Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  And so de Juan had little choice but to order another ambush. Tense with anticipation, the guerrillas had crouched at the edge of the clearing outside Lungaog as the intruders milled at the well. “Do not fire until I tell you to fire,” de Juan warned them. For several anxious minutes, de Juan analyzed the situation. “Boys, these are not Germans,” he told them in Illonggo, a Visayan dialect, before stepping out into the clearing to confront the Americans up close.

  When the Americans praised de Juan for setting the ambush at Kinamayan, the usually boastful leader just grinned and shrugged off the compliments.

  “I do not know how to command troops,” admitted de Juan. “I just use my tactics.”

  Sensing that the escapees needed their rest, Big Boy rose to take his leave and ordered the townspeople to do the same. He then reassured the escapees that though the Japanese were likely still licking their wounds from Kinamayan, he would post guards to stand watch.

  “Do not be afraid,” he said. “If the Japanese come again we will have warning.”

  Approaching Ed Dyess, one youthful guerrillero did not exhibit the same self-assurance as his commander and comrades. Visibly shaken, he told Dyess, apologetically, that he was one of the two scouts on the railroad that morning and that it was he, believing the escapees to be aligned with the Japanese, who had raised his shotgun and taken aim at Dyess. He then confessed that he had panicked and pulled the trigger, but fortunately for Dyess the cartridge did not fire. “God must have been with you, sir,” Dyess was told.

  “Little wonder,” commented Grashio, “that Ed believed in predestination.”

  The distance between hell and paradise—the barrio Lungaog—the escapees discovered, had been only twelve miles. With no Japanese bugler to blast them from their bunks at dawn, they slept—ten hours on the first day. They went swimming, laundered their clothes, and caught up their diaries. And they ate. And ate. Sometimes, five meals a day. Whether he was taking them “papaya hunting”—in essence, fruit scavenger hunts in the jungle—or into his own home for sumptuous meals, Big Boy made sure that the Americans never went hungry or thirsty. At every opportunity, the Americans toasted their newfound freedom and friendships with tuba, a potent, rose-colored alcoholic beverage fermented from the sweet sap of the coconut palm. And they entertained a stream of visitors.

  Thanks to the bamboo telegraph, visitors ventured from as far as ten miles to see the Americans who had escaped from the hated “Hapons.” Most came bearing gifts of food, everything from eggs, fruit, vegetables, and boiled fish to live animals, which were tied to stakes and penned up outside the escapees’ bamboo billet. “We soon had a private menagerie of our own,” recalled Hawkins.

  Shofner entertained the guests with photographs he had taken in Shanghai and on Corregidor and had smuggled through prison camp in the seams of his Marine football jacket. The locals spent hours looking at the pictures and listening to the Americans tell stories of the atrocities they had witnessed and survived, as well as the hair-raising tale of their escape. Some awestruck Filipinos asked the former POWs to serve as godfathers to their children.

  “It was an odd sensation to be treated as if we were conquering heroes,” said McCoy, “when in fact we were bedraggled fugitives from Japanese brutality.” But that same brutality was the reason for the sympathetic hospitality they were now experiencing. It was what drove men like Casiano de Juan, a storekeeper from Capiz, Panay, to become guerrillas. Though they had not been corralled, starved, and tortured, they, too, had suffered abhorrent treatment at the hands of the Japanese. The visitors were rich and poor, educated and illiterate, old and young, but all told tales of poverty, oppression, and humiliation under the Japanese regime. All Filipinos, the Americans learned, were forced to bow to the Japanese. If not, they received a vicious beating. Shofner befriended a young boy who was missing his fore and middle fingers, cut off by the Japanese so that he could not fire a rifle. If a woman resisted the advances of a Japanese soldier, they learned, she was severely beaten in public. “My daughters must not be defiled by the filthy Japanese,” one Filipino, a cultured refugee from Davao, told Hawkins. “I will hide my family here in the interior until the Japs are driven out.”

