The plan, which Mellnik named “Operation Chicken,” required each man to perform a specific role. While the “snatcher” was directly responsible for entering the enclosure and retrieving the chickens, the “watcher” patrolled the access trail. The role of the “guard sitter” was to prevent any guards from wandering onto the scene. The “coordinator,” stationed in a concealed position near the “snatcher” and the insertion point, a camouflaged depression beneath the fence, was the triggerman. He communicated through simple signals: raised hands indicated “all clear”; doffing a hat and wiping one’s brow postponed the insertion. Once the snatcher entered the enclosure, the coordinator “talked” to him by throwing pebbles. A single pebble bouncing off the roof served as a warning; a handful was a general alarm. Once safely inside, the snatcher purloined as much poultry and eggs as he could. “We made it a point of honor never to take less than two [chickens] on a single raid,” said McCoy.
Hardly a day passed without the sound of pebbles clanking off the galvanized iron roofs. Each successful mission seemed to raise the stakes ever higher, with freelancing guards and squawking hens breeding an increasingly disturbing amount of close calls. More than once, no small bit of luck was the difference between a last-second, feather-filled flight and capture. On one memorable mission, Marshall climbed the rafters of a bodega and hung for thirty heart-pounding minutes as a group of guards milled below him. “It was risky,” Spielman admitted, “but not as risky as being too weak to actually escape.”
Their synchronized stealth enabled them to liberate 133 chickens in three months. The hens were “quanned” with vegetables in five-gallon “quan” cans in the coffee fields, “quanned” meaning to clean and cook the birds. The single most important word in the prisoners’ vocabulary, “quan” was derived from the Tagalog “kuwan.” Although primarily used to describe anything edible, it became a “whatchamacallit,” an all-purpose linguistic widget that grew to possess multiple meanings and uses.
Though they did smuggle in food for needy POWs, the chicken thieves held their quanning parties—chicken-sharing parties, that is—in the fields to avoid bringing the stolen birds inside the compound. The source of the quan had to be kept secret because the Japanese wanted desperately to solve the mystery of the missing hens. “After we had stolen 75 of these chickens the Japanese noted their losses,” said McCoy. “Thereafter we had to work with infinitely more guile, for we knew that, if caught, we would be punished with a severity ranging from a mere flogging to death by torture.”
Confounded, the Japanese took out their frustrations on the chickens: one POW witnessed a guard throw a hen against a wall in some strange method of interrogation; the Japanese also withheld feed as punishment for the chickens’ lack of egg production or else their perceived complicity in allowing the Americans to snatch their eggs. Of course, such odd behavior was not unusual. The Americans had seen their bedeviled captors pry open the hoods of broken-down trucks and beat engines—in effect punishing the recalcitrant motors—with sticks. Another sliced the tail off a stubborn bull on the plowing detail so that the animal would “lose face” among his peers. A nerve-racked Pop Abrina, however, did not find the Americans’ antics or the responses of the bumbling Japanese entertaining. “You’re taking a big gamble every day!” he told McCoy. “And one of these times you’ll lose!”
The plotters decided that they had to tell their Filipino friend about their inchoate escape plan. It fell upon Mellnik to break the news one day during lunch.
“We must tell the world what the Japanese are doing in the Philippines,” he declared. “We must make the horrors of O’Donnell, Cabanatuan and Davao a matter of record. And we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach MacArthur’s headquarters and influence history. We can’t do it alone, Pop; we need your help!”
Abrina was not moved by Mellnik’s plea. Abrina was so startled, in fact, that he avoided the conspirators, renouncing his vow of silence only to denounce McCoy several days later.
“You and the major [Mellnik] are crazy,” he said to McCoy, “because you risk your lives for nothing. It’s impossible to escape—no one has yet tried! How will you cross the swamp? What will you do about the headhunters who live on the other side?”
Perhaps it was his latent patriotism, or else it was the thought of participating in a real adventure, instead of living vicariously through fabricated tales, that brought Abrina around. He approached the two officers, the raconteur’s gleam evident in his eyes.
