Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  Steve Early telephoned me tonight and said that the British and the State Department had protested to the President against the release of the Dyess-McCoy story on Monday morning, January 24. The President accordingly had determined to give the British another week to prepare any simultaneous release of their own which they might desire. They are to be advised that we shall release in any event in morning papers of January 31. In the meantime if the Dyess story should be broken in Congress or elsewhere we shall release the joint Army-Navy statement immediately.

  Once again, undertakings in Europe would have a direct bearing on, or exercise a degree of control over, an aspect of the Pacific war. The remaining escapees were not out of the jungle, be it the politicized, bureaucratic one in Washington or the real one on Mindanao, just yet.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 22–TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1944

  Baroy, Lanao Province, Mindanao

  Perhaps Leo Boelens thought it was another false alarm—the bamboo telegraph, after all, seemingly never stopped buzzing with reports of Japanese activity in the area. Perhaps he thought he could reassure his men by appearing confident. Or maybe Boelens was just in need of some excitement. As his diary attested, the pickin’s had hardly been good. There was ample evidence of a dull life dominated by bouts of boredom, chronic illness, and, despite allusions to a romantic relationship with a mysterious woman named Miguela, persistent loneliness.

  In any event, Sgt. Wenceslao “Ben” del Mundo had been right.

  Boelens and the others had moved to the evacuation area shortly after the first shots were heard in the direction of Maranding at 0715. That afternoon, del Mundo, Sam Grashio’s old bodyguard, had suggested to

  Boelens that he stay put. Though the Japanese had probably moved on, there was no reason to take chances, argued del Mundo. But Boelens shrugged off the advice, grabbing his carbine and five magazines of ammunition before heading back toward the airfield—his airfield. Evidently, he intended to return soon. “Before moving out,” del Mundo would write, “he gave me his last word that if anything was lost among his things he would find my dead body right beside them.”

  Following orders, del Mundo did not leave his post, not even when he heard gunfire less than one hour later. When Boelens did not return the following morning, del Mundo went to investigate. He found no sign of the American, nor the Japanese at the airfield, but the latter nearly discovered him sleeping in Boelens’s quarters the next morning. Slipping away undetected, he watched from a distance as Japanese soldiers ransacked Boelens’s billet, destroying a safe and several drums of crude and coconut oil that had been buried nearby. When he finally made his way back to the evacuation area, a shaken del Mundo learned that the losses were greater than he had imagined.

  A civilian led him to the edge of the airfield, where he found the mutilated body of Boelens; the Japanese had finally reclaimed one of the Dapecol escapees and their punishment had been severe. Sam Grashio was later told that Boelens had been shot by a hidden sniper and recaptured before being “put to death cruelly.” From the descriptions in del Mundo’s after-action report, there is evidence that Boelens may have been tortured before his execution. After a close examination of the body, del Mundo said that the corpse contained “two wounds at the back, a bayonet thrust behind the left ear and several knife wounds at the back of the head.”

  The next morning, del Mundo and several others burned Boelens’s body and respectfully buried the remains in a four-foot grave. Even in death, Leo Boelens continued to inspire: “His personal belongings are still intact in my hands and have not been touched,” wrote del Mundo.

  Chances are, Boelens did not know of Ed Dyess’s shocking death exactly one month earlier, much less the circumstances that precipitated it, but his own tragic end was jarringly similar in that it might have been prevented by some patience, or perhaps better judgment. As it was, Boelens would be the only American escapee not to return to the United States.

  For some men, legacy trumps survival, and so it was with Leo Boelens. His legacy, however, would not be tangible: when he died, so did Farm Project No. 1 and his dream of building an airfield out of the Mindanao wilderness. Boelens’s enduring legacy, as time would reveal, would not be what he did, but what he convinced others to do.

