Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  General Whitney was sympathetic, yet offered a warning. “Though the Old Man told me to bring your friends out,” he told Mellnik, “don’t expect overnight service.” Despite the bewildering logistical buildup of Allied forces in Australia and the fact that the United States was locked in a defensive stalemate in the Pacific, interservice rivalries were still prevalent. MacArthur’s GHQ was an Army show. The submarines were controlled by the Navy. GHQ’s Philippine Regional Section was allowed only five tons of cargo, or five men, on subs transiting Philippine waters. “Now that we’ve demonstrated a capability to conduct safe rendezvous, we hope the Navy will give us sub space more frequently,” added Whitney. It was not the answer that Dyess, McCoy, and Mellnik wanted to hear, but they would have to be content with that assurance for the time being.

  Their feelings of powerlessness and guilt were magnified when they walked into General MacArthur’s office in the Australasian Mutual Provident Society, or AMP Building, on Edward Street at 6:05 p.m. on the evening of July 30. There, they found the famed four-star general, as well as a phalanx of senior staff officers, standing rigidly at attention. As an adjutant read their citations, MacArthur pinned a Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest military decoration in the United States Armed Forces, on each of their chests.

  The adjutant’s words—“For extraordinary heroism during operations against an armed enemy …”—troubled Mellnik. “As Gen. MacArthur pinned DSCs on McCoy and Dyess, I thought of the heroic

  thousands who died anonymously on distant battlefields and PW

  camps…. Feeling contrite and unworthy, I silently prayed my fallen comrades to forgive me.”

  The office emptied after the ceremony, leaving only MacArthur and the escapees seated around the general’s desk. Typically, a “conversation” involving MacArthur and a guest consisted of the general doing most of the conversing and the guest doing most of the listening. That was not the case on this evening. MacArthur inquired about the fates of mutual friends and then listened intently as Dyess told his firsthand account of the Death March and as McCoy and Mellnik added the horrific tales of their respective prison camp ordeals. MacArthur was revolted by what he heard. A lone photograph taken during the occasion shows a different MacArthur, without the characteristic theatric regality. Instead he appears tight-lipped, uncomfortable, even grim. Despite MacArthur’s well-chronicled narcissism, he was, in all likelihood, haunted by the thoughts of the price that his men had paid—and that those in captivity continued to pay—for his failure in the Philippines. MacArthur may have left the Philippines, but the Philippines and memories of his men had never left him.

  When the former POWs finished their informal debriefing, the typically eloquent general’s reply was unusually brief, yet threateningly powerful.

  “The Japanese will pay for that humiliation and suffering,” MacArthur promised them in a grave voice.

  After all of the meetings and conferences with seemingly uninterested subordinates, it was reassuring for the escapees to know that MacArthur, at least, was on their side.

  “It’s a story that should be told to the American people,” said MacArthur, singling out Dyess as the person to tell that story, much as Father Haggerty and others on Mindanao had. “But I am afraid, Captain, that the people back home will find it hard to believe you.”

  MacArthur did not specify to whom he was referring in regards to “the people back home.” The American public? The top military brass who were running the war from Washington? Or was he referring to the U.S. government?

  But that mattered little to Ed Dyess. After all, whether it was a stage performance at John Tarleton College in Stephenville, Texas, a briefing at Bataan Field, or a fiesta in the middle of the Mindanao jungle, he had yet to encounter an audience he could not win over.

  CHAPTER 18

  Duty

  You say I’m jesting, talking like a fool?

  Perhaps you’re right, here in your crowded hive

  Safe in your comfort. The misguided tool

  Who earned that comfort now returns alive …

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1943

  White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, United States

  On this morning Ed Dyess awoke in a bed in the high-security wing of a military hospital secluded in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. Following his homecoming journey to the United States from Australia, Dyess had suffered a physical collapse that was as dizzying as any malaria bout. A cargo plane had transported Dyess, McCoy, and Mellnik across nine time zones in a mere thirty-six hours. Back home they discovered a nation firmly on a war footing, military personnel wearing new styles of helmets and uniforms and so much else. Dyess must have been especially bewildered at the sight of unfamiliar new aircraft adorned with new logos and new names, “fighters.” To top it off, a chaotic routine of conferences and debriefings left the men little time to catch their breath, much less adjust to the bizarre new surroundings.

  Dyess had not been admitted to Ashford General—formerly the luxurious Greenbrier Resort—entirely for physical recuperation. Anyone with enough security clearance to read his fourteen-page Pentagon deposition would have realized the significance of his words. There were those in the upper strata of the U.S. government who were deeply concerned by his revelations, so Dyess was sent to Ashford until the government could figure out what to do with him. In the meantime, a gag order was enforced. If Dyess spoke of his experiences to anyone but authorized personnel, he risked his commission and possible criminal proceedings. His only outlet was his deposition, which revealed his deep feelings about the consequences he and his comrades suffered from following orders: “Had the Americans and Filipinos of Bataan known the fate in store for them … never would they have surrendered to our dishonorable foe.”

