Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  Shortly after his Washington trip, Grashio experienced his own breakdown. As with Dyess, his was a long time coming. In prison camp, the prisoners’ energies had been devoted to survival. After escaping, they needed to stay one step ahead of the Japanese; there was no time to look back. Thrust back into home life, Grashio grew chronically nervous and restless. His moods became “dark and petulant.” When he wasn’t suffering from insomnia, he endured nightmares, frightening visions of the prison camps and the Japanese.

  Grashio was soon admitted into Spokane’s Fort Wright hospital for six weeks of “rest, recuperation and repairs.” While doctors fought his malaria and a dentist reconstructed a mouthful of teeth that had been decimated by malnutrition, he searched for the source of his debilitating depression. It did not take long: it was them—Bert Bank, Motts Tonelli, and the others still in Dapecol. “Now I found myself muzzled,” he would say, “seemingly unable to do anything for those left behind, and at the same time ignorant of what had happened to them.”

  His inability to respond to the “avalanche of questions, calls and letters,” the information requests from relatives of POWs, plunged him deeper into despair. “It was maddeningly frustrating to be unable to divulge what I knew, especially when some of the beseechers were aware that I was holding back on them and when I was convinced that there was no sufficient reason to hold back.” All that the escapees had been through seemed for naught. It was the cruelest of ironies. “The whole purpose of our escape,” he said, “seemed thwarted, mocked every day.”

  As bad as it was, Grashio admitted that “Dyess came much closer than I to being destroyed by the consequent frustration.” Dyess had absorbed one bitter disappointment after another. Not only had he been forced to ignore the families of his men and essentially been removed from public circulation for several weeks at Ashford, his request to return to combat duty in the Pacific had also been denied. Months later, Marajen Dyess attempted to explain what her husband was going through. “I saw it in his eyes—that suffering—when I first greeted him,” she said. “I was the only one he could tell. He had to tell someone. He was breaking inside. Hundreds of people with relatives who are Jap prisoners called or wrote him daily and he couldn’t tell a single one about the dreadful happenings in the Philippines. It hurt him so.”

  Dyess, however, was temporarily placated with another promotion, as well as General Arnold’s promise of a fighter command in Europe. And Grashio’s orders were changed so that he could join Dyess as a squadron commander. Even more important, Dyess had been granted one more special permission: he was going home to Texas.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1943

  Albany, Texas

  Ed Dyess no sooner rose from his seat than the overflow crowd at the Albany High School stadium jumped to its feet and erupted in thunderous applause. He had not even opened his mouth.

  “Hello folks,” he said, leaning toward the microphone sheepishly. Then, waving the audience down, he pleaded, “Everybody sit down.”

  Dyess had sat through the invocation and introductions waiting nervously for his turn at the rostrum. The stadium floodlights shone down upon the highly decorated, twenty-seven-year-old new lieutenant colonel on this Friday night with greater intensity than at any time during his playing days. But butterflies were not the problem.

  “I feel like I have a ten-gallon hat caught in my throat,” he opened. “You know, I really am embarrassed up here…. I don’t know of any other time when I have felt like this—except I remember one morning I was standing in a cow pasture with a parachute on while the Japs were bombing Pearl Harbor. I feel now like I felt then, except I don’t have a parachute now…. If you have ever gotten up to make a speech and can’t say anything—you know the jam I’m in now.”

  Dyess had been permitted to stop in Texas before reporting to his new assignment with the 4th Air Force in California. It would be the briefest of homecomings—six days—and an uncomfortable one at that, given the entourage of officers and bodyguards that accompanied him to Albany. Whether he was in the parlor room having a conversation with an old friend or outside tossing around a football with some Cub Scouts, the escorts were omnipresent. In the latter years of her life, his mother, Hallie, would remain convinced that the telephones in the Dyess home had been bugged at this time. Throughout Dyess’s brief stay, hundreds of calls, letters, and telegrams—many were from well-wishers, but most were from worried parents, wives, and loved ones of people declared missing on Bataan—streamed into his parents’ residence. He had no choice but to answer each the same: “I can’t say a thing.” He could not even tell his parents about what he had seen and experienced, or how he had escaped. Invitations to speak in nearby Cisco and Abilene had to be turned down. Dyess was probably fortunate in that regard.