“I was thinking, Major, that a convict might lead you through that swamp! But you’d have to offer him something.”
“We have influence in high places,” chimed in McCoy, elatedly, before explaining that Mellnik had worked for MacArthur. They could not promise anything, but they would do everything in their power to secure a pardon for any colono who assisted them.
Abrina’s support was a major coup—they would need as much help as they could get. The Second World War was filled with countless impossible missions, but perhaps none more inherently difficult to execute than escaping from a Japanese prison camp. Some Allied POWs, officers mostly, felt duty-bound to attempt to escape. A few even succeeded. Handfuls of Australians, Britons, and Dutch were able to filter from Ambon, Borneo, Burma, Hong Kong, and Thailand to friendly territory. Mostly, those rare successes were small-scale escapes, piecemeal breakouts by lone actors or pairs of POWs.
But for every success story, there were hundreds of failures, almost all of which were fatal. According to one American POW who recorded a history of escapes at Cabanatuan, it was estimated that of the twenty-three prisoners who attempted to escape, fourteen were executed outright. The fates of the others—many of those recaptured were removed to other places of incarceration or else executed elsewhere—were immediately unknown, suggesting a terrible success rate. That dismal percentage was a deterrent itself, yet there were a multitude of other reasons why the vast majority of Allied prisoners in Japanese hands did not seriously entertain thoughts of escape.
If, as the preeminent POW researcher Gavan Daws suggests that, a prisoner’s white skin was a “prison uniform he could never take off,” his generally poor health was a weighty ball-and-chain. Men living in a near-death state knew that they could not survive on the lam in a dense, malarial jungle. The Japanese line of thinking was clear: feeding or caring for the prisoners’ medical needs might have the corollary effect that they would grow strong enough to escape or harm their captors. So, opined one Dapecol POW, “they didn’t, and we didn’t.”
The shooting squads and the grisly public torture spectacles also curbed most prisoners’ desire to stray. The kowtowing of their officers to the Japanese in some cases bordered on treason, and, in many camps, an escape attempt would require them first to elude perimeter guard details composed of their comrades.
Geography was perhaps the most formidable impediment to freedom. Nearly all Allied POWs were surrounded by Japanese troop concentrations in depth on land and by thousands of miles of water patrolled by the Imperial Navy. On Mindanao, the further the group ventured from Dapecol the more dangerous its situation would be. The swamp that encircled the penal colony was only the first hurdle. “The question was, ‘how do we rejoin the forces?’ ” said Spielman. “There is no point in escaping and hiding underneath a rock somewhere.”
After traversing the swamp and sixty miles of jungle, their next goal, would be the town of Cateel on the eastern coast of Mindanao. There they would acquire a vessel to sail to Australia, 1,300 miles distant, the closest friendly territory according to the news reports supplied by Acenas’s radio. Despite the distance, McCoy was confident that he could reach the continent by dead reckoning. What he needed was manpower, a crew of at least nine men to staff three watches. Expanding their ranks would diminish their already infinitesimal odds for success, but, as Mellnik had told Abrina, the group had higher, historically significant aspirations. They had no choice but to organize and operate on a grand scale.
St
ealing chickens, however, was proving easier than recruiting an escape team. There was already a small pool of potential trustworthy candidates, and all seemed hesitant even to discuss escape, let alone participate. One evening, Mellnik approached Maurice Shoss, a young officer he had known on Corregidor. Shoss’s reply was representative: “You must be joking, Steve. No one can escape from here!” Having disclosed their plans to Abrina, who was now actively seeking guides on their behalf, the plotters had passed the proverbial point of no return. A sense of urgency dictated that they move on to the next phase of planning. McCoy ordered that efforts to round out their party be redoubled.
“They must be willing to follow orders, risk their lives, and keep their mouths shut. If they have those qualities, I’ll make sailors out of them. Keep your eyes open for such men.”
