Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  There was also a large number of American and Filipino civilians, from stranded businessmen to missionary priests, who were actively involved in the guerrilla movement. Many wealthy Filipinos provided financial and material backing. Others, extraordinary men like Vicente Zapanta, invested their entire lives in the cause. Reportedly a U.S. Navy veteran of World War I, Zapanta volunteered not only his services, but also the large, two-masted banca that he had used to make a nice profit in commercial trading. The ship would be christened the Athena, in honor of the goddess of war, and Zapanta promoted to admiral of the guerrilla navy.

  Hatred of the Japanese transcended even bitter, centuries-old religious quarrels. The relationship between the Moros, the Muslim inhabitants of western Mindanao, and Christian Filipinos had been at best tenuous, at worst bloody. Because the Japanese were equal-opportunity oppressors, Moro datus, or chiefs, decided to join forces with the Christian guerrillas. It was an uneasy truce, one that would end with the war. Tribes such as the Manobos and Negrito pygmies were also brought into the guerrilla fold. Whether one was white, black, yellow, or brown, Christian or Muslim, male or female, young or old, rich or poor, illiterate or educated, all were united in their efforts for a common cause: the defeat of the Japanese empire.

  The guerrillas had been able to put aside most of their differences. The bigger conflict was between Mindanao and Australia.

  “As far as MacArthur’s headquarters are concerned, our prime mission is intelligence—report on Japanese shipping, air traffic, troop movements,” said McClish.

  To that end, once contact with Australia had been established, GHQ had begun to supply the guerrillas via submarine. The first landing, McCoy and Shofner learned, had taken place just two months earlier. Some weapons and ammunition had been delivered, but the supplies consisted mostly of cash, medicine, and the radio equipment, codebooks, and batteries needed to set up coast watcher stations. Also included were cigarettes, matchbooks, and other small items imprinted with the words “I Shall Return,” which were designed to further engender the cult of MacArthur in the Philippines. From chocolate bars to carbines, these items, though meager in sum, were a tantalizing taste of what came to be called “The Aid,” symbolic, appetite-whetting samples of the fulfillment of MacArthur’s promise of liberation. But in order to prevent the guerrillas from initiating any major engagements and unwinnable battles, which might jeopardize the overall mission, GHQ would deliberately not supply enough firepower.

  While the Filipinos seemed willing to work and wait patiently for “The Aid,” as well as MacArthur’s return, they were not content simply to spy on the Japanese. They cared little about global strategy and even less for the mandates of officers in Australia or Washington. They supplied and sheltered the guerrillas, and in return wanted tangible results—dead Japanese. This demand forced the men on the ground in the Philippines, men like McClish, to burn a small candle on both ends.

  “We’re an army of bamboo, rattan and courage, gentlemen,” summarized McClish.

  Lastly, McClish admitted, somewhat hesitantly, these were not solely his problems. As just one of what would eventually be eight subcommanders in charge of separate territorial jurisdictions on the island, he was in command of only the 110th Division, which was composed of the 110th, 113th, and 114th Regiments, units spread across the provinces of Misamis Oriental, Agusan, and Surigao. Overall command of the Tenth Military District, he told them, was held by a brigadier general named Wendell W. Fertig, whose headquarters was in Misamis City in Misamis Occidental, 150 air miles from Medina in northwestern Mindanao.

  “I have a radio transmitter in Gingoog, about fifteen miles from here,” said McClish. “It is in contact with Fertig’s headquarters, which relays our messages to Australia.”

  McCoy and Shofner, still dazed by McClish’s briefing, excitedly asked if a trip to Gingoog could be arranged.

  “I’ll take you there myself,” offered McClish. “It’s a horseback journey of course; the country’s too rough for anything else…. We’ll go tomorrow. But first, the governor would like to have you as his guests for dinner.”

  That evening, ex–Provincial Governor Don Gregorio Peleaz, a wealthy, white-haired gentleman of the landed aristocracy whose speech was affected with a Castilian lilt, entertained the two former prisoners of war like visiting dignitaries in his Spanish villa. An eleven-piece orchestra played while they enjoyed a multi-course dinner with shiny silverware and white linen napkins. While puffing on their after-dinner cigars, McCoy and Shofner knew that the others would not believe the dream world they had discovered.