  The escapees, however, had no such luxury. It would be only a matter of time until the Japanese picked up the fugitives’ tracks. In fact, the sudden appearance of Sgt. Aquilino Baguilod on April 9 proved that their story had spread far and wide. It also served as evidence that the guerrilla movement was in fact a sprawling entity, not just localized. Baguilod introduced himself as an emissary sent on behalf of Capt. Claro Laureta of the 130th Regiment. The deference that Big Boy showed to Baguilod was immediately perceptible.

  “[Laureta] is the leader of all people in this part of the country,” explained Baguilod. “He heard that you were here and sent me to invite you to come and see him.”

  Though the request seemed more like an order than an invitation, the Americans communicated their intention to travel to the coast and procure a boat for a trip to Australia.

  “The captain will be The One to assist you,” countered Baguilod, telling them that it was a three- or four-day hike to Kapungagan.

  “That’s a long way,” said McCoy.

  “Yes, commander,” agreed the messenger. “But it will be the direction you wish to go.”

  Since any direction away from Dapecol seemed a good direction in which to travel, and Laureta seemed to be an authority figure who could make things happen, they accepted the invitation. They would leave the next morning.

  Big Boy furnished sixteen guerrilleros to serve as guides, armed escorts, and cargadores, that is, carriers of the Americans’ accumulated gifts, which now included a sixty-pound pig that “rode protestingly” hanging upside-down on a bamboo pole, remembered McCoy.

  The party proceeded first to barrio Luna, four kilometers north of Lungaog and the location of a sugarcane plantation owned by Onofre Beldua. Beldua’s hospitality would rival that of Big Boy. Despite their endless eating, their food fixation seemingly grew even more powerful during this time. Consider Austin Shofner’s diary entry for April 10:

  Hot coffee and bananas were served less than ½ hr. after our arrival. As I am writing this, I am listening to phonograph play the first American music I heard in a long time. For our noon meal we had corn with chicken—papaya and black eyed peas with basi (sugar wine). Pineapple desert. In the afternoon, we played bridge—read and listened to a 3 piece string band play native and popular music. In the afternoon we rambled around looking at the plantation and watching the sugar cook off. About 5:30 we had coffee, rice flour cake with molasses—real nice. For dinner we had rice with the pig we brought with us—the pig was cooked three ways—spare ribs, fried pork and another native way—very good. Tuba (much) was served with the meal and coffee and bananas after dinner. The moon was about ¼ new and the heaven was full of stars. We retired at 9:45 for a very restful sleep.

  An easy five-kilometer hike the following morning brought them to Sampao—Lungaog’s sister village, whose barrio lieutenant, or mayor, was the brother of Lungaog’s chief civilian official—and another banquet. The inhabitants of each successive destination, it seemed, desired to outdo their predecessors in hospitality, a situation the escapees welcomed. Late in the afternoon, after they crossed a small river in an outrigger banca, their movable feast finally reached Kapungagan, headquarters of Captain Laureta. Surprisingly, they were welcomed not by Laureta, who was attending to affairs elsewhere in his district, but by the town’s mayor, Eligio David, a Davao businessman who had fled to the interior with his wife and five children when the Japanese landed. David’s hospitality would surpass that of all others.

  The fun-loving Filipinos, they soon came to learn, would throw a fiesta, or party, on any pretext. In this particular case, as the twelve attractive Filipinas sent to their palatial quarters—the town’s municipal building—informed them, the fiesta was being held in their honor. Moving toward the music, the escapees were
escorted in a torchlight procession to a plaza crowded with people and tables heaped with food. Colored lanterns strung between trees, torches, and oil lamps arrayed throughout the jungle clearing lent a festive glow.

  “Now this,” said a smiling Ed Dyess, “is the way to fight a war.”

  Dyess was perhaps the only one capable of speaking. The others just stood, dumbfounded, waiting to wake up. “Less than a week earlier, we’d have called a man insane if he had predicted our presence at a dance,” McCoy would write. It would take Grashio much longer, many years in fact, to find the appropriate words with which to describe the emotions they felt that night. “After twelve months of brutality, starvation, and degradation, an abrupt change to such hospitality left us midway between tears of gratitude and utter bewilderment.”

