Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  “Shof,” he whispered, “McCoy might be the best ship’s navigator in the Navy, but I don’t believe he’s doing much of a job here on the ground. I’d swear we’re going in circles.”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “So have I,” added Dobervich, overhearing their conversation. “McCoy doesn’t watch his compass close enough. Remember the night compass march we made at Basic School, Jack? I think that’s the way we should do it now.”

  “If we are circling,” said Hawkins, “it means our bones will rot here in this swamp.”

  Shofner called for a caucus. According to Hawkins, McCoy “frankly admitted that his Naval training had not included anything to cover a situation such as this” and gladly turned over navigation duties to the Marines. The POWs also agreed to share cutting duty. A team of two men, it was decided, would cut for ten-minute intervals. This fair rotation would enable them to operate at peak efficiency, a necessity since the Japanese search party, which surely had set out at dawn, would have the benefit of their clearance work and thus move considerably faster through the swamp in pursuit. With time their enemy, the Marines quickly applied their training to the situation.

  Taking the compass, Hawkins assumed the lead position directly behind the cutters. As they hacked forward, Hawkins remained stationary, watching until they progressed to the limit of his vision, at which time he would close up behind them, take another compass reading, and restart the process. Shofner, meanwhile, was charged with shepherding the party—which was strung out in long, serpentine fashion in the tunnel of cogon—forward while keeping an eye on Hawkins. Dobervich was tasked with keeping stragglers in front of him and also keeping himself moving, a chore with as many as three packs on his back. “We moved forward a few paces and stood, moved again and stood,” said Shofner. It was slow, monotonous progress, but progress nonetheless.

  Making the mission more difficult was the fact that following a straight line and adhering to the readings was practically impossible. Obstacles consistently cropped up, necessitating numerous navigational detours. “We came to places in the jungle impossible to cut through. Sometimes we climbed over, and again we crawled under, holding our noses just above the slime and expecting to meet snakes face to face,” remembered Dyess.

  Thankfully, they had not encountered any of the swamp’s rumored inhabitants—animal or human—and there was still no sign of pursuing Japanese, but they began to encounter potentially more dangerous enemies: themselves. Shofner and Mellnik, for example, were soon at each other’s throats. Shofner felt as though Mellnik was not carrying his weight, and he had evidence: Mellnik had dropped their portable stove, Boelens’s quan can, and it had to be retrieved. And perhaps Mellnik simply did not appreciate Shofner’s motivational methods. Whatever the case, small slights festered into major arguments. Once, when Shofner overheard Mellnik berating Dobervich, he vociferously interceded on behalf of his fellow Marine, unperturbed by the fact that Mellnik outranked him.

  “I’m the senior Marine here,” shouted Shofner. “Don’t you ever speak to another goddamn Marine here. You speak to me, you understand that, skinhead?”

  By noon, several crises had only narrowly been averted and it seemed as though the group, as well as the carefully conceived escape plan, was slowly being shredded to pieces much like their clothes, faces, arms, legs, and psyches. Although the Marines were confident that the party was now moving in a somewhat linear fashion toward its northeasternly goal, McCoy estimated that they were traveling less than fifty yards an hour. There were no visible road signs indicating positive progress, no proof that it was worth it to push one’s self a little further. One by one, they began to break down physically and mentally.

  “How does one die in the swamp?” Mellnik asked himself. “From exhaustion? Drowning? Or by just quitting?”

  McCoy stumbled upon an underwater obstacle and sat down in water up to his mustache, refusing to move. He had awakened with nausea and other symptoms of a forthcoming, full-blown attack of malaria or dysentery. Finally, after a long break, he struggled back to his feet.

  “We’ve got to go on,” he mumbled, “it’s only one o’clock.”

  It was during these desperate hours that they learned that they needed to fight the swamp, not each other. Dyess, staggering perceptibly, was just about to surrender his gear to the water—a step to sure death—when Dobervich grabbed him.

  “No, don’t do that, Ed,” warned Dobervich, hoisting the pack on to his shoulders. “You’ve got to keep your gear. Here, give it to me.”

  After swinging a bolo with wild, blind rage for one cutting shift, Grashio reached a dangerous stage of delirium brought on by exhaustion, hunger, and dehydration.

  “Tell McCoy to go on without me,” he told his partner, Mellnik.

  “Hell, we weren’t leaving anyone,” said Marshall. Mellnik had bitten his lip open, relying on the pain and salty taste of his own blood to remain conscious. From that point forward, he and Spielman shadowed Grashio closely.

  It was mid-afternoon when they finally reached a point at which no words of encouragement, no physical assistance, not even Shofner’s

  indomitable spirit, could will them any further. Marshall summoned enough energy to climb atop Spielman’s shoulders. Peering over the wall of cogon, he spied a mammoth fallen tree, perhaps eight to ten feet in diameter and nearly thirty feet long, half-submerged no more than 100 yards behind their position. “Sloshing back, we hoisted ourselves onto the trunk and flopped like lizards, bellies up,” said Shofner.