Thanks to Shofner, the Marines had been permanently assigned to the plowing detail. During their rest period, they napped, played bridge, hunted wild pigs, and scavenged fruit for sumptuous banquets cooked in a bamboo clubhouse lodged deep in the banana groves and nearly invisible to the nearest guardhouse. This idyllic existence was made possible because many labor details at Dapecol were unsupervised. Because of Japanese combat losses elsewhere, only a fraction of the 3rd Iwanaka Unit remained to garrison Dapecol. Steadfast in their belief that the swamp made Dapecol escape-proof, Maeda and Hozumi only employed roving patrols to maintain order.
Even so, there was an ominous sign that these halcyon days would not last. Maeda had reduced the prisoners’ rations following the arrival of the Red Cross packages and though these supplies were soon exhausted, the rations were not raised. Accordingly, the Marines began making contingency plans. Huddled together as cold rains drummed the tin roof of Barracks Five, they secretly pored over a map of the Pacific and charted distances and terrain. After each session, their focus returned to Australia. Like McCoy’s group, this group, too, had deduced that Australia was the closest Allied-held territory. They also possessed McCoy’s moxie, believing that only one portion of a sea voyage, the final 400-mile leg from Timor to Darwin, was laden with potential danger. What they did not possess, though, was McCoy’s seafaring experience or the necessary Filipino contacts that could turn their plan into reality.
Reaching an impasse with their planning, they nevertheless began to squirrel away cans of food for future developments—though they never actually allowed themselves to discuss just what kind. “We avoided any actual direct conversation about escape,” said Hawkins. “We did not formulate any definite plans, but we were thinking. Every night I went to sleep with escape on my mind. Once awakened, the dormant thoughts could not be quieted.”
Austin Shofner was doing more than thinking about escape. It was a Thursday night in mid-February. After an hour-long talk in relative seclusion in Barracks Five, Shofner and Ed Dyess had reached an agreement on a tentative joint escape plan: that they would sleep on it. It remains lost to history just who contacted whom first, but the fact remains that both had decided that the timing was right for an escape, that the odds would likely never be more in their favor, and that they could not go it alone. “It still looked good the next night, and we decided to give it a try even if we lost our lives,” said Dyess.
“When do we go? Right now? Sure!” exclaimed a breathless Sam Grashio when approached by Dyess. “If we tried to escape and were executed, so what? It would only be faster than staying on to expire of disease or starvation,” he explained. “If the escape was successful, I would save my life.” Escape had been a regular topic of conversation for Dyess and Boelens, so when Boelens detailed what he could contribute, it became obvious that he had only been awaiting the order to proceed.
Hawkins and Dobervich were intrigued by the proposed interservice partnership, yet characteristically apprehensive at the same time. They were well acquainted with Dyess and Grashio, but Dyess’s glowing recommendation of Boelens would not suffice. Before signing on to any venture, especially one with life-or-death consequences, they would have to meet with Dyess’s entire team. And the sooner the better. “I felt I was already dead,” Hawkins would later say. “I felt I was living on borrowed time.” With the clock ticking, a conference was scheduled.
At nightfall, the Marines left Bay 10 singly, at intervals so as not to arouse suspicion, for the rendezvous point: the shed located some fifty feet behind the barracks that served as the prisoners’ barbershop. They believed that the shack’s proximity to the latrines, more specifically to the odor, would give them the privacy and security they needed.
They had just pulled up three stools when Leo Boelens appeared. Perfunctory handshakes and a few minutes of small talk provided the Marines with all they needed to know. Boelens exuded a quiet confidence and his “rugged, bronzed” face, said Hawkins, revealed “depths of strength and character…. I liked what I saw and what I learned.”
As soon as Dyess and Grashio arrived, Shofner rose to survey the surrounding area. Satisfied that there were no eavesdroppers, he returned and signaled for the meeting to proceed.