  They sat down to a dinner of chicken and roast pig, which they washed down with copious amounts of tuba while being entertained by a conga dance featuring small children and a hula dance by a pretty Filipina. Once lubricated, they mustered enough courage to join in the dancing. The Filipino men remained seated as a courtesy to the guests, and the Americans took off their bulky shoes before whirling their partners around the dirt dance floor. The crowd, however polite, could not help but snicker at the sight of Shofner’s red socks. It was good-natured kidding, but Grashio was not game.

  “As a dancer I was no Arthur Murray so I drank tuba and regaled an admiring audience of teenagers and children with my exploits as a P-40 pilot perpetually engaged in mortal combat with squadrons of villainous Japanese,” he recalled. Grashio’s performance was an infamous traveling act destined for other children in other barrios. Complete with hand motions and vivid descriptions, each story would invariably begin with Grashio seated among his audience: “There I was in my crippled P-40 at 20,000 feet …”

  After a group of girls sang a set of native ballads, the hosts made a startling announcement: it was the guests’ turn. “We had a hasty consultation,” wrote McCoy, “realizing that this was a crisis. Our hosts might be offended if we failed to sing.”

  As per usual, it was Dyess who valiantly stepped forward. Despite the fact that his drawling rendition of “Beautiful, Beautiful Texas” was terribly off-key and the tiny band—which featured a trumpet, banjo, and guitar—struggled with the accompaniment, the applause was tremendous. Emboldened by Dyess, Paul Marshall stretched his vocal cords, too. Shofner then ascended the stage and proceeded to do his own version of the “Tennessee Stomp.” The forceful performance almost brought down the house—literally.

  At 2230, with the dance winding down, the crowd gathered and, at the request of Eligio David, sang “God Bless America.” Once the moving tribute concluded, the crowd began to disperse. That’s when McCoy stepped forward.

  “We’re not through yet,” he announced in a choked-up display of emotional extemporization. After asking the crowd to make some minor lyrical changes, he signaled for the miniature orchestra to resume playing, saying, “Let’s sing ‘God Bless the Philippines.’ ”

  At the conclusion of the song, remembered Grashio, it mattered little whether one was Filipino or American, “there were no dry eyes afterward.”

  SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1943

  Davao Penal Colony

  Tears welled in the eyes of the POWs congregating outside the barbed wire boundaries of the special compound holding a group of prisoners. “Our friends who were working around the barracks came up with tears in their eyes and told us to take it like men, and that we were giving up our lives for other Americans, and that it was a wonderful way to die,” remembered Bert Bank. Major Maeda and a phalanx of rifle-toting guards—the firing squad, no doubt—goose-stepped into the compound at 0845.

  Japanese military jurisprudence dictated that someone had to pay. In the tension-filled days following the escape, the POWs at Dapecol had received regular news bulletins from the “manhunt front.” They had been repeatedly assured that the search party had picked up on the escapees’ trail, that the fugitives had been surrounded, that their recapture was imminent. Yet when Hozumi’s patrol returned empty-handed (with the exception, of course, of their own dead), it became apparent that either the swamp had proven more competent than the search party or that the escapees had achieved the impossible.

  But neither the POWs nor the Japanese had any way of knowing. Maeda was flustered. Prison camp commanders were given some autonomy, but since he had been unable to clean up his own mess and since mass escape was such a rare event, he had to report the matter to the Prisoner of War Bureau in Manila, under the command of Maj. Gen. Iichiro Morimoto, and await official instructions.

  In the meantime, the Japanese, in keeping with their belief in mass punishment, had placed the entire camp on a diet of rice and salt and removed approximately 560 prisoners, more than one-fourth of the camp’s total population, from the main POW enclosure into a special compound on April 11. In addition to the twenty prisoners who had slept next to the escapees, the Japanese had added the barracks’ leaders, the American camp leadership, men who worked on the same details as the escapees, and others who had eaten, conversed, or associated with the escaped POWs—in short, anyone even remotely connected to the escape.

