “You’ve got a point,” said McCoy. “I suppose the first thing is to find a path through or around that damned swamp. You’re the ground soldier, what equipment would we need?”

  “Food, shoes, leggings, and medicines—we couldn’t move far without quinine.”

  Further discussion revealed another necessity: absolute secrecy. Fearing that some “hopeless and irrational” men might make their plans known to the Japanese, they decided to pursue the procurement of food and keep the larger, still abstract goal of escape to themselves.

  It would not take long for the seed that McCoy had planted to sprout. Days later in the Mactan mire, they heard shouts, repetitive Japanese commands rising in volume, in a nearby paddy. Peering over the dike, they watched as an older Filipino approached an irate guard and bowed deferentially. After some brief words and gesticulations, the Filipino conferred with some Americans who had angered the guard by not gleaning some rice properly. They quickly tidied the area, mollifying the

  guard.

  “Who’s the peacemaker?” McCoy asked a nearby POW.

  “That’s Candido Abrina. He’s an agricultural adviser and a good Joe. Though he brags like hell, he’s saved lots of us from getting punished. Everybody calls him Pop.”

  Impressed, Mellnik sidled up to Abrina later in the day: “This is a lousy war, Pop. When are the Americans coming?”

  Abrina grabbed Mellnik’s scythe and pretended to perform a demonstration.

  “The biggest U.S. convoy in history arrived yesterday!” he replied in an excited tone.

  “Where?” asked an incredulous Mellnik. “Lingayen Bay? Aparri? Atimonan?”

  “None of those places,” whispered Abrina. “In Africa … they landed at Oran and Casablanca. Aren’t they in Africa?”

  Upon spying a guard, Abrina abruptly ended the conversation and moved on.

  “Pop can’t be dreaming up those African names—he’s hearing them over a shortwave set tuned to a U.S. station,” said an excited McCoy upon hearing Mellnik’s report. “We can trust a Filipino who’ll listen to a U.S. broadcast. Let’s cultivate him.”

  Getting close to Abrina was a work detail in itself. Men jostled for space next to him on the Toonerville Trolley. “O.K., gang,” he began, passing around a pack of cigarettes, “what do you want to hear?”

  “It was easy to see why everyone knew Pop,” Mellnik would write. “He was a ham actor and born comic.” The jovial, suntanned raconteur with the toothy grin regaled his audience with what Mellnik called “highly improbable” tales of his adventures in sultans’ harems and scraps with Moro pirates. In reality, the fifty-five-year-old Abrina had been a cashier at the Philippine National Bank in Davao City. He had moved his family to Dapecol and had been permitted to stay on as an unpaid agricultural adviser. As he was a reservoir of morale in the midst of a severe drought, the veracity of Abrina’s tales was inconsequential. The POWs knew on which side his loyalties lay. In serious moments, the fatherly Filipino counseled the prisoners that their misfortune was only temporary. “You must have faith,” he would say.

 
; Each day brought McCoy, Mellnik, and Abrina closer. During lunch, Abrina shared the latest rumors and radio news. McCoy soon felt comfortable enough to ask Abrina to assign them to a more nutritionally rewarding detail. Abrina reported that the Japanese were displeased with the poor egg production at the chicken farm. The POWs reacted with blank stares, but they brightened when Abrina added that the colony’s fifty-acre cornfield, left untended for months, was ready for harvest. The hens, he explained, needed feed to lay eggs. He had figured out a way to appease both the Japanese and the assistant superindendent, Juan Acenas, while feeding the chickens at the same time. As for feeding the Americans, he had a plan for that, too.

  One morning after the rice harvest had ended, two guards accompanied Abrina, McCoy, Mellnik, and fifty prisoners on a half-hour hike to the cornfield. The men faded into the stalks to begin work and Abrina called the two officers over. Mellnik, remembering his own youth as an enlisted man, tried to impress the guards by demonstrating firing positions and a snappy manual of arms; McCoy, academic subjects. There was awkward, icy silence. But the Americans did not know that they were only an opening act.