  CHAPTER 21

  Conditional Victory

  Our faith is in the blood of weary men

  Who take the coral beaches back again …

  My country—Oh, my country—well we know

  That final victory will be your part …

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 28,–MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1944

  Washington, District of Columbia

  After months of interminable intragovernmental feuding, interservice rivalry, indecision, intrigue and executive esoterica, the official Army-Navy statement regarding atrocities committed by the Japanese military against American prisoners of war was finally released to the nation’s media with military precision at exactly 12 a.m., Eastern War Time, on Friday, January 28, 1944.

  Later that morning, General Strong called General Surles to assess the initial reaction. “You’ve got to give [the newspapers] 24-hours to get their editorials running,” answered Surles.

  It would not take that long. In cities and towns large and small from Long Island to Los Angeles, Americans were startled and stunned by black, blaring banner headlines such as the one appearing on the front page of the New York Times: “5,200 AMERICANS, MANY MORE FILIPINOS DIE OF STARVATION, TORTURE AFTER BATAAN.” Sensational subheads such as the Times’s “AMERICANS BURIED ALIVE” and “Men Worked to Death—All ‘Boiled’ in Sun—12,000 Kept Without Food 7 Days” invariably led to “a horror story,” proclaimed the Associated Press, “scarcely paralleled in the annals of modern war,” eleven pages of “factual and official” testimony from Dyess, McCoy, and Mellnik that spanned the fall of Bataan to the murder of a Dapecol POW. As per official orders, no details were provided about the method and route of escape, nor was there any mention of the guerrillas who aided the escapees. But in the midst of the resulting national furor, the absence of such details went largely unnoticed.

  Radio, jammed telephone exchanges, and word of mouth relayed the shocking news of the Bataan Death March, the existence of charnel houses of horrors called O’Donnell and Cabanatuan, and the appalling stories of systemized starvation, slave labor, burial details, torture, and calculated enemy brutality to every corner of the country. The news traveled all across America, it was like nothing the nation had known before.

  That Sunday, the first installment of the Dyess story ran on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, as well as in 100 associated newspapers. There would be twenty-four total installments, one appearing each day for the better part of the next month. To the public, it must have seemed as though the deceased pilot was daring them to close their eyes and imagine the horrors he and his comrades had endured. “To my commanding officers I repeated the story of what I had seen and experienced in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan,” Dyess had opened. “And from each of my superiors came the warning: ‘The Public won’t believe it.’ Perhaps the public will not. But the story I am about to tell is true.” Though what they would read seemed beyond belief, believe it they did. Newsweek would later claim that the revelation was a bombshell more explosive even than Pearl Harbor: “the American emotion … was a fury such as had never before gripped the nation in this war.”

  Washington was the epicenter of the outrage. “According to the reports of cruelty and inhumanity,” said Secretary of State Cordell Hull, “it would be necessary to summon … all the demons available from anywhere and combine the fiendishness which all of them embody to describe the conduct of those who inflicted these unthinkable tortures on Americans and Filipinos as the report recites.”

  “Neither you nor I can express our reaction in words,” America’s ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, told a reporter from the North American Newspaper Alliance. “I have used the words ‘fiery rage,’ but my feeling is far too de
ep to try to express in language. My anger against those responsible for these dastardly acts is inexpressible.”

  The most vociferous reaction emanated from Capitol Hill. Texas rep resentative Eugene Worley, a Navy officer who had spent four months on active duty in the Pacific in 1942, attacked the Europe First policy, asserting that, if they did not know so already, “the American people now know their number one enemy—the inhuman, despicable Jap.”

  Members of Congress, blind with rage, demanded immediate retribution. While Missouri senator Bennett Clark wanted to “bomb Japan out of existence,” Alabama senator Lister Hill desired to “gut the heart of Japan with fire.” Andrew J. May, a Kentucky Democrat and chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, wanted the Pacific fleet immediately dispatched to Tokyo to “blow it to Hades.” Calls for the hanging of Hirohito as a war criminal were widespread.