  As they lay gulping in deep breaths, too exhausted even to wave away the whining mosquitoes, Hawkins took stock of the situation. Never, not while huddling in his dugout during the worst bombardments on Corregidor nor during the darkest days in Cabanatuan, had he allowed any negative thoughts to creep into his mind. Until now. “I was afraid that the end had come for McCoy, and possibly for all of us, and I was horrified at the thought of perishing in this God-forsaken stinking swamp. I doubted that McCoy could move on the next day and I wondered if I could last through another day myself. And what if the end of another day, and another, and another should find us still lost in that almost impenetrable prison? One by one, our food gone and strength exhausted, we would sink down into that brown slimy water and perish. I glanced downward—and shuddered.”

  After several hours, their bodies responded to the rest. The log stirred to life as they began to build a sleeping platform large enough for the entire party. Then someone, in the midst of chopping saplings and vines, inadvertently struck a hornet’s nest. Leo Boelens was the first to sound the air-raid siren: “Duck! Duck!”

  The warning came too late. What seemed like a thousand angry wasps came pouring from their disturbed hive. They were large, much larger than the yellow jackets in the States, and fanatically aggressive. “Their stings were like stabs with a hot dagger,” remembered Grashio. Spielman, stung no fewer than a dozen times, was the hardest hit.

  Frantically abandoning the log to yelps and profanity, they dove into the water, their only defense, and stayed there submerged for nearly thirty minutes until the brutal attack was finished. Finally, Sam Grashio angrily spluttered up out of the water.

  “What next?”

  “The pain of the stings took our minds temporarily off our other troubles,” said Dyess. But only temporarily. After a supper of corned beef, rice, and hot tea, they stripped their saturated clothes and huddled around a small fire. Their sullen faces told a grim tale.

  “We were all visibly frightened over our circumstances,” remembered Hawkins. “Things looked really bad and confidence in ourselves was badly shaken … the swamp was proving to be an enemy more deadly than the Japanese.”

  Dyess concurred. “We had no way of knowing how much swamp remained to be conquered. Our shoes were falling apart. Our legs and bodies had been slashed severely by the sword grass. Infections would start swiftly. Another day like this one would finish us off.”

 
; Not stopping to eat, they agreed, had been a critical mistake. An inventory of their stocks showed that they had forty-two cans of corned beef and fish and a kilo of rice, enough food to last for at least two, perhaps even three days. “Engines won’t run without fuel,” said

  Dyess.

  That, however, was where the consensus ended. Jumarong suggested returning to the vicinity of Dapecol to locate the original trail. There were murmurs of agreement, which McCoy immediately moved to silence.

  “Look at the map,” he reasoned, pointing out that they were only two or three miles from the railroad. “If we keep on that compass course we are bound to get out tomorrow, or the next day at the very latest.”

  “And if we don’t get out by then, then what?” Mellnik asked.

  “Let’s don’t even think about it.”

  But Mellnik had thought about it. He announced he was going back to Dapecol. He’d take his chances with the Japanese. Maybe the ruthless heat, the water, and the cogon had taken their toll. Maybe the legends were true; if the swamp did not kill you, it would drive you mad.

  At first glance, Mellnik’s statement suggested cowardice. But perhaps he was the only one courageous enough to voice an opinion that others might have shared, but were afraid to say, that this whole quixotic emprise had been a bad idea, that they had been fools to attempt an

  escape.

  “You know what would happen to us,” said Hawkins, trying to appeal directly to Mellnik’s capacity to reason. “Nobody could go back, and

  live.”

  Then, speaking like a lawyer before a jury, he made an impassioned plea to the others: “They will torture any or all of us if he does that, and kill us if we ever get there.”

  But Mellnik was not thinking about it. He was going. Several seconds of uncomfortable silence passed. And then that silence was broken.

  “No,” boomed the clearly agitated voice of Shofner, “you are not.”

  Until now, the escape party had operated democratically. But now, with the union dangerously close to fracturing, there were too many disparate voices. With the senior officer, McCoy, physically unable to command, and Dyess’s powerful personality drained by his dreadful condition, someone had to take charge. At this critical juncture, Shofner probably could not help but be reminded of the maxims of his coach and mentor, Robert Neyland. One, in particular: “If the line goes forward, the team wins; if the line comes backward the team loses.”

  Jumarong had proffered the suggestion, so his departure was probable. It was unlikely that de la Cruz would abandon his friend. Should Mellnik be permitted to leave, Marshall and Spielman would, in all likelihood, accompany him. Sapped of the manpower of their youngest and strongest members, the remainder of the escape party would certainly perish in the swamp, but recapture was a more realistic fate. Even if Mellnik should make it back to Dapecol, he would likely be tortured until he divulged the whereabouts of the others. Shofner saw the situation with unmistakable clarity: this team could not retreat. Mellnik could not be allowed to secede from the group—and thereby cause its distintegration—under any circumstances.

  “You can’t stop me,” retorted Mellnik, defiantly.

  Shofner then literally rose to the challenge, his erect posture and build, though decimated by months of disease and hunger, still quite formidable.

  “The hell I can’t,” he bellowed. “Just give me the opportunity.”