  “In Davao, I sleep with takusan [many] girls,” declared Abrina with his limited, but functional command of Japanese. The guards immediately took notice, their raised eyebrows and grins evincing success where lectures in marksmanship and electrical circuitry had failed.

  “Yes,” added Abrina, “different girl on each day: Ilocano on Monday, Moro on Tuesday, Portuguese on Wednesday, Chinese on Thursday, Cebuano on Friday, and Russian on Saturday.”

  “Who on Sunday?” one asked.

  Abrina shrugged, as if weary from the schedule: “Church and rest on Sunday—no girls.”

  Abrina held court for the rest of the day, describing seduction techniques and answering the guards’ “embarrassingly probing questions in great detail, all the while strutting and posturing like a debonair but tired Don Juan,” remembered Mellnik. While marching back to the camp, the Americans noticed that the guards were so enthralled with Abrina that they paid little attention to their charges. “As [the guards] embraced Pop and called him their tomodachi [friend],” said Mellnik, “the latter glanced at us and grinned as if to say, ‘See what I did?’ ”

  The plan had been established. But to begin liberating food, more conspirators would have to be brought into the fold, no easy task in a camp full of potential snitches, collaborators, and selfish operators. These individuals would have to be trustworthy, as well as elusive and experienced. As luck would have it, there was a surprise waiting for Mellnik in

  his bay.

  • • •

  This time, it was Paul Marshall and Bob Spielman who had arrived with impeccable timing.

  “As soon as we got here,” said Spielman, “we asked about old friends. It didn’t take long to learn that Major Mellnik lived in barracks number eight.”

  Mellnik had not seen either since Cabanatuan, yet he should not have been surprised to see the two sergeants turn up in Dapecol. They had a knack for that sort of thing. As they explained, they, too, had traveled south aboard the Erie Maru, but upon arrival had been impressed into a salt-making detail near Lasang. But there was more to their story. Much more.

  It began on Corregidor—sometime in March, in all probability—during one of the many boring lulls between attacks. Marshall’s platoon leader believed there was top-quality booze aboard President Quezon’s luxury yacht, the Casiana, which had been sunk at its moorings in January. The wreck rested in only a few feet of water and its deck was often exposed during low tide. The sergeant found a volunteer in Marshall, a well-built—he stood five foot eight, 150 lbs.—and well-rounded—he was an avid outdoorsman as well as a talented violinist—self-starter whose confident aura and dark, pencil-thin mustache made him seem much older than his twenty-four years. Marshall dove on the wreck and surfaced with two cases of liquid treasure, one each of scotch and Canadian Club whiskey. That was not all he found. Robert Blake Spielman, almost identically adventurous and mustachioed, had swum out to the Casiana with similar notions. From that point forward, Marshall and Spielman would become an almost inseparable, sometimes insufferable, dynamic duo destined to cause problems for friend and foe

  alike.

  Case in point: the party thrown later that night, according to Marshall, “got a little out of hand” and landed himself, Spielman, and several other revelers in the jug. They awakened the following morning to throbbing headaches and hangovers made worse by Japanese bombers roaring over Corregidor on an early run. Their jailers ran for cover, but fortunately for Marshall and Spielman, a staff officer both men had befriended during previous duty assignments—Steve Mellnik—arrived just in time to release them.

  For Marshall, it would be a temporary furlough. Weeks later, he was weathering a heavy bombardment outside Malinta Tunnel when news came in of casualties at Kindley Field. A Japanese shell had toppled an observation tower and wounded several of Marshall’s buddies, but the “old colonel” in charge of the hospital had decided against sending help. “He had only two ambulances and he said that he was damned if he was going to lose them,” remembered Marshall. Similarly obstinate, but possessing considerably less rank, Marshall was equally determined not to lose his friends. He “absconded” with an ambulance and barreled down the pockmarked road, weaving around hairpin turns and smoking craters amid exploding shells. After loading the wounded, he reran the mile-long gauntlet only to be greeted by MPs at the tunnel entrance. “That son-of-a-bitch was going to court-martial us,” said Marshall. Marshall later admitted to being the “instigator” of perhaps the only party thrown on Corregidor during the battle, but would remain modest and unrepentant regarding the second offense. “We were just lucky, young kids that didn’t know any better,” he would say. “But, you know, you get a call for help, why, what are you going to do? Sit on your butt? They’d have done the same thing for me.”