  Assigning blame was a natural, secondary reaction. “Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins,” charged Indiana representative Gerald W. Landis, identifying Hopkins’s role as the major policymaker behind Lend-Lease, “are directly responsible for not getting supplies to Gen. Douglas MacArthur that would have saved these men.” As for the perpetrators of the crimes, “let these Japanese know in plain and no uncertain terms that we’re going to hold them responsible for this nasty, damnable, despicable business,” railed New York Sol Bloom, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “We’ll hold the rats—from the Emperor down to the lowest ditch-digger—responsible for a million years if necessary.”

  In the ensuing week, the shockwaves rippled out from the nation’s capital. Americans of all ages, stripes, and stations expressed their shared outrage in their own ways. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia suggested that if the Mikado is the “true type of Japanese gentleman, let him, in keeping with the custom of his country, commit hara-kiri to prove it.” One of La Guardia’s constituents, a Bronx housewife, could manage only a few teeth-gritting words when asked her opinion of the Japanese: “They’re stinkers.”

  At the Brooklyn Navy Yard on January 29, nineteen-year-old Margaret Truman smashed a bottle of champagne off the bow of the newly completed USS Missouri. As the 45,000-ton battleship slid into the East River, her father, Missouri senator and future president Harry S. Truman, told the crowd of 26,000 that the “christening and launching of this greatest warship of all time illustrates the decisive answer which the democracies of the world are making to the challenge of the aggressor nations. May this great ship be an avenger to the barbarians who wantonly slaughtered the heroes of Bataan.”

  Herby Funston, a young boy from Keota, Iowa, wrote General Marshall to tell him that he wanted to do more for the war effort than “selling and buying bonds and stamps and salvaging.” The Army chief of staff was evidently so moved that he took time to respond to Funston’s missive on February 2: “My dear Herby, I like your letter, the fact that you want to do your full part in licking these Japs … [but] these things must be done, so somebody must do them and that seems to be your duty at the present time. But I sympathize with you in your desire to avenge the ‘nice kid’ from your town who became a prisoner in the Philippines.”

  Security was added to the internment camps scattered throughout the West, a precautionary measure to prevent angry mobs from seeking retaliatory action. The threat, believed Western Defense Command chief Gen. Delos C. Emmons, was very real. After all, a forty-year-old Los Angeles hotel clerk was almost consumed by his burning hatred of the Japanese—literally. The man, who had confessed during an arrest in January to setting more than 200 fires in “cheap Jap flop houses” since Pearl Harbor, was booked again on suspicion of arson after two fires had broken out in his own hotel following the release of the atrocities story.

  The news quickly went global. The Chicago Tribune was successful in arranging with the Associated Press for the distribution of the Dyess story to Cuban and South American newspapers, and by the first week of February two British newspaper groups, along with publications in Canada, were said to be bidding for the rights. The Soviets, though not at war with the Japanese, publicized the American atrocities stories.

  In London, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden related tales of atrocities committed against Commonwealth citizens and military personnel to an enraged House of Commons. The most notable of these stories included the sinking of the unmarked hellship Lisbon Maru, which had been carrying 1,800 British POWs from Hong Kong to Shanghai in October 1942. Nearly 850 of the prisoners had died in the disaster, many belowdecks after the Japanese had locked the hatches to prevent their escape. “The Japanese have violated not only the principles of international law but all canons of decent civilized conduct,” Eden said.

  The Japanese responded to the Allied accusations by claiming through the official news agency, Domei, that the charges were “a mere reoccurrence of the enemy’s vicious propaganda.” And then, abruptly abandoning the denials, Japan launched an inflammatory, if not self-incriminating, propaganda assault. “If the American and British leaders are so ready to raise a hue and cry over the ‘maltreatment’ of their war prisoners, why don’t they teach their men to stand up and fight to the finish?” prodded Tokyo radio. “The way the Americans threw up their hands at Corregidor and the way the British gave up at Singapore … surely shows that these men must have carried on their backs a pretty wide streak of yellow.”

  The ultimate significance of the escape was yet to be determined, but one thing was for certain: the secret was out. Somewhere, Ed Dyess was smiling.

