But that did not mean that Hawkins had completely switched off his survival instincts. He and Dobervich were returning from the fields late one sultry afternoon when they heard rifle shots emanating from the direction of the hospital compound. Soon, bullets buzzed over their heads and they instinctively dropped to the dirt.
“What’s going on?” said Hawkins, lifting his head ever so slightly from the ground.
“Don’t know. But that was close!”
When the shooting had stopped, they rose to their feet and saw a congregation of prisoners and Japanese milling about the hospital compound. Getting closer, they saw the lifeless body of an American at the base of a guard tower just outside the fence line.
“What happened?” Hawkins asked one of the prisoners.
“Jap in the tower shot him. Tried to shoot another fellow inside the compound, too, but missed.”
Slowly, the details were pieced together. According to eyewitness accounts, the dead prisoner, Sgt. John H. McPhee, had been digging camotes directly below the northeast corner tower just outside of the hospital stockade. McPhee had tossed his canteen back over the fence into the compound to be filled by one of his buddies. When it was returned to him, he raised it to his lips, an action that infuriated the tower guard. Unable to understand the commands being shouted at him, McPhee tilted the canteen and spilled a few drops onto the ground to show the guard that it was only water. Incensed at this innocuous gesture, the guard unshouldered his rifle and opened fire. The first bullet struck McPhee between the shoulder and the neck. He staggered forward, screaming, “My God—don’t shoot me again!” The guard—Superior Private Osenaga, aka “Liver Lip”—ignored the plea and pumped several rounds into McPhee’s body before turning his rifle on the POW who had tossed the canteen to McPhee. The latter zigzagged for his life as bullets ripped through some hospital structures—thankfully, no patients were hit—and ricocheted out of the compound.
By the time the compound gates were locked for the evening, the camp was seething. Random, senseless acts of violence on the part of the guards had been on the rise in recent weeks. In February, an enlisted prisoner was struck with a hoe by the guard known as “Fishface.” The attack left a deep gash in the POW’s leg, necessitating a four-month hospital stay. And in March, the Army lieutenant colonel in charge of the sugar-cutting detail had attempted to bring in some cut cane for the hospital patients. The guards caught the officer and tied him to a stake where he was severely beaten for twenty-four hours.
This latest act, however, was nothing short of cold-blooded murder. But that’s not how the Japanese saw it. At evening announcement time, the barracks leaders read a message from Major Maeda: “The Japanese commander regrets that it became necessary to shoot an American prisoner today to prevent his escape. Let this be a warning to other prisoners, that any attempt to escape will meet with the same action.”
“Those miserable stinking bastards,” someone snarled within earshot of Hawkins in Bay Ten. “They’ll pay for this someday.”
Muffled by the roar of revulsion, Hawkins turned to Dobervich.
“Maybe someday before long we’ll be telling the folks at home about this and all the other thousands of men murdered out here,” he whispered.
Or maybe, they began to wonder, they wouldn’t. Maybe McPhee’s shooting had been a preemptive warning. Maybe the Japanese knew something.
“ ‘Are [the Japanese] playing cat-and-mouse?” Shofner asked himself as he lay in the darkened barracks on his crude bed, fighting insomnia and wakeful nightmares of a looming Japanese trap. “Will it end in the thunder of machine gun fire? I fought the visions that came rising up, of a dozen bodies flopping like dying chickens in the dirt.”
PART III
FREEDOM
CHAPTER 13
A Miracle
I am awake. Across the prison yard …
The camp is deadly still
I barter choice for life, and I must pay—
Sunday, April 4, 1943
Davao Penal Colony
Just before dawn, Steve Mellnik awakened and through a window, watched as the stars faded into a pewter, overcast sky.
The day was finally here.
Mellnik dressed, tiptoed down the aisle, shook Melvyn McCoy awake, and went to the mess hall, where he found cooks preparing rice for those scheduled for Sunday labor. Picking at his food, he asked himself, “Would everyone appear?”
