The message, by and large, would be received. Thanks to the efforts of the escapees, the war had finally become personal. January 28 would prove the antidote to the complacency epidemic that had infected much of the nation. Whether it was buying more War Bonds, donating more blood, combating absenteeism in war plants, scrimping and saving a little more, and complaining about rationing and other sacrifices a little less, Americans seemed more aware of what was demanded of them and better prepared for the long road ahead. And it would be long.
The victories at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal had enabled the United States to blunt Japanese advances, and the advantage held by the United States in resources and industrial capability would assure its armed forces strategic dominance in the Pacific. Nevertheless the nation seemed a long way from total victory. “Let us face the facts and admit that after two years of war Japan is the victor,” Carlos Romulo told the Hearst newspapers. “Out of 1,366,000 square miles of land she has grabbed we have only recaptured 160,150 square miles. We have been fighting 3,000 miles from the Japanese mainland, have advanced only 200 miles and have taken only 377 Jap prisoners.” Using his January 26 birthday as a marker, Newsweek noted the sluggish progress being made by MacArthur: on the occasion of his sixty-third birthday on January 26, 1943, MacArthur’s forces were heavily invested in Eastern New Guinea, some 2,500 miles from Manila; one year later, they had advanced only 240 miles closer to his stated objective. In 1944, one newspaperman examined the distances involved, the logistical and political constraints facing U.S. forces in the Pacific, and remarked that “at this pace, we won’t get to Tokyo until 1960.”
Good news or bad, Americans would now know where they stood. The Detroit Free Press would hail the atrocities’ story as “the most important piece of journalism to come out of this war.” And perhaps it was. As Hoyt explained in American magazine, the release of the atrocities’ story was a pivotal victory for the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment over the oppression of officialdom. After Pearl Harbor, a “precedent” had been set “for withholding and delaying all kinds of information, which could, if continued, make of us—the best informed people on earth—the least informed…. That kind of censorship lulls us into indifference and may, if we put up with it, destroy our freedom.”
Instead, thanks to the Dapecol escapees and a handful of dedicated journalists, a new precedent had been established. War news for the most part would no longer be suppressed or else parceled out in portions at the whim of the government or powerful officials. “The breaking of the Bataan story was tremendously important,” Hoyt later declared to a fellow editor in his private correspondence, “because it opened the way for other stories.”
In the war-torn Pacific, news of the Dapecol escape and release of the atrocities story affected the fighting men. “In this theatre there is no doubt what is the most widely read and best remembered story ever to appear in Life,” remembered photographer Carl Mydans. Whether it was the Life or Dyess version of the atrocities, the story traveled throughout the Pacific Theater of Operations and China-Burma-India theaters, from South Pacific islands to Australia and mainland China—where there were Americans, there was the story.
Perhaps no nation needed a bigger boost than the occupied Philippines. For months, one copy of the February issue of Life, brought in by submarine, traversed Mindanao. Like the escapees, it traveled by banca and over jungle trails. In barrios, remote outposts, and large towns, Filipinos recognized the photos of the escaped POWs and beamed with pride and shared accomplishment. Each morning, the guerrilla padre, Father Edward Haggerty, would take the tattered issue to mass; in the afternoons it was circulated at market. When eager crowds assembled at the cock pits, a sergeant was assigned to turn the pages while soldiers kept the masses from pressing too close. Still, the worn periodical, often damp with jungle rain, always returned to him “with more loose pages, more tears, more dirty fingerprints.”
Two men, recalled Haggerty, were permitted to peruse the magazine at their leisure: Paul Marshall and Bob Spielman. “They both expressed satisfaction at knowing now that the people back home had learned about the Jap treatment of our people,” Haggerty wrote. As one Spyron operative claimed, the ragged copy of Life was “a symbol, of joy to many, and a satisfaction to others … a tangible 1944 link with the U.S.A.; the first most of them here had had since 1942.” It would prove not only a tangible link to America, but a bridge to future victories.
And what of those fighting a day-to-day battle for their lives, the prisoners of war still held captive by the Japanese? Would the revelation have any positive effect, as believed by Ed Dyess and the other escapees, on their plight? Hanson Baldwin, for one, was not optimistic. “Whether or not this course will be effective in relieving our prisoners of some of their misery is doubtful,” wrote Baldwin in the New York Times. “But it is certain that the policy of ‘suffer in silence’ has ended.” That much was true. The escapees had at the very least successfully accomplished part of their mission: lifting the curtain of silence that the Japanese had closed across the Philippines in 1942.
As time would reveal, there would be consequences. It was probably with great satisfaction in the spring of 1944 that Melvyn McCoy made a broadcast via shortwave radio that he hoped would reach his former comrades in captivity. “Be of good cheer,” McCoy’s message read. “Your hour of deliverance will not be long delayed. Meanwhile, I have reason to believe your stay in prison camps is to be made more bearable. The Japanese government recently announced that it was preparing to permit International Red Cross and Y.M.C.A. to alleviate the horrible conditions that prevailed in Japanese camps in the past.”
