Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  At least Hawkins could keep his $10,000 option, which he dutifully divided among the escapees. The escape was proving to be a lucrative venture. In addition to receiving equal installments from Life amounting to $5,000 per man, there were payments from book deals negotiated by Dyess, McCoy, and Mellnik. The Chicago Tribune series later became The Dyess Story, and the Life article Ten Escape from Tojo in book form. Both became bestsellers. McCoy reportedly sold the movie rights to Ten Escape from Tojo to Republic Pictures and Dyess’s estate settled on an agreement with another studio, but no motion picture on the Dapecol escape was ever made.

  While getting rich had certainly never been a goal, getting revenge on their captors had been. Among the Marines, Dobervich and Shofner would have the earliest opportunity. Fighting with the 1st Marine Division, both participated in the Battle of Peleliu in September 1944, which had the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific war. Shofner, now a lieutenant colonel, would win his second Purple Heart leading an assault battalion ashore. When the battle entered its closing stages, the Marines were charged with flushing obstinate Japanese from caves and fortifications. “I would say a lie if I said I didn’t enjoy this,” Dobervich told a war correspondent. “I am not a cruel man. I would treat them kindly if they surrendered to me. But I am glad they want to fight it out.”

  After stints aboard the carrier Philippine Sea and the battleship New Jersey, Dobervich would command the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion during the Korean War. Retiring from the Marine Corps in 1954, Beaver Dobervich kept busy by running a food processing business, working at the Fargo, North Dakota, YMCA, and teaching Sunday school until his death in 1997.

  Shofner retired as a brigadier general in 1959 and returned to Shelbyville, Tennessee, where he raised five sons and managed finance and insurance businesses. Just as Shofner kept the escape party from fracturing in the swamp, he did his best to keep the group together in the decades following the escape by calling many of the participants on the April 4 anniversary of their breakout. Shofner’s passing in 1999 was noted in a New York Times obituary.

  • • •

  “When we escaped, well, our story was really just beginning,” Paul Marshall believed. Marshall and Bob Spielman, newly minted guerrilla officers, wasted little time using the Surigao-based 114th Infantry Regiment as a vehicle for revenge. “We went around and gathered up anybody that had the same feeling about the Japanese that we did,” said Spielman. In between assaults and ambushes—which he planned aboard his mobile command post, a launch called the So What—Marshall also continued to wage his paper war, trading incendiary notes and leaflets with the local Japanese commander who repeatedly requested his surrender.

  “Bob Spielman basically took over combat operations when [the 114th] got so big,” said Marshall. “I had a lot to do. [Clyde Childress] wrote and told me to get my ass off my boat and quit chasing Japs and start running my operation.” That operation was intelligence gathering, the guerrillas’ primary mission as assigned by GHQ. Spielman admitted that his and Marshall’s early actions were “not significant militarily. It did great things for my ego, but MacArthur wanted information.” So, at the time, Childress’s pleas fell on deaf ears. “Like all the other orders we got that we didn’t like, we didn’t pay any attention to it,” he added.

  And then they heard from Steve Mellnik. Mellnik had been running the Philippine Section of G-2 for GHQ, an assignment that tasked him with coordinating espionage nets and gathering information on Japanese troop strengths and dispositions everywhere from Aparri to Zamboanga. In late 1943 and early 1944, however, Mellnik would spend an excessive amount of time on a pet project that had taken on a life of its own: the breakout of POWs from Dapecol.

  The plan was structured around Capt. Harold Rosenquist, a MIS-X (Military Intelligence Service, X-section) officer in his late twenties who had been trained in the latest escape and evasion techniques. Rosenquist would be inserted into the Philippines on what was essentially a fact-finding mission, to make contact with both the guerrillas and the POWs in order to ascertain the best way to liberate the camp. It naturally fell to Marshall and Spielman to provide the latest intelligence. Though he would not be able to steal any chickens from the poultry farm, Spielman would get close enough to map the penal colony and Japanese defensive positions, as well as leave cigarettes and chocolate bars carrying the message “I Shall Return” for the POWs.