  Laden with a requisition for food, a pair of rubber shoes, and thirty bars of soap, as well as $100 with which to buy salt for his men and a box of face powder for Sergeant Baguilod’s girl (the cash was a gift on behalf of all the escapees), and, last but certainly not least, a message for Captain Laureta prepared by McClish, Tuvilla left at midnight aboard the Athena for Buenavista. On the orders of McClish, the guerrilla flagship would ferry the rest of the Dapecol fugitives to Medina on its return trip. It looked to be a joyful reunion—if all went well in Gingoog.

  Just past noon on Thursday, May 6, McClish, McCoy, and Shofner were saddled atop three native ponies clipping down a colorful jungle corridor. His spirits brimming, Shofner thought it appropriate for another lecture on the proud history of the Marine Corps.

  “Have you ever heard of the Horse Marines?” Shofner yelled as they bounced along. “The cavalry unit that protected American citizens in China from 1912 to 1938? Don’t you know that the Marines have a great tradition in all forms of sport, as well as all forms of warfare?”

  Greeting them at the expansive Anakan Lumber Company, some five miles from Gingoog, was the mill’s manager, a fifty-something American named Cecil Walter, who was trapped behind enemy lines. Walter showed them to the powerful transmitter, which had been used before the war for business purposes, mainly communication with Manila.

  For the first time since the fall of Corregidor, exactly one year to the day earlier, McCoy assumed a familiar position and sat down at the transmitter to dispatch two messages. “It was an exciting moment for us,” Shofner would write. If McCoy realized the significance of the day, he did not acknowledge it in his log. Nor did any hint of emotion appear in his copy. He followed procedure by identifying himself and reporting in to his superiors before communicating the facts.

  FOR COMMANDER NAVAL FORCES SOUTHWEST PACIFIC

  INFO COMMANDER MARINE FORCES

  FROM LIEUTENANT COMMANDER MELVYN H. MCCOY

  ARRIVED AFTER ESCAPE FROM AMERICAN PRISONER OF WAR CAMP DAVAO WITH THREE MARINE OFFICERS CAPTAIN SHOFNER, THREE AIR CORPS, CAPTAIN DYESS, ONE CAC [COAST ARTILLERY COMMAND], MAJOR MELLNIK AND TWO SERGEANTS X ALL CAPTURED BATAAN AND CORREGIDOR HAVE EXTENSIVE INFO REGARDING CORREGIDOR X BRUTALITIES AND ATROCITIES WITH EXTREMELY HEAVY DEATH TOLL TO WAR PRISONERS DUE SAME X HAVE SOME INFO RE DAVAO PROVINCE X IF PRACTICABLE REQUEST ENTIRE PARTY PLUS TWO FILIPINOS WHO AIDED ESCAPE DEPART HERE VIA NEXT TRANSPORTATION AVAILABLE X

  The second message, previously prepared by Mellnik, was sent to the attention of Lt. Gen. Richard Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff. Given Mellnik’s relationships with members of MacArthur’s inner circle, this message was more personal, as well as alarmingly detailed, in order to elicit a rapid response.

  FOR LIEUTENANT GENERAL RICHARD K. SUTHERLAND, GENERAL HEADQUARTERS

  U.S. ARMY FORCES IN AUSTRALIA

  FROM MAJOR STEPHEN M. MELLNIK

  HAVE ESCAPED WITH SEVEN OFFICERS AND TWO ENLISTED MEN FROM JAPANESE WAR PRISONERS CAMP IN DAVAO PENAL COLONY X LIEUTENANT COMMANDER MCCOY US NAVY HAS REQUESTED SENIOR NAVAL OFFICER IN AUSTRALIA FOR SUBMARINE TRANSPORTATION TO AUSTRALIA X WILL YOUR OFFICE ASSURE A FAVORABLE ANSWER X JAPS VIOLATING ALL RULES OF WARFARE AND DECENCY X FIFTY PERCENT USAFFE FORCES SURRENDERED IN BATAAN NOW DEAD FROM MALNUTRITION AND DISEASES X REMAINDER IN VARIOUS STAGES OF BERI BERI, DYSENTERY, MALARIA AND BLINDNESS DUE TO VITAMIN DEFICIENCY X WAINWRIGHT, MOORE, B
EEBE, DRAKE GOOD HEALTH AT SURRENDER X REGARDS COLONEL DILLER, GENERALS MARQUAT AND WILLOUGHBY X HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON X

  Their mission completed, McClish, McCoy, and Shofner rumbled back to Medina along a rutted roadway in a battered, alcohol-fueled Chevrolet, estimated to be of 1931 vintage, that McClish had procured. Though in constant pain from blisters caused by his saddle, Shofner could not help but ponder the whereabouts of the other escapees in the closing sentence of his diary entry on the evening of May 7: “I wonder whats wrong with the rest of the gang—they should have been here by now—sickness—Japs or they didn’t get the word[?].”