Feeling the weight of world opinion, the Japanese had been forced into action. In March 1944, the Imperial vice-minister of war sent the following edict to all POW camp commanders:
In light of the recent intensified enemy propaganda warfare, if the present condition continues to exist, it will needlessly add to the hostile feelings of the enemy and it will also be impossible for us to expect the world opinion to be what we wish it to be. Such will cause an obstacle to our prosecution of moral warfare. Not only that, it is absolutely necessary to improve the health condition of POW’s from the standpoint of using them satisfactorily to increase our fighting strength.
POW historian E. Bartlett Kerr added that “this admonition was followed by instructions to be sure that the prisoners were given their full allowance of food and clothing and that efforts were made to improve medical care.” As the decree indicated, Japan’s decision to improve the lives of its prisoners was not entirely motivated by shame nor by a desire to right past wrongs. Japan’s leadership was more preoccupied with propaganda and tapping the deep labor pool of prisoners to prop up the crumbling war effort. So mistreatment continued, as did the deaths. All the same, the escapees had, to a certain extent, correctly gauged Japanese psychology. They had forced their former captors into demonstrating at least some semblance of humane treatment, resulting in the saving of lives. While a shocking percentage of Allied prisoners—37 percent—would ultimately perish at the hands of the Japanese it was probably due in part to the Dapecol escapees that the number was not significantly higher. (In comparison, only one percent of Allied POWs—excluding Russian prisoners—held by Germany died during the period of their confinement.)
Though the remaining imprisoned defenders of the Philippines could not have known it at the time, the relief columns that they had dreamed of in 1942 had finally arrived, albeit the relief, in the most indirect way, had arrived in the form of newspaper columns, syndicated stories, magazine features, and editorial cartoons. The escape from the Davao Penal Colony had proved that not only was the American pen mightier than the Japanese samurai sword, but that perhaps the most important weapons in America’s arsenal were its typewriters, printing presses, microphones, radios, and calls of corner newsboys, as well as the most powerful weapon of all, an infuriated, well-informed, and galvanized civilian population.
Ev
en so, an overwhelming number of the American prisoners still in Japanese hands, most of whom had nearly two more years of captivity awaiting them, would not learn of the Dapecol escape nor have any inkling what it meant to them, their country, and the war. And though many of these captives would perish, the escape and the story of the escape was nevertheless a victory—one of the most important if least known of the entire war. A victory won by twelve extraordinary men who dreamed, then dared to attempt, and then ultimately accomplished what had seemed impossible.
Epilogue
We’ll have our small white crosses by and by
Our cool, green lawns, our well-spaced, well-cared trees
Our antique cannons, muzzles to the sky,
Our statues and our flowers and our wreaths.
The release of the atrocities story was significant for many reasons, but above all it signaled the successful conclusion to the escapees’ epic quest. “I felt very satisfied,” Jack Hawkins would say, “because I knew the story was worldwide. I felt very good that we had done all we could do.”
Yet in early 1944, there was still plenty of war left. The paths that each escapee took to V-J—“Victory over Japan”—Day were extensions of their escape odyssey, divergent, yet sometimes intersecting, and filled with adventures gratifying and depressing, bewildering and banal, but in the end, enduring.
Sam Grashio had been Ed Dyess’s understudy, and after Dyess’s death, his replacement: upon Dyess’s death, Grashio’s orders were changed again, transforming him from squadron leader to Treasury Department spokesman.
For much of the next two years, he traveled the country on the War Bond circuit, speaking everywhere from Spokane to Jersey City, where he gave fifteen speeches in one exhausting day. He spoke in churches, schools, theaters, factories, mills, and shipyards, before Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, chambers of commerce, the Red Cross, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the YMCA, and, of course, the Bataan Relief Organization. No audience was too small or too large—he addressed a crowd of 50,000 that had gathered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles to jointly commemorate Easter and Bataan Day—and, according to Grashio, “no publicity gimmick was left unused.” At one munitions plant he posed for a photograph next to a 400-pound bomb to which he had affixed his signature and a message for General Tojo: “In appreciation of your hospitality.”
While the size of the crowd or the location might change, Grashio’s speech was the same. He condemned the Japanese loudly and vehemently—one of his favorite, crowd-pleasing lines, which had been written for him by Colonel Frank Capra, the director who was then making training films for the Signal Corps, was “I can’t tell you very much about the education or the training of the Japs, but I can tell you what the result is. The finished product is a lying, rotten, bullying son-of-a-bitch!” He would then exhort his audience to do their part, lest his long-suffering comrades “will all perish miserably at the hands of the cruelest captors in the world.” The results varied as little as the speeches. “Large crowds attended the war bond rallies everywhere, accounts of the Death March invariably left many listeners crying, and bond sales skyrocketed,” he remembered.