  The giant crowd jammed in and around the stadium on this night—by most accounts, the entire population of Albany, approximately 2,000—was starving for information about the adventures of their native son. Dyess tried his best to nourish them with his charm and sense of humor. One friend, he told the audience, had suggested that Dyess just count to 100 to fulfill his speaking obligation.

  “But I see Miss Jackson, my old math teacher, out there,” cracked Dyess, “and she knows I can’t count that high.”

  Dyess then turned to a subject that he could talk about indefinitely: food.

  “One thing I know for sure—it is wonderful to be here. I didn’t know that when I sent a telegram asking that a steak be saved for me that I would get all of the food I am getting now.”

  The gag order had forced the pool of reporters covering the homecoming to file stories on what Dyess was putting into his mouth, rather than what was not coming out. Judge and Mrs. Dyess had dutifully saved up their ration points in order to provide their son with a steak for nearly every meal, leading to headlines such as the one appearing in this day’s edition of the Dallas Morning News: “One-Man Scourge of Japanese Turns Talents on Texas Steak.”

  “I am going to have to get out of town before I give my dad a race,” Dyess, said, laughing and patting his midriff as the crowd roared. “In my lifetime, I have tried practically everything there is to eat. In fact, in Shackelford County, I tried to eat a barbecued sparrow and a hawk. I have eaten a little monkey, horse, mule and carabao. Our cooking recipe for carabao was simple. Put two rocks in with the carabao. When the rocks melted, you knew the carabao was tender.”

  On Bataan, Dyess added in all seriousness, U.S. troops ate everything but rats.

  “Yellow rats! If you don’t know what a yellow rat looks like—well, it is larger and rattier and yellower than any rat you have ever seen. We had a lot of trouble with these rats and killed a good many of them.”

  The implication was clear. It would be Dyess’s only reference to his combat experiences.

  “I’ll tell you where I’ve been,” continued Dyess, returning to humor in an effort to address some of the rumors that had prefaced his presence in Albany. “This is my story and I will stay with it. My boat sailed from San Francisco two years ago—and I jumped the ship. Since then I’ve heard that I’ve been in Shangri-La—you’ve all heard of Shangri-La. But I haven’t been in Shangri-La. I’ve been incognito in a zoot suit.”

  Dyess, whose eyes were beginning to turn glassy, did not need to glance down at his diamond-studded wristwatch, a gift from his parents for two missed Christmases and three birthdays, to know that it was time to wrap up his speech.

  “But seriously, it is probably a pretty good thing that I can’t talk too much on a few subjects. This is the greatest tribute I will ever get—past, present or future … I don’t think that this should be a tribute to me. I am back. I am here. Let’s make this a tribute to those boys who are not back but who are still over there.” Dyess paused momentarily as his amplified voice reverberated into the crowd. “This is the greatest honor I shall ever receive. When the folks at home are glad to see you home—you can’t beat that.”

  Dyess could barely choke out the l
ast words when hundreds from the crowd—men, women, and children, friends and strangers alike—surged from their seats and pressed the speaker’s stand to pump his hand, ask for autographs, embrace him, or, in the case of some, merely touch him.

  “I want you all to know that I love every one of you.”

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1943

  Nasipit, Agusan Province, Mindanao

  It was almost 1600 hours and Austin Shofner was, as usual, in a betting mood. An hour earlier, Shofner, Mike Dobervich, Jack Hawkins, Wendell Fertig, and Ernest McClish had boarded the launch Agusan and puttered out from Nasipit to meet the submarine that had been dispatched to evacuate the three Marines, as well as a number of civilians and children, from Mindanao. The sub was slightly overdue and Shofner sensed that the group needed a boost.

  “Who wants to make a little bet?” he challenged. “I’ll say she surfaces at four-thirty. How about you, Beaver? Think you can outguess me?”