  There was still no sign of their comrades the next day, but McCoy and Shofner did meet McClish’s chief of staff, Maj. Clyde C. Childress. Childress, a twenty-five-year-old officer from Fort Worth, Texas, had fought in the ill-fated action at Malabang and had headed into the hills rather than surrender.

  A fearless warrior and a straight shooter, Childress would be a trusted friend to the escapees. He tempered the enthusiasm of the two messengers, who believed they had just accomplished an essential part of their mission at Anakan. McCoy would write in his diary of a warning from Childress that, for reasons unknown, “communications with GHQ were slow and none too satisfactory.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Little Time to Rest

  I find my way with weary stumbling feet

  Between the broken fragments of defeat

  “We have our honor; we were meant to fail”

  I hear the words but still there is the trail.

  SUNDAY, MAY 9–MONDAY, MAY 10, 1943

  Medina, Misamis Oriental Province

  It was 0520 when Mellnik reached under the mosquito net to shake McCoy awake. To McCoy, just returned from a guerrilla dance, it seemed like a bad dream. Mellnik must have thought he was dreaming, too. He stood there, absorbing the lace curtains, the frame-shuttered windows and the fancy, four-poster bed from which McCoy was now stirring, his mouth agape.

  “Stop gawking,” said McCoy. “Let’s clean you up and put you in some decent clothes.”

  Haggard from two days of dodging shoals and shore-based small arms fire, the escapees had not seen anything yet. Outfitted in new khaki and shoes—donations from Chinese merchants and McClish’s stores—the entire escape party celebrated the seventy-fourth birthday of Governor Peleaz with a lavish lunch. They were then whisked by sailboat to a fiesta celebrating the Queen of May in the village of Daan-Lungsod, about fifteen miles southeast of Medina. The fiesta, as much as Marshall could remember of it, was a wild affair. “Jeez, everybody got snookered to the gills.”

  After a succession of speeches from assembled dignitaries, the escaped POWs were summoned to the stage for the coronation of the May Queen and a standing ovation. But their celebrity was taking its toll. “We went to such events both because we were guests and because by so doing we helped maintain esprit de corps in the guerrilla army,” said McCoy. “But we never forgot for an instant that our friends were still rotting in Jap prison camps.”

  There was something else bothering McCoy: he had had no confirmation of his messages from General Fertig’s headquarters. Perhaps there was more to Clyde Childress’s warning about communicating with Australia than they knew. A group conference determined that a face-to-face meeting with Fertig was in order. McCoy and Mellnik, as ranking officers, were selected for the task. The others offered their services, however temporary, to the guerrilla army.

  On the afternoon of May 10, after lunch at Vicente Zapanta’s home in Daan-Lungsod, McClish promoted each of the remaining escapees one grade. Thus, by the orders typed by McClish’s adjutant on ruled school tablet paper, they officially became officers—brevet, or “bamboo grade”—in the Army of the United States, USFIP. Though de la Cruz and Jumarong exchanged their prison stripes for enlisted chevrons, perhaps the biggest leap was made by Marshall and Spielman, newly minted second lieutenants who were assigned to the 114th Regiment. The arrangement was confusing, but each escapee felt as though he owed a debt to the guerrillas. “I don’t know how we can be officers in the Marine Corps and the Army at the same time,” remarked Dobervich, “but if it’s all right with McClish, I guess it’s all right with me.”

  As their comrades rummaged for insignia and weapons, McCoy, Mellnik, and Childress boarded the Athena. They would be taking an indirect route to Misamis Occidental, stopping first at the town of Talakag in the northwest corner of Bukidnon Province to investigate a rumor.

  “My intention,” McCoy wrote in his log, “was to see a Lt. Commander Parsons, USNR, who had been left here by submarine in March, on a special intelligence mission.”

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 12–THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1943

  Misamis Oriental, Bukidnon, Lanao, and Misamis Occidental Provinces

  McCoy knew that the popular flagship of the guerrilla navy was not a commissioned U.S. Navy vessel, but he had no objections with its designation as the USS Athena. Not that he would have dared say anything. “The swarthy, husky members of the Athena crew needed only daggers in their teeth to make them look like pirates,” he commented.