Within a few minutes, all of the conspirators were present and accounted for, with the exception of Father Carberry. They sat at different tables, exchanging not so much as a glance. When the reveille bugle sounded, rousing the rest of the camp from its slumber, they rose from their seats. “Little did that Jap bugler realize that he was sounding our call to action,” said Jack Hawkins. That was the prearranged signal; they would assemble at the main gate at 0800.
In their barracks, they dressed and packed their possessions. It would not take long. Nearly one year as prisoners of war—in the case of Dyess and Grashio, this morning marked the 361st day they had awakened in captivity—had stripped their lives down to the barest essentials. They looked like an assemblage of military misfits. While McCoy buttoned up the suntans of an Army officer of MacArthur’s staff, which he had found on Corregidor, Shofner packed his treasured Marine football jacket and pulled on a comical pair of red wool socks. “I had marched too many miles as a Marine to start flirting with foot problems now,” he reasoned.
Thanks to Mike Dobervich, Hawkins was perhaps the best-dressed member of the escape party. Among Dobervich’s many gifts to Hawkins was a shirt that had belonged to a man who had been beheaded on the Death March and a leather AAF jacket. Hawkins also had a canvas sun helmet, complete with the eagle, globe, and anchor emblem of the Marine Corps, that he had purchased in Cabanatuan for a pack of cigarettes. He wore a new pair of U.S. Navy–issue tennis shoes—a rare gift from the Japanese, recently shipped from Manila—which he had had smeared with mud to lessen their attention-grabbing whiteness.
Paul Marshall was perhaps the poorest of the prisoners. “We were going barefoot all the time in the camp,” he recalled. “Most of the officers had shoes, one kind or another.” Slipping on a pair of sandals made from rubber tires and throwing a small bag over his shoulder, he resembled a hobo about to hit the rails. “I had one blanket and half a pup tent. And I had a little sack with a couple of changes of underwear and socks … that’s all I had when we went in down there [to Dapecol]. And that’s all I had when we left.”
In Barracks Eight, as Mellnik slid a razor and a worn toothbrush into his musette bag, McCoy covertly packed his belongings, including his maps and charts, medicines, and some delicate piña cloth handkerchiefs, gifts for his wife and daughters, under his clothes. He managed to find room in his musette bag for his most prized possession, a half-roll of toilet paper that he had kept since Corregidor. Finally, he folded his mosquito net under his bulging shirt.
“Where are you going with the mosquito netting?” asked an older Army officer.
“This net? I’m going to wash it during the noon rest hour today,” said McCoy, nonchalantly. “It’s full of bedbugs again.”
“If he suspected anything he did not say so,” McCoy later recalled.
Back in Barracks Five, Bert Bank sensed something strange was transpiring. When Bank maneuvered close enough, it looked as though Ed Dyess was rubbing a greasy substance, perhaps some kind of cooking fat, on his pants and leggings.
“Ed,” asked Bank playfully, “you going to take a trip?”
Dyess shrugged and laughed a nonsensical answer: “I just found this stuff.” Though his eyesight had all but vanished, Bank’s other powers of perception had heightened. He now understood what was going on. Dyess, he believed, probably felt guilty about leaving him behind. Bank, not wanting to make a difficult situation any more so, decided not to press the issue.
It was almost 0800 and there was still no sign of Carberry. Grashio made some hurried inquiries. Carberry was l
aid up in the hospital, he was told. Malaria. “I went there at once,” recalled Grashio, “and found him lying in bed. He told me that he hoped to go with us but that he was too weak to make the attempt now; that we should go without him.” Carberry could not bring himself to tell Grashio the truth, that he had feigned
the malaria attack because he had been forbidden to participate in the
escape by Father Albert Braun, the senior chaplain. Braun was ill and short-handed—one priest had died—and feared that a priest’s participation in an escape would cause Maeda to abolish religious services. Carberry’s mission, as Braun saw it, was to stay and minister to the prisoners, not to save his own life. (Carberry’s faithful obedience would cost him his life. After suffering through nearly two more years in Japanese prison camps, he would survive the bombing of the POW transport Oryoku Maru by U.S. planes only to die in late January 1945 while en route to Japan aboard another hellship, the Brazil Maru.)