  “You don’t have any weapons,” countered a dubious Mellnik.

  “I’ll kill you with my own two hands,” promised Shofner, curling his giant hands into fists as if presenting weapons for inspection prior to a duel.

  There was little doubt that Shofner, sufficiently riled, would have done just that—had they not at that very moment heard violent thrashing sounds coming from a thicket no more than fifty feet away. Marshall doused the fire and they jumped from the platform, half-nude, into the swamp, their bolos drawn. With bated breath, they crouched silently in the waist-high water.

  “What could it be?” whispered Dobervich.

  “There couldn’t be any Japs in this place,” reasoned Hawkins.

  Jumarong leapt back onto the log, jabbering in Tagalog and motioning madly for the others to follow. Ben de la Cruz translated: “Come on! It’s crocodiles.”

  “We literally flew back to the platform,” recalled Hawkins.

  Crocodiles. Sam Grashio sighed. “Nobody had even thought about them when we were struggling waist deep in the water and sword grass. With our luck so far, we should have stepped on a couple.”

  But their luck was about to change. The echo of gunfire was perhaps the most bizarre harbinger of good fortune imaginable. It was about 1800 hours when they heard the first shots. “By now we were so jumpy that the shooting shook us to the marrow of our bones,” wrote Grashio.

  The unexpected, unearthly clatter—rifle shots and the staccato tattoo of machine gun fire—was unquestionably that of a small battle. But where? And between whom? Jumping to their feet in unison, they stared silently at each other while trying to determine the direction of the gunfire, as well as the different types of weapons involved, skills that all soldiers who had spent time on or near a battlefield possessed. Shofner immediately recognized the distinctive crack of a Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. Another weapon sounded familiar to Dyess.

  “That’s a Nip burp gun. Ran into them on Bataan. Wonder what they’re shooting at?”

  “It’s the Japs all right,” added Spielman after a telltale thump. “Hear that knee mortar?”

  With each exchange of shots came a corresponding exchange of whispers: How far away was this firefight? Did the Japanese have a fix on their position? McCoy attempted to alleviate the tense situation with his dry sense of humor, one, of course, flavored with logic.

  “Those guys can’t be firing at us. No one knows where we are, not even ourselves.”

  Suddenly, the sky was set aflame with an eerie red aura.

  “They must have set a house or village on fire with that mortar,” said Marshall.

  Judging by the direction of the shots and explosions, which were now fading in both volume and intensity, they deduced that the battle was being fought near the supposed location of the railroad. “We could only hazard a guess on distance,” explained Mellnik. “The reflective surface of the water complicated the problem.” Shofner thought the fight—and thus the railroad—could not be more than three miles away, perhaps even as close as one mile. As the fiery, orange-red glow danced skyward, Hawkins reached for the compass. The needle pointed due north; they looked at each other knowingly.

  “That way is out,” said Dobervich. “Japs or no Japs.”

  • • •

  No sooner had night fallen than the swamp symphony commenced. The fire flickered ever so dimly on the horizon, as their fears smoldered. Transfixed by the glow, no one slept, or spoke.

  Sandwiched between Shofner and Grashio on the giant common bunk, Dyess was in a contemplative mood. There was something he needed to do, needed to say. He had never before assigned a task that he himself would not do, nor had he ever shied away from addressing his men, but he felt as though he was not the individual for this job. He nudged Shofner.

  “Don’t you think Sam ought to lead us in a little prayer?”

  “I sure do think he ought to, Ed.”

  Dyess explained that he thought Grashio was probably the most religious of the group and therefore it would be appropriate that he led them in a prayer. Since there were no objections, Grashio dropped to his knees and began to recite the “Memorare,” a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary that the Catholic nuns at Saint Aloysius school in Spokane had taught him. It had always been his favorite, and it seemed almost tailor-made for their current situation. He recited one sentence at a time and the other supplicants replied in kind:

  Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence I fly un
to you oh Virgin of Virgins my mother. To you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. Oh mother of the word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy and kindness, hear and answer me. Amen.

  When Grashio finished, it was as if everything they had experienced, both physical agony and mental anguish, had disappeared. The heated confrontations, their aching limbs, the swollen, throbbing wasp stings, the fear and doubt—all vanished.

  Yet it was not so much an absolution as it was a message. They had been slowly staggering toward inevitable collapse, dissolution, and death. And now, they had been shown, seemingly by some otherworldly phenomenon, a path—as well as the courage and strength to follow it. “I felt easier and more optimistic than I had since the start of the escape,” recalled Dyess. Hawkins experienced a similar sensation. “That prayer drove anxiety and trepidation from my mind and left me with a feeling of peaceful calm and security.”

  To a man, the effect of Grashio’s words was instantaneous, calming and curative. None of them would ever be able to explain just what had happened that night on the log. But Grashio knew.

  “I thought a miracle had occurred,” he would say. “I felt now that God would save us.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Another Gamble

  Thus hunger, thirst, fatigue, combine to drain

  All feeling from our hearts. The endless glare,

  The brutal heat, anesthetize the mind …

  TUESDAY, APRIL 6–MONDAY, APRIL 12, 1943