  “Okay, Shof,” said Dobervich, ever indulgent. What do you want to bet this time—the usual?”

  “Yep. One steak dinner, payable in Frisco.”

  “All right, you’re on. I say five o’clock. You say four-thirty. Whoever’s closest wins.”

  “Beaver, you already owe me twelve steak dinners, you know.”

  “Don’t worry, Shof. When we hit Frisco I’ll buy you those twelve steaks—all at one time. And I hope you choke on ’em.”

  The lighthearted banter did little to alleviate Hawkins’s gnawing fears.

  “I could scarcely believe that the submarine would actually appear,” he would say, “that this, at last, was to be the day of deliverance.”

  Reaching this point had not been easy. The remaining escapees had spent the last four months buckwheating from headquarters to headquarters, town to town, hideout to hideout. Hawkins was lucky to be alive, let alone here for this moment. In June, soon after being sent to Tubay in the Lake Mainet area of Surigao to prepare a new camp, Hawkins had been stricken with blackwater fever, a virulent complication of malaria. The devastating attack immobilized him at a most inopportune time: almost simultaneously, the Japanese launched an assault on Tubay. Amid falling bombs, Filipinos carried a semiconscious Hawkins to the remote home of a man named George Tirador. For nearly a month, Tirador and his family nursed Hawkins back to health with around-the-clock care and some of the quinine that Ed Dyess had pilfered from the Dapecol dispensary prior to the escape.

  The Marines’ departure would leave just three of the original American escapees on Mindanao. Leo Boelens, still laboring on his airfield in Lanao, steadfastly refused evacuation. Spielman had made a habit of visiting the homestead of Frank McCarthy, a Spanish-American War veteran who had stayed in the Philippines to build a fortune in lumber and mining in Surigao, purportedly because of McCarthy’s stockpile of cured meats. “[McCarthy] had hams, bacon and a pretty little girl,” Paul Marshall revealed. Her name was Lucy, and Spielman was smitten. Marshall would be the best man at their wedding that fall. It was not a large affair, for fear of unwanted guests. “We were afraid if [the Japanese] knew about it, they would come,” remembered Lucy Spielman.

  Marshall, now a captain, was CO of the 114th Infantry Regiment. Spielman, in turn, became his executive officer. The two youngest members of the escape party understood the unique opportunity they had with the guerrillas. If they returned to the regular army, they would return as enlisted men. There was unfinished business, too. “Bob and I had a little grudge, shall we say it, with the Japs,” explained Marshall. “It was payback time.”

  Much to the relief of the Marines, the sub finally surfaced—“like some great sea monster from the depths,” remembered Hawkins—around 1700. More than 370 feet long and with a displacement of 2,730 tons, the USS Narwhal was the largest sub in the U.S. fleet, along with her sister ship, the Nautilus. But to many of the Americans and Filipinos waiting at Nasipit, the Narwhal’s sheer size and two 6-inch deck guns made her look like a battleship. None present that day would ever forget the sight of the massive vessel docking at the rickety pier. Nor would the crew of the Narwhal ever forget the welcome they received.

  Sailors pouring out of the ship’s hatches could not believe their eyes—nor their ears. A guerrilla band began belting out “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and dozens of stevedores appeared almost magically to begin unloading the Narwhal’s cargo of much needed supplies. “The place was lit up by native torches eight feet tall, flickering and sputtering and sending up thick, oily smoke,” one of the Narwhal’s chief petty officers later told The Saturday Evening Post. Other sailors saw barbecued pigs and kegs of beer laid out as if in presentation for a banquet. Soon there were hundreds of inquisitive locals swarming the pier. The band alternated sailors’ requests with some favorite tunes such as the “The Eyes of Texas,” which Ed Dyess had taught them, as well as “Anchors Aweigh” and “Yankee Doodle.”

  So much for secrecy. Shofner, standing on the deck next to Cmdr. Frank Latta, skipper of the Narwhal, while savoring a cup of American coffee and a cigarette, noticed that Latta’s face, previously beaming in wonderment, quickly drooped. It must have dawned on the bewildered skipper that this surreal scene was taking place deep in enemy territory. The Japanese garrison at Butuan was, after all, only fifteen miles away.