On his way back to the main gate, Grashio met a POW named Chuck O’Neil, a friend and flying school classmate he considered safe. Grashio confided in O’Neil that he was attempting to escape and asked him in the event that he made it home and Grashio did not, to inform Grashio’s family of what had happened to him. O’Neil agreed. “He said I was crazy,” said Grashio.
Pop Abrina, in all probability, had been praying. Standing in the doorway of the chapel, he watched anxiously as the escapees formed their respective groups—six coffee pickers and four plowers—and proceeded to the main gate. They had no idea that Abrina was watching them from afar, but another pair of eyes hardly mattered since it seemed as though the entire camp—or every Japanese, at least—was watching.
With McCoy out front, the first group, composed of Mellnik, Dyess, Boelens, Marshall, and Spielman, marched up to the gate.
“Detail, halt,” ordered McCoy.
It had come to this. Months of planning, mounting mental strain, and hushed conferences. The enormous weight of worry that had accompanied their constant fear of discovery by the Japanese or, worse, betrayal by their own. Every surprise inspection, search, and shakedown, every
stolen, borrowed, bought, and carefully concealed piece of gear, every prayer, every painstaking detail, every carefully concocted story,
every angle worked, every gamble taken. It had all been for this moment.
Each single bead of sweat seemed a river coursing down their brows. They thought that they could hear the thumping of their hearts. And that the Japanese could, too. Watching from a few feet away, Jack Hawkins sucked in a deep breath and stood like a statue. Believing that each of them looked “suspiciously bulky,” he wanted to remain motionless, invisible. “I don’t suppose there was anything particularly unusual about my appearance,” recalled Hawkins, “but I felt as conspicuous as if I were dressed in prison stripes.”
“I knew that the next minute or two would bring the supreme test for us,” remembered Dyess. They still had several additional sentry posts to pass, but none was more important than this one. It was the gateway to freedom, the point where all work parties leaving the main compound were required to check out.
Usually, the sleepy sentries made a swift count, chalked the number of departing POWs on the blackboard, and allowed the detail to pass. But not this time. Though McCoy had counted twice, the sentries remained curiously unimpressed. One stepped out from the guardhouse to inspect the party, doing so with what seemed to Dyess to be unusually intense scrutiny. If the Japanese knew of their plans, as Shofner had feared, now would be the time for a theatrical interception. Dyess realized that at this point the mission was in the hands of a higher power.
“If the Old Man is with us,” he said to himself, “we’ll make it. If He isn’t, we won’t.”
As the guard strode up and down the file of prisoners with narrowed eyes, they could not blink or breathe—there was nothing left to do but believe.
Finally, after several seconds—which seemed like an eternity—the guard turned and barked his decision over his shoulder: “Okay.” McCoy presented a customary salute and with a command—“Forward march”—moved the detail out. As each prisoner passed though the gate, another guard chalked up the numbers on the blackboard. Ichi. Ni. San. Yon. Go. Roku.
Six clear, four to go.
“Come on gang, fall in,” said Shofner, moving the plowers into the spot vacated by the coffee pickers. Hawkins could tell that Shofner’s voice was unusually shaky.
“Easy now, Shof,” whispered Hawkins. “Just like every day.”
Shofner saluted and barked the Japanese word for plowing, “kosaku.” Unlike McCoy’s group, the plowers didn’t even receive a raised eyebrow. The guard wagged his finger at the Americans, counting and chalking off four men. With a salute from Shofner, they were on the way. “My feet felt light,” said Hawkins, “as if they were scarcely touching the ground.”
Abrina had a jaunt in his step, too, as he strolled from the chapel. Each Sunday, a truck traveled into Davao City and a handful of spots was reserved for civilians who wished to visit relatives or purchase supplies. Believing that an alibi would be highly valuable, Abrina had made plans to be absent from Dapecol during the prisoners’ evening tenko.
Their first hurdle cleared, the two details went in different directions, ostensibly to their work assignments. As Shofner led the plowers to their shack, McCoy’s men executed a sharp left outside the main gate and began marching parallel to the fence line, passing in rapid succession the row of barracks. Their path took them directly beneath the guard towers. Mellnik glanced up anxiously. “Though we were moving a regulation 128 steps per minute, I felt as though we were crawling. I had an insane desire to run.”