  Tucked away in a banana grove almost 800 yards apart from the main compound on the other side of the railroad tracks, the special compound was a bestial relic from Dapecol’s earliest days: five thatch-roofed barracks surrounded by three concentric barbed wire fences. The barracks, which radiated out from a central space, contained cages made of wood and wire mesh. These double-decked cages were seven feet long, three feet wide, and seven feet high, and predictably uncomfortable. “When we were all installed, crouching in our cages with heads poked out of the upper and lower ‘apartments,’ it … resembled nothing so much as the Bronx Zoo,” wrote POW Alan McCracken.

  Nothing, not even patchwork repairs of the mesh screens or homemade insecticides made of wood ash, water, and boiled tobacco stems could combat the colonies of bedbugs that infested the cages. The Japanese had placed severe restrictions on the entire camp. There was to be no smoking, no reading, no card playing. As Maeda had told all of the POWs in an address on April 15, they have “a moral obligation and must be penitent.” But they were not going to be penitent in the camp chapel; church services were suspended. Less surprisingly, hard labor was deemed a suitable penance, but now, POWs headed out to the fields wore only G-strings. The Japanese believed that additional escapes could be discouraged if the prisoners were not permitted to wear pants, shoes, or other clothing crucial for jungle survival.

  Another consequence was that Lieutenant Yuki’s influence was all but eliminated since many of the Japanese believed that it was his liberal policies that had made the escape possible. Guards became correspondingly meaner, and beatings and incidences of physical violence committed against prisoners more commonplace. The interrogations continued unabated, too. “Why did they want to run away?” the Japanese repeatedly asked, with a frustratingly bizarre naïveté. “Because the prisoners are being starved,” came the exasperated answer. Even so, rations were further slashed.

  Guards patrolled inside the special compound to make sure that the Americans were not engaging in any restricted activities. When a guard was spotted, a code phrase alarm—“Heigh-ho Silver”—passed from cage to cage to curtail clandestine card games and conversations.

  Though there had been little mention of shooting squads since Wada’s impassioned speech on the night of the escape, most, if not all, of the men in the special compound considered themselves condemned. There was no way, they believed, that the Japanese would let something as monumental as a mass escape slide. And so they waited. The period was so mentally taxing, Bert Bank would later write that the ordeal lasted an entire month. It was, in actuality, slightly less than one week. “We really lived in agony,” Bank said, “and prayed that they would come and shoot us right away instead of letting us suffer.”

  Not surprisingly, the debate about the escapees had hardly cooled.
“To some they were heroes,” said one POW. “To others names unprintable.” Jack Donohoe, one of those awaiting his fate in the special compound, was both pessimistic and philosophical. “The way I felt was, you never knew, all of us might’ve been dead and they’d been the only ones to stay alive. At least somebody got to live.”

  Most notable, and perhaps peculiar, of the Japanese rules was that the imprisoned were not to exhibit any signs of emotion. “No hilarity” had been the decree. Bank had decided that he was going to do his best to violate that rule. After all, what else could the Japanese do to a condemned man? “Every individual has got their own idiosyncracies,” he would say. “I never lost my sense of humor. While we were waiting for them to come and execute us, I told the guys, ‘Hell, in the States, before they kill a guy, they give him a nice meal. Maybe they’re going to bring us a steak tonight.’ They didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was funny as hell.”

  There was no steak that night, but no blindfolds or cigarettes were distributed in the morning, either. All of the special compound’s occupants watched with apprehension as Maeda and Wada ascended to a small box from which they could address the crowd.

  The first order sentenced the entire group to confinement for a period of one month. Then a list of names was read: the American camp commander and his assistants; the barracks and bay leaders whose charges had escaped. Finally, the names of those who had slept next to the escapees were read. They were ordered to step forward twenty paces and salute. It was peculiar protocol, but, remembered Alan McCracken, “we who were about to only-Heaven-and-the-major-knew what, saluted.” Maeda then took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed the

  document—in all probability the official order from Manila—to Wada.