  A static life was no life for Paul Herman Marshall. Since his birth in McCune, Kansas, in 1917, Marshall had been propelled through life by the forces of nature and fate. Much in the same way that the tornadoes of his childhood hustled him into his family’s root cellar, the Depression would blow him west, across the Dust Bowl into adulthood in Pueblo, Colorado, where he graduated from high school in 1935. Marshall migrated to California to take a job as a meat salesman with Armour, but the biggest leap came when he wandered into an Army recruiting office in Los Angeles in the winter of 1941. As the potbellied sergeant told him, enlistees had their choice of domestic duty stations or overseas posts. “Where you want to go is the Philippines,” he added. “I’ve done duty twice over there and it is really great, you will love it.” And so Marshall, a night manager of a supermarket earning a monthly salary of $180, signed his life over to Uncle Sam for a $30-a-month Army paycheck and the promise of adventure. Before shipping out, he gave his father, then working for a Chrysler dealership in Pueblo, his Plymouth with the understanding that a vehicle of comparable value would be waiting for him after what was likely to be, at the most, a one- or two-year absence.

  Like Marshall, Bob Spielman had enlisted in the Army to satisfy his hunger for adventure. A rangy, rugged latter-day frontiersman from the South Texas flyspeck of Carrizo Springs, Spielman began chasing work throughout the West at the age of sixteen. Freight trains and a strong sense of self-confidence carried him through Colorado, Wyoming, and into the Civilian Conservation Corps. The fall of 1940 found the tough, teenaged Texan in Cheyenne, breaking horses, bulldogging cattle, and trying to lasso a future. “I rode in the rodeos, but not with a lot of luck,” he said. “Lost a lot of skin doing that.” The weather was turning cold and Spielman’s stomach was rumbling—ranchers laid off their hired hands in the winter—so he signed up at Fort Warren. The Philippines would provide all the adventure he needed.

  His rackets were as numerous as they were lucrative. He ran poker and blackjack games, fished from his own sailboat, the Sea Urchin, sold octopus to the Chinese operator o
f the Corregidor PX, and taught illiterate soldiers how to write their names. “Every evening we would go down to the Spiff Bar,” recalled Spielman. “They would buy the beer and I taught them to write their name. I would would write it and they would trace it … they were happy when they were successful.” And there were the women.

  In Manila, while working as Mellnik’s one-man administrative staff at USAFFE, Spielman “spent his spare time ‘scouting and patrolling,’ ” as Mellnik called it. “The large number of breathless girls who called him by phone each day testified to the success of his off-duty efforts!” But Mellnik was impressed by more than just Spielman’s little black book. He probably saw a lot of himself in the enterprising, hardworking sergeant. And in Paul Marshall, too. The friendship between Mellnik, Marshall, and Spielman was a rarity within the social caste system of the prewar Army—but it was real. “He could take an enlisted man and shake his hand and walk right along side of him,” Marshall would say of Mellnik.

  In Cabanatuan, when a malignant case of malaria had crippled Marshall, Spielman would help his enfeebled buddy outside on clear days, propping his ashen, sickly body against the barracks for some fresh air and sunlight. Twice Marshall was taken to the hospital and because staying meant certain death, twice Spielman personally discharged his friend. “We were very, very close,” said Marshall. “Like brothers.”

  Though no stranger to rackets, Spielman was sickened that some unscrupulous men were profiting from hoarded medicine. One day, the immorality in the camp and his best friend’s approaching mortality moved him to action. He cornered a known operator and requested a dozen quinine pills. When a price was quoted, Spielman jabbed the tip of his mess kit knife into the man’s gut. “I have a pal who is about to die and you are going to help him live,” said Spielman. The black marketeer, said Spielman, “had a change of heart.”