  Despite his officer’s oath, he knew that he also had a duty to those left behind, and he ended his deposition with an expression of his strong personal convictions. Though he had no intention of being insubordinate, these words had probably been enough to land him at Ashford: “In my opinion, it is not only advisable, but absolutely necessary that all civilized people of the world know the conditions of the Japanese prison camps and the atrocities against American prisoners of war…. It was my idea when I escaped from the prison camp that if I could bring conditions before the American people we could force the Japanese into … giving us better treatment.”

  Ashford was the perfect place to quarantine Dyess and his story. Located 250 miles from Washington in southeastern West Virginia, the resort had first served as a detention center for enemy diplomats. Before war’s end, more than 24,000 Army patients would be treated there. But for Dyess, Ashford was no sanctuary. Although one needed a special pass to gain access to him, he had nevertheless been besieged for two weeks by what one newspaper would call a parade of “literary sharks, Hollywood stooges, and syndicate agents.”

  He had the Associated Press and well-meaning friends to thank for that. The Dyess legend might have begun with his raid on Subic Bay, but in the States stories about him had been appearing since he had passed into captivity. The earliest appeared in the New York Times on July 26, 1942. In that article, correspondent Byron Darnton told of being summoned to an Australian field hospital. “I didn’t want you to come to see me so I could talk about myself,” Lt. Ben Brown told Darnton, “I want to tell you about Captain Ed Dyess. I don’t think his story has been told back in the United States and it ought to be.” Brown briefed Darnton on Dyess’s exploits, and Darnton relayed the story to the Times Manhattan headquarters. Ensuing stories effectively built up Dyess’s legend. Some of his visitors had informed him that arrangements had already been made for the publication of his story, regardless of his cooperation. He summoned his wife’s attorney, August Meyer, to deal with his unwanted visitors. All Dyess wanted was to tell his story and return to the Pacific in the cockpit of a fighter plane as soon as possible. Then Marajen Dyess remembered that the Chicago Tribune, one of the nation’s largest, as well a
s most powerful, daily newspapers, had been the first to request an interview with her husband.

  Meyer contacted Walter Trohan, the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief, and Trohan transmitted the facts of the situation to assistant managing editor Don Maxwell in Chicago. Wasting little time, Maxwell selected Charles Leavelle, an experienced, middle-aged reporter, to accompany him on a trip to West Virginia. Maxwell arrived at Dyess’s bedside and told him that the Tribune would beat any offer. But, as Dyess explained, money was not the most important consideration.

  “The thing I must do—the thing I’m going to do—is to tell the American people what the Japs have done and are doing to their sons and husbands and brothers out in the Philippines. I want the American people to understand Japanese psychology and the way they make war. I am going to tell my story through the medium that will get it to the most people most effectively.”

  “We gave him the facts,” Leavelle would write. “The best of the magazines could tell his story to two or three million people a week. The Chicago Tribune and associated newspapers could tell it to 12 to 14 million people a day.” Maxwell also told Dyess that he would not have to pay for Leavelle’s services. This saccharine concession was not lost on Dyess, who had, in fact, offered what amounted to a disclaimer in his deposition. “I had tried to put into words some of the things that I have experienced and observed during these past months, but I fail to find words adequate to an accurate portrayal. If any American could sit down and conjure before his mind the most diabolical of nightmares, he might perhaps come close to it, but none who have not gone [through] it could possibly have any idea of the tortures and the horror that these men are going through.”

  The Tribune offered $21,000, only $1,000 more than the highest standing offer from Collier’s, but Maxwell and Leavelle had impressed Dyess.

  “It’s a deal,” said Dyess, raising himself off his pillow to extend his right hand. “In the last few days all I’ve heard is talk about percentages on this, cut-ins on that, and slices of something else. Nobody would talk about how they were going to present this story … or about the number of people that would read it. That’s all I’m interested in. I don’t care about money and apparently you don’t either. I want the story told and that is what you seem to want above everything else. We’ll start work as soon as you can fix it up in Washington.”

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9–TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1943

  Washington, District of Columbia

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  September 9, 1943

  SECRET

  MEMORANDUM FOR:

  The Secretary of War.

  The Secretary of the Navy.

  Subject: Japanese Atrocities—Reports of by Escaped Prisoners.

  1. I agree with your opinion that any publication of Japanese atrocities at this time might complicate the present and future missions of the GRIPSHOLM and increase the mistreatment of prisoners now in Japanese hands. I request, therefore, that you take effective measures to prevent the publication or circulation of any stories emanating from escaped prisoners until I have authorized a release.

  2. It might be well for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make recommendation as to the moment when I should inform the country of the mistreatment of our nationals.

  s/FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  Copy to: Admiral Leahy

  Mindanao’s bamboo telegraph had nothing on wartime Washington. So fast did news travel—even of top secret White House memoranda—that the ink had hardly dried on FDR’s signature when an alarmed Don Maxwell learned of the executive moratorium on atrocity stories. Maxwell called Walter Trohan. Trohan, in turn, dialed up Brig. Gen. Alexander Surles, chief of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations. Trohan reached Surles at 5 p.m., September 9.