Leaning his angular frame against a post, Dyess struck a match to light a cigarette; the flame illuminated his hunger-chiseled features and serious demeanor. After a whispering sizzle of glowing red tobacco and burning paper, he exhaled his thoughts in hushed tones.
“I’ve always planned to get away from these little bastards, and I think the time has come to do something about it. I don’t have anything definite in mind yet, but if we can get out of here we can try to get to the south by boat. I say the time will be right pretty soon, because things are going to get tougher around here. Look at the chow we’re getting now—just like Cabanatuan.”
“And we never know when they might start the shooting squad idea here either,” interjected Hawkins. “That would stop the whole idea for good.”
Dyess nodded in assent. “I’ve been thinking about that angle, too. We would have to give it up altogether if there was a chance of anything happening to the boys left behind.”
Though there was no precedent by which to predict Maeda’s response and no accounting for the mercurial Japanese temperament, they all agreed that reprisals would be unlikely.
“I don’t believe Maeda would do anything serious,” said Dobervich. “If Hozumi were in command, I might have a different opinion.”
Their ethical reservations addressed, they next discussed the physical obstacles to an escape, namely, how to leave Mindanao. Dyess outlined two proposals, the first of which called for the escapees to steal an enemy plane, which either Dyess or Grashio could fly to freedom. Capturing a plane, concurred the Marines, was highly unlikely.
“Well, how about the boat?” asked Dyess. “Is there anyone here who could get us to Australia? How about you, Hawk? You studied navigation at the [Naval] Academy, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, but this is a different problem,” said Hawkins, explaining that not only did he have little practical experience, but that he would also be hampered by the lack of charts and instruments. “I’m willing to try, but I want you to know that I don’t claim to be an expert.”
They needed more than a navigational expert. They needed someone knowledgeable, experienced, and shrewd enough to shepherd the operation. It was Shofner who voiced the name on everyone’s lips: McCoy.
“I guarantee he’s shrewd. I’ve been playing poker on the cuff with that boy and I know.”
Whether McCoy would throw in his lot with the group was a matter of conjecture, but their mission was clear. “We even went so far as to state exactly what our mission was,” said Hawkins. “It was our intention to bring America and the whole world the awful true story of what the Japanese had done and were doing to the survivors of Bataan and
Corregidor.”
Though their plans were born out of an innate desire for self-preservation, there was more riding on their mission than their own lives. On Christmas Day, the Marines had prepared a huge fruit salad from their stash and taken it to the hospital. The sight of the diseased,
emaciated patients had served, by Hawkins’s recollections, as a “sobering” impetus to action. By February 1, more than one-third of the POWs occupied a special “sick” compound apart from the main hospital, which had long since reached capacity. They could not have known that the tide of war was slowly turning in America’s favor, but they did know that if someone did not do something, the empirical evidence suggested that there would likely be no Americans left in the Philippines to greet MacArthur should he ever fulfill his promise. That “someone,” they realized, was them.
“There are a lot of other camps and a lot of lives that could be saved,” Shofner reminded the others. “Who knows how many men are in the same rotten boat we’re in right now?”
They had kin in misery all over the Far East. The same monstrous ideological momentum that had propelled them into O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, and Dapecol had driven countless Allied prisoners to other levels of hell everywhere from Borneo to mainland Japan. Thousands would continue to die on other death marches, in other camps, and on voyages undertaken in the holds of hellships inconceivably worse than that of the Erie Maru. And tens of thousands more had been destined to reach Japan, Manchuria, Burma, and Thailand to toil on docks and in mines and factories owned by companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui and on projects with ominous names like the “Death Railway.”
“We hoped that by our efforts we might serve in some way to relieve the suffering of those men we left behind, and at the same time arouse the righteous fury of the American people for the punishment of Japan,” Hawkins would write. At the very least, they believed that through a startling revelation “tremendous international pressure would be brought to bear on the Japanese,” forcing their enemy to make some improvements in their prison camps in order “to regain some of their ‘face’ lost in the eyes of the civilized world.”
Escape from Davao Page 18