  Rosenquist was to depart in February, but internal discord in GHQ held up the mission. “Colonel Whitney’s influence too strong,” Rosenquist would write in his diary. Regrettably, Rosenquist did not set foot on Mindanao until June 1. He made his way to Kapungagan, where he met with the escapees’ old friend Claro Laureta, now a major. Rosenquist gave Laureta a cigarette lighter from Mellnik, as well as President Quezon’s pardons for Ben de la Cruz and Victor Jumarong. With building anticipation, Mellnik traced Rosenquist’s progress through garbled radio messages. Rosenquist easily infiltrated Dapecol—but that was because the camp was deserted. “Walked around Penal Colony,” read the deflating communiqué. “Found no, repeat no PWs. Happy convicts say PWs evacuated ten days ago, probably to Manila.”

  As Mellnik, Marshall, and Spielman learned, approximately 1,250 American prisoners had been blindfolded, tethered to each other, and marched out of Dapecol on June 6, 1944. Arriving at the Lasang Pier, these men were packed aboard the merchant vessel Yashu Maru, which would take them to Cebu City. The prisoners would then board the Singoto Maru for the remainder of their journey to Manila, where they would then be redistributed to Bilibid Prison, Cabanatuan, and other prison camps scattered throughout Japan’s shrinking empire. But not all of the Dapecol POWs left Mindanao.

  In March, nearly 700-odd prisoners had been selected for a work detail to build an airfield near Lasang. After finishing their labors in August, this last shipment of Dapecol POWs was herded aboard a familiar vessel, the Erie Maru, for the short haul to Zamboanga, where they would board the hellship that was supposed to take them to Manila: the Shinyo Maru. “Seems that more POW have left Davao area … guess I won’t get the chance to do what I really came here for,” lamented Rosenquist in his diary. He would not be the only one with regrets.

  None of the final Dapecol POWs would ever reach Manila. In fact, fewer than 100 would survive the final voyage of the Shinyo Maru. It was to be an all too common occurrence in the war’s latter stages: according to author Gregory Michno, more than 126,000 Allied POWs were transported in 156 voyages on 134 Japanese vessels that also carried supplies or arms. Since the Japanese steadfastly refused to mark these vessels as POW transports, some 21,000 POWs were killed or injured on the ships as a result of attacks from American planes or submarines.

  The commander of the submarine Paddle had no idea that the merchant ship he sighted in the enemy convoy zigzagging north along the western coast of Mindanao on the afternoon of September 7, 1944, was carrying American prisoners of war. Seconds after the Paddle fired a spread of torpedoes at the slow-moving Shinyo Maru, the fish slammed into the hull of the antiquated freighter, rocking the ship with a series of explosions. Water poured into the holds and panicked POWs clambered up to the decks, only to be beaten back by rifle butts. It would take less than ten minutes for the 2,600-ton vessel to break apart and sink, and in that time, only a handful of Americans would make it abovedecks and jump overboard. Though most of POWs would experience horrible deaths trapped inside the flooded holds, many of those who made it into the water would suffer equally worse fates. As launches arrived to pluck Japanese survivors from the water, the handful of weak Americans struggling to stay afloat were fired upon, beaten with oars, and drowned. By the time darkness fell, only eighty-two washed up on the shore alive. Guerrillas would spirit away the survivors and nurse them back to health before another American submarine, the Narwhal, was dispatched to retrieve them.

  The failure to reach the Lasang-Dapecol prisoners in time, and the subsequent Shinyo Maru tragedy, would remain a point of contention amon
g the Mindanao guerrillas for years. “I thought it [a prison break] could [work] and Bob thought it could,” Marshall would say. “But the powers-that-be didn’t want anything to do with it.” Marshall believed that Wendell Fertig’s refusal to cooperate with Rosenquist limited the latter’s ability to coordinate and execute the mission. That certainly was likely. Clyde Childress explained that Rosenquist’s attitude toward Fertig and the guerrillas was generally cold and condescending, thus creating an adverserial relationship. Fertig probably believed that such an operation was logistically impossible, and that it might have led to a massive Japanese counterinsurgency that could have destroyed the guerrilla movement on Mindanao.

  Historical hindsight shows that Mellnik’s mission faced almost insurmountable odds. While a raid on Dapecol or any other local POW compound would have been easy to execute due to the guerrillas’ numerical advantage over any guard detail, the main problem was arranging the transportation of hundreds of sickly, emaciated POWs to an extraction point. It is also highly unlikely that the guerrillas in the Davao sector, however numerous and spirited, could have held off the large, well