  “I wanted to put a couple of things up to you because I know you will be fair and honest and want to do the right thing,” opened Trohan. “Between you and me, we want the prestige of releasing it…. That’s laying it completely and coldly on the table.”

  Trohan then suggested that until publication permission was granted, only three copies of the story—in addition to Dyess, one each for the Army and Chicago Tribune—would be printed.

  “Nothing is going to happen on this thing for at least six weeks,” Surles assured him.

  “Yes, but we’d like to spend about that much time writing it, if it could be arranged.”

  “I’ll see what they say on it and let you know.”

  After Trohan and Surles hung up, the discussion about what would eventually be called “the Dyess story,” as well as the larger subject of censorship, began in earnest.

  On the home front during the dark days of early 1942, before the advent of ration stamps and gasoline stickers, America’s first chronic shortage was war news. Censorship restrictions were responsible for the information famine, and though these restrictions originated from the highest levels of the military and the civilian government, two government agencies were largely responsible for waging the news war: the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information, more commonly referred to by its initials, OWI. These agencies were separate entities and their missions entirely different.

  Censorship, headed by Byron Price, the former executive editor of the Associated Press, was tasked with reading, evaluating, and editing news content before it appeared in the nation’s print publications and radio broadcasts. Whereas Censorship was largely a filter between writers and commentators on one side and the country’s printing presses and microphones on the other, OWI was charged, in the words of President Roosevelt, who signed the agency into existence with Executive Order 9182, “with the duty of formulating and carrying out information programs designed to facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, aims and activities of the Government.” OWI, in so many words, was the public relations arm of the wartime U.S. government.

  The mission of OWI chief Elmer Davis, a popular CBS commentator, was extraordinarily difficult. As Time magazine explained, Davis and those at OWI had, in effect, taken an oath “to tell the truth, but not the whole truth about the U.S. to its friends and enemies, and to neutrals abroad.” Davis, a fifty-something Hoosier with horn-rimmed glasses, was the quintessential American journalist—Edward R. Murrow called him “fair and tough-minded.” He would have to fight not only enemy propaganda abroad, but public misconceptions (the residual effects of American propaganda during the First World War), Washington policymakers, and military brass at home, all while trying to keep a lid on internal squabbles. Though the tide of war seemed to be turning in America’s favor in the fall of 1943, Davis, and Price to a certain extent, were steadily losing ground in their efforts to educate the American people.

  So stringent were the censorship regulations that it was not until the September 20, 1943, issue of Life—a full twenty-one months since Pearl Harbor—that the public saw the first images of dead U.S. servicemen in the war. Previously, thousands of images captured by combat photographers had been locked in a War Department vault known as the “Chamber of Horrors.” Written accounts of battles were also edited to eliminate gory details. In order to foster optimism, authorities believed that it was best to withhold the truth concerning the state of the Allied war effort, not just the casualty statistics and strategic failures, but also the visual proof of the dead and maimed bodies that was real war. The Office of Censorship had asked American journalists and media outlets to “lay off” reporting atrocity stores as early as February 1942.

  The government, mindful of the effect on the public of the most recent war news from the Philippines, had no wish to reopen old emotional wounds at this time. The news of Bataan’s surrender had been devastating when finally delivered in full, deflating detail in the spring of 1942. A funereal gloom had shrouded the country as newspapers, radio, and newsreels revealed that approximately 36,000 U.S. troops were believ
ed to have been surrendered to the Japanese, qualifying the defeat as the largest and most ignominious in U.S. military history. The reverberations caused by the capitulation had rippled through the nation. It was not long after the fall of the Philippines that Americans began to question the “Europe First” strategy. A Brooklyn man sent $100 to Secretary of War Henry Stimson with the stipulation that the money be used to purchase “bullets or bayonets to avenge Bataan.” Perhaps the most noteworthy national response was the formation of grassroots organizations designed to lobby for action in the Pacific and for POW support. Among many others, there was the MacArthur Club of Fort Worth, Texas, the American Bataan Club of Maywood, Illinois, the Sponsors of Philippine Heroes in Hollywood, California, the Philippine Society of Kansas in Wichita, and the Philippine Hero Club of St. Joseph, Missouri. Foremost, however, was the Bataan Relief Organization, created by Dr. V. H. Spensley, an Albuquerque dentist whose son was a Japanese POW. Within months of the Philippines disaster, the BRO would claim more than one million members in affiliate chapters nationwide.

  Despite the efforts of these organizations, the martyrs of Bataan and Corregidor faded from the national consciousness in 1943. As the war in Europe took priority in terms of strategic planning, personnel, supplies, and media coverage, it seemed to many Americans, among them Mrs. August Mensching, a member of the American Bataan Clan from Des Plaines, Illinois, that “too many people have forgotten that there was a Bataan.”

  Perhaps some occupying the loftiest levels of the government would have preferred that. In a telephone conversation with one of General Marshall’s aides on September 14, General Surles stated his belief that the mounting confusion concerning Roosevelt’s memorandum and the buzz in official Washington behind the Dyess story were “all tied up with a great many factors, including the visit of the GRIPSHOLM and other things.”