Fawned over by politicians, corporate sponsors and military brass, Grashio rubbed elbows with people like Gen. Hap Arnold, financier Bernard Baruch, actress Brenda Marshall, actor Pat O’Brien, singer Bing Crosby, boxer Jack Dempsey, and other celebrities. It was all too mind-boggling. Scarcely months earlier, Grashio had been a starving, shivering, suffering slave laborer in rags. Now he had his own plane and personal secretary. He was even the subject of an adventure comic strip. “Everywhere I went I was treated as a hero, given awards, asked to speak, taken to expensive nightclubs, fed steaks, plied with drinks, introduced to famous people, and photographed endlessly,” he recalled. But Grashio would not allow himself to be blinded by the glare of the klieg lights or the flashbulbs. “Despite it all, the sense of frustration never left me. Every time I ate another steak in another plush night club with another Big Name I thought of the starving prisoners left behind to a fate still
unknown.”
Much to the dismay of his handlers, Grashio began to devote more time to the inquiries he continued to receive from those hoping to learn something about the fate of their loved ones in the Philippines. Many waited in long lines for Grashio to complete his speeches; others rushed him with photographs and questions, pleading for answers. Grashio considered the bond tour rewarding, but felt trying to answer the innumerable requests was “the most permanently satisfying thing I did during the remainder of the war.”
But that did not mean it was easy. He sat for hours scanning photographs, trying to recall faces and names. It was painfully difficult for him when he was unable to identify an individual or provide some piece of information to an anxious mother or wife. But there were moments that made it all worthwhile. Once, in Seattle, a line of information seekers stretched from the entrance of Grashio’s hotel down the block. He had not had much luck on this day until the parents of John Arthur Davis, an enlisted man in the 21 Pursuit, presented him with a picture of their son. “I want you to wait here,” Grashio told them. “I want to talk to you after everyone has gone through.” Later, Grashio told the Davis family that he had seen their son being beaten with an ax handle and dragged into a burial shack at one of the Luzon POW camps. But, Grashio recalled, the next day Davis crawled out alive and was still alive as far as he knew. The news buoyed Davis’s parents until the day their son returned home.
The best news of the war, however, was not Grashio’s to deliver. That honor went to Bert Bank, who was reunited with Grashio in San Francisco in early 1945. Bank, along with 500 others, had been liberated from Cabanatuan by Army Rangers in a daring January raid. The two friends caught each other up on everything that had happened since the escapees had disappeared into the jungle that Sunday morning nearly two years earlier. Grashio was relieved to learn that none of the Dapecol prisoners had been executed by Major Maeda. “That news lifted a cloud that had hung over me,” Grashio would write.
At war’s end, Grashio would find himself back at Hamilton Field, welcoming home prisoners of war from the Pacific Theater. He retired from the Air Force in 1965, reaching the rank of colonel, and then served as the assistant to the president of Gonzaga University until 1977. In the 1980s, Grashio would meet and befriend the man who almost shot him out of the sky on the first day of the war, Japanese fighter legend Saburo Sakai. Grashio passed away in 1999.
In early 1944, the Marines discovered that evading their fame was a challenge that rivaled evading the Japanese on Mindanao. Each was given two-month’s leave, but the time was largely spent speaking at bond rallies, dodging reporters, and answering the letters and calls from prisoners’ relatives that invariably found them at their residences. Mike Dobervich and Jack Hawkins agonized over lengthy, sugarcoated replies to these relatives, but Austin Shofner remained his usual, blunt self. “If I knew about it, I said, ‘yes, your son was killed.’ … I told it straight,” he would say. “Nobody ever suggested I play ring around the rosie.”
One task that Shofner relished was reconnecting with University of Tennessee football coach Robert Neyland. Shofner told Neyland that it was the coach’s training and maxims that had enabled him to return home alive. He reportedly caused the tough old coach’s eyes to well up when he told him, “You always taught us to play for the breaks, and when one comes your way, score. That’s what I did.”
Jack Hawkins found his new fame flattering, yet ultimately a nuisance. Hawkins had married his fiancée, Rhea, in Annapolis just after Christmas 1943 and was inundated with so many media and information requests that the newlyweds were forced to flee Fort Worth for Detroit in hopes of enjoying some semblance of a honeymoon. But it was not until the couple relocated to Quantico, where Hawkins was reunited with Dobervich and Shofner at the USMC staff and command officers school, that they were able to enjoy a somewhat normal life. Even then, the reprieve, not to mention the Marines’ reunion, was a
bridged.
Upon graduation, Hawkins received a most peculiar assignment: Hollywood. He was assigned to be a military adviser to Col. Frank Capra. Hawkins spent several weeks working on what he called “the film business,” as well as hobnobbing with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Capra invited Hawkins to cocktail parties and even included him in late night bull sessions during which time Capra and his colleagues kicked around scripts. None of those stories, of course, could compare with what Hawkins had just lived through. He recalled Capra and the other “Hollywood-types” being riveted by his account of the Dapecol escape. “A movie should be made out of this,” Capra told Hawkins.
After hearing Hawkins tell the story over lunch at the Brown Derby, Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century–Fox studios, agreed. Zanuck drew up a contract: Hawkins would receive a $10,000 option payment and then $75,000 when the full manuscript was approved by military censors. Hawkins returned to Quantico and spent many a late night formulating his story. Despite his efforts, the War Department refused to clear the 377-page work, ostensibly for fear of compromising guerrilla operations on Mindanao.
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