  The Athena, in McCoy’s words, was “the strangest flagship that ever flew the Stars and Stripes.” Stretching forty feet from bow to stern with outriggers and two tall sail masts, Zapanta’s diesel- and wind-powered ship was equal parts yacht, gunboat, and Chinese junk. There was no delineation between steerage and first class: the Athena’s food supply of chickens, pigs, and even a cow mingled on the deck with the human passengers and crew, which Zapanta had divided into sailors and Marines in imitation of the U.S. Navy. Despite Zapanta’s hard brand of discipline, noted McCoy, his crew was fiercely loyal and “would have attacked a Jap battleship if he had given the order.” Fortunately for the Athena and her passengers, there were no hostile encounters. The ship’s most formidable piece of armament was a homemade three-inch cannon mounted on the bow. It was fired by hammering on a nail, which set off a dynamite cap. Mellnik, the artillery expert, asked a gunner about its range. “Seer,” came the proud reply, “it fired so far we did not see.”

  Zapanta guided the Athena from Medina by hugging the coast, but to reach El Salvador, the town closest to their ultimate destination, he would have to proceed across the breadth of Macajalar Bay, an area filled with Japanese traffic. The Athena departed an intermediate stop at Balingasag in the afternoon in order to reach El Salvador at dawn, but the wind blew up during the night, creating rough seas. Daylight revealed three large armed enemy transports, well within range of observers. As the Americans ducked beneath the gunwales and covered up with burlap bags, Zapanta followed discreetly behind the convoy until the ships turned to Cagayan, then aimed the Athena toward El Salvador. Recalled McCoy, “Had we left Balingasag an hour later we would probably have ended up in the middle of these three Japanese ships.”

  From El Salvador, the Americans and their local guides set out on foot and horseback for Talakag, thirty miles due south. For two days they followed a ridgeline trail, past breathtaking waterfalls into the high plateau country of Bukidnon, territory that (if one could ignore the omnipresent coconut palm trees) closely resembled Great Plains farmland. The infinite cornfields and grassy hills provided a stunning contrast with the jungles of weeks past. For McCoy, a Midwesterner, never had home seemed so close, yet so impossibly distant.

  They ferried the Cagayan River and then boarded a bus that deposited them in Talakag, headquarters of the 106th Division commanded by Lt. Col. Robert V. Bowler, at about 1300. Bowler, a thirty-five-year-old former college economics professor, was hungry for information about his brother, Col. Louis Bowler, who had been on Corregidor. Mellnik reported that the elder Bowler had been in good health when last seen in Cabanatuan. Bowler then reciprocated with information of his own: he confirmed that a Navy officer named Parsons was indeed in this locality. And then as if to shroud the presence of Chick Parsons in the Philippines storm clouds arrived and rain fell.

  The message reached Chick Parsons at the ranch where he was sta
ying with a Jesuit missionary priest named Father Edward Haggerty. The sopping-wet courier unscrewed the cap on the bamboo tube that he had clenched in his teeth as he swam the raging Ipanan River. Parsons swiftly scanned the note, then readied to head out into the storm.

  “You’ll want to come, Padre,” he said. “These men have just escaped from the Davao Prison Camp.”

  Despite their incredible story, the escapees did not make a good first impression on Haggerty. He seemed put off by the escapees’ insistence that they be immediately evacuated to Australia. “We needed good men here to help us, and we didn’t consider escaped prisoners any more heroic than the rest of us who had never surrendered,” wrote Haggerty, an active guerrilla in spite of his priestly vows.

  But Parsons understood the titanic effort it had taken to escape from the Japanese, and the escapees’ determination to help their still captive comrades. He empathized with them in a way that only one had who shared nearly the same experiences could. Parsons, after all, was a member of their exclusive fraternity, although he could not tell them that. “Though outwardly frank,” recalled Mellnik, Parsons “was most mysterious about his origin and mission.”

  Neither McCoy nor Mellnik knew that Parsons, while playing the role of Panamanian consul, had witnessed their humiliating march down Dewey Boulevard. It’s unlikely that they would have believed the amazing story of how Parsons had managed not only to sneak his family out of the Philippines in a repatriation of diplomats, but, with the help of his son Peter, to smuggle a briefcase containing intelligence documents. Or how, just before boarding a Douglas DC-3 in Formosa, he had so thoroughly charmed the police commandant that the official requested that he “remember to tell the people at home,” referring to Panama, “the truth about Japanese hospitality.”