  “You say we have good security?” asked Latta.

  “Every road, every trail is covered by sentries,” Shofner reassured him. “If a Jap goes to get a drink of water in Butuan, the bamboo telegraph will tell us about it.”

  When the unloading was finished, Filipinos brought forth baskets of fruit, as well as long bamboo tubes, which Latta, once he understood the contents—tuba—apologetically refused. Touched by the Filipinos’ generosity, the crew reciprocated by emptying their lockers of candy, cigarettes, and clothes, which they distributed to the crowd. The Marines did likewise. Shofner unslung his BAR from his shoulder and handed it to McClish.

  “Big Boy will need this back,” he said.

  Dobervich characteristically slid off his battered shoes and tossed them to a shoeless Filipino on the dock. Hawkins handed his pistol to McClish. “I choked up and had difficulty saying goodbye to him and to my other friends on the dock. I had come to love these warm and brave people and this wild and primitive land,” he would say. “I had a feeling that the high point of my life was at hand and would soon slip into the past. Nothing in my future, I thought, could ever equal these experiences in these two years.”

  One could certainly sense the sentimentality in the sultry, smoke-choked air. With the human cargo embarked, a total of thirty-one evacuees, including several women and children, among them a baby, the sub shoved off to farewell waves and the strains of “God Bless America.”

  The Narwhal’s eight-day voyage to Australia became the stuff of legend. In a matter of days, the wardroom became a dispensary for chewing gum and gumdrops. Grizzled torpedomen hauled children over hatch coamings by their diapers. Crewmen taught children how to make sailor’s knots so that the kids would quit “monkeying with the valves, levers and electrical switches.” According to The Saturday Evening Post, “frilly and pastel-hued underthings” appeared “upon improvised laundry ropes in those portions of the Old Girl’s innards that were warmer and dryer than the others.” There were lines for the head and many surprises, such as the time Latta turned on the shower jets only to be ambushed by a pair of pink pants and a brassiere.

  The high jinks, however, hardly bothered the Marines. Just about the only problem they recounted was an inability to sleep, but that had nothing to do with their fellow passengers. As Shofner remembered, not even Latta’s soft bunk helped. Nearly two years of sleeping in foxholes, on concrete floors, wooden slats, and bamboo cots had adversely conditioned him. So one day he climbed down onto the hard steel deck plating and, much to the surprise of the sailors stepping over his body, fell asleep immediately.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1943

  San Francisco, California

  The Pan Am Cli
pper skimmed San Francisco Bay, its propellers whirring to a stop at 0900. Exhausted after eight days of island hopping across the Pacific—their flight itinerary covered a total distance of more than 7,000 miles and included stops at New Caledonia, Espiritu Santu, the Ellice and Phoenix Islands, and Pearl Harbor—the three Marines were also cold and hungry. With another plane waiting to whisk them to Washington, they would have to hurry if Shofner was to collect on his bets.

  Strolling down the dock and shivering in their thin field jackets, they found a cozy restaurant decorated for the season with tinsel and holiday bunting. Wearing decorations of their own, Distinguished Service Crosses awarded to them by MacArthur during an unforgettable ceremony in Brisbane, they took a booth near a small Christmas tree.

  “If General MacArthur had gone into the movies, you would never have heard of John Barrymore,” Shofner said. “I went in hating his guts—we used to call him ‘Dugout Doug’ and a few other nice choice words—[but] he told me what a great job I had done and gave [me] the Distinguished Service Cross. I thought he was God and I was his right-hand angel when I left.”

  But nothing could compare to the elation that accompanied being back in the States. They were so caught up in the holiday atmosphere and in the joy of being home that they could barely finish their meals.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Hawkins muttered aloud, “it’s like a dream.”

  The tune playing on the restaurant’s nickelodeon, Hawkins would recall, had a familiar ring to it. Had it really been one year since he, restless in Barracks Five in Dapecol on a cold, rainy, miserable Christmas Eve, had awakened Dobervich with a strange premonition?