  Americans, riveted to and revolted by the Dyess story, received another sickening shock when the February 7 issue of Life hit newsstands. The issue, which contained an exclusive feature entitled “Death Was a Part of Our Life” authored by Cmdr. Melvyn McCoy, Lt. Col. Steve Mellnik, and Lt. Welbourn Kelley, included photographs of all ten escapees plus artists’ conceptions of events related by the authors. The fifteen-page exposé was a sensation that at once rivaled and complemented the Dyess story by adding fuel to an already massive conflagration.

  The indignation was not limited to the atrocities. Angered that Congress had been kept in the dark, Chairman Elbert D. Thomas of the Senate Military Affairs subcommittee announced that Army and Navy intelligence officers would be summoned to hearings. “My committee is going to get all the information it can through the proper channels,” said the Utah Democrat.

  In the meantime, exclamations turned into question marks and

  Americans—public officials, the press, and the public alike—began to speculate as to the reason for the strangely sudden announcement. Why had the story been released now, almost a full year after the escape, and six months since the escapees’ homecoming? There is no single answer to that question. An examination of both concrete and circumstantial evidence suggests that the story was released when it was for multiple reasons, or, at the very least, multiple, credible hypotheses.

  President Roosevelt said at his February 1 press conference that his “first impulse” was to make the atrocities known to the public immediately after the escaped POWs returned to the United States, but that discussions with Britain and China resulted in withholding the stories for “humanitarian” reasons. Interestingly, when meeting with reporters following the release, Press Secretary Steve Early would call this the “on-the-record” reason. Early did not elucidate upon any “off-the-record” reasons for the suppression of the story, but the implication that there was one or perhaps more “off-the-record” reasons, as previously suggested, is noteworthy. Despite the doublespeak coming from the White House, the motive of protecting the Gripsholm’s mission—the main “humanitarian” reason—remains, in all likelihood, partially legitimate.

  The second reason, or piece of the political puzzle, had been strategically set in place before the release. Just as one could not walk down the street, open a newspaper, or view a newsreel without being reminded of Japanese atrocities, it was no coincidence that the release appeared at the time of the Fourth War Loan Drive.


  The War Finance Committee had been tasked with the purpose of engaging the American public to purchase bonds that would help the U.S. government finance the conflict. The first of what would be eight War Loan Drives began in November 1942; the Fourth War Loan Drive, with a target sales goal of $14 billion, had commenced on the 18th of January, barely ten days before the release of the atrocities story. While Elmer Davis and Palmer Hoyt would argue that the timing of the release with the Fourth War Loan Drive was “purely coincidental,” a close examination arouses suspicion to the contrary.

  Soviet successes on the Eastern Front, coupled with the surrender of Italy in early September 1943, brought clarity to a picture that had been muddled for the better part of two years: the European war would be ending in the foreseeable future, perhaps sooner than anyone had imagined. As Davis would note, this belief gave birth to a sense of complacency—stagnant bond sales and increased absenteeism in war plants served as solid indicators—during this pivotal period of the war. And it was none other than Hoyt who had claimed in 1943 that the responsibility of OWI was to provide accurate news information so that the public and industry could cooperate in war programs and drives. It should be as plainly obvious to any contemporary observer as it was to the powers-that-were at the time that some kind of perfect sales pitch, a reason for Americans to reach for their wallets, was needed.

  Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s men had been working on the problem for some time. “The men on the Treasury’s bond staff, committed to advancing sales in 1943 … utilized market research to develop improvements in their program,” wrote historian John Morton Blum. What the Treasury Department discovered was that Americans’ motivations for buying bonds had little to do with “enthusiasm for the New Deal or the Four Freedoms, or even from a sense of national peril … consumers’ preferences … called emphatically for an appeal to hatred.” It is not difficult to comprehend how the sudden appearance of several POWs with a blockbuster story that was all but guaranteed to arouse a slumbering nation must have seemed heaven-sent to a cash-strapped government waging an ultra-expensive global war. The release of the atrocity stories to coincide with the Fourth War Loan Drive was perhaps the perfect manifestation of an “appeal to hatred” and cannot be dismissed as coincidence.