“We walked as nonchalantly as possible,” recalled Dyess, “but it seemed to me that my heart was beating my brains out. I thought I could actually feel the guards’ eyes on the back of my neck.”
They had almost cleared the compound area when the residents of Barracks Eight emptied toward the mess hall. That was when Frank “Siki” Carpenter, a good-humored officer and one of Mellnik’s close friends, spied Mellnik—or, rather, Mellnik’s musette bag.
“Hey, Steve!” Carpenter’s piercingly loud voice cried out across the compound, “your toothbrush is sticking out of the back of your musette bag. Are you planning to escape?”
If ever there was an occasion when Carpenter’s brand of humor was in poor taste, this was it. And if the POWs had learned anything during their period of incarceration, it was that all Japanese knew the meaning of at least one word in English: “escape.” The mere mention of the word, of course, had sealed the fate of the three would-be escapees at Cabanatuan.
But Carpenter had no inkling of what was transpiring. Luckily for the escapees, neither did the Japanese. Mellnik, pretending not to hear Carpenter, lowered his head as they double-timed it from the area. The adrenaline surge was so powerful that they were almost jogging.
“Hold it down,” snapped McCoy. “The tower sentries are still watching. If they see Americans rushing to work, they’ll know damn well something is wrong!”
As they decelerated, familiar sights passed in sentimental slow motion.
“Dammit,” said Spielman, wistfully, while skirting the poultry farm, “I hate to leave those 2,800 plump hens. In a way, I almost gave my life for them.”
Because the coffee patch was located on the far southwest quadrant of the colony, the journey of McCoy’s group to the rendezvous was not only longer, but also potentially more perilous. In the process of making two left turns and doubling back via interconnecting roads, they encountered another guardhouse. Whispering last-minute instructions, McCoy warned them to be ready to jump the guard if necessary, but to otherwise proceed according to plan.
“Act military,” said McCoy. “Give him one he’ll always remember.”
Once they got within range, McCoy bellowed the command: “Eyes left!”
As he snapped his right hand to his head, six heads jerked in unison, a show of pa
rade-ground precision. Stiffening to attention, the guard, recalled McCoy, was “so surprised that he returned the salute and smirked toothily as we marched on past.”
In the span of several minutes they skulked, singly, unseen across two heavily patrolled roads near the Japanese billet and headquarters area, depositing them into the banana groves.
“The Old Man is with us today,” Dyess thought to himself. “What we’re having is more than luck; a lot more than luck.”
Though it seemed a lifetime, the entire movement took all of thirty minutes. According to McCoy’s log, his group reunited with Grashio and the Marines at the plowers’ shack at 0830. Locating their stashed supplies, they discovered that most of their gear was waterlogged. After wringing a week’s worth of rainwater out of their blankets and wrapping the salvageable supplies in shelter halves, they tied their heavy bedrolls around their shoulders in horseshoe fashion and dispersed into the brush to wait for Ben de la Cruz and Victor Jumarong. Ten nervous minutes passed. Then twenty. The dreary sky began to spit a heavy downpour.
“Good old rain,” whispered Boelens, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “It’ll cover our tracks.”
“Cover our tracks, hell!” retorted Shofner, gruffly. “I wish those guys would come on so we could start making some tracks.”
The escapees sat silently in the rain. Had the Filipinos been waylaid? Had they gotten cold feet? Or were they conspiring at this very moment with the Japanese? They had just about decided to go on without the two guides when Jumarong finally arrived, alone, at 0900.
“Where’s Ben?” asked an irate McCoy.
“Ben want to know if you ready,” said Jumarong in his best broken English.
“You tell Ben come quick or we go without him.”
Although the Americans were shocked, such dilatory behavior on the part of the two colonos was in fact standard operating procedure in the Philippines, where no amount of talk or planning is enough to convince one of another’s sincerity or intentions. Jumarong and de la Cruz needed proof, needed to see with their own eyes the ten gringos, loaded down with gear, ready to go. “Apparently,” wrote McCoy, “they wanted to make certain we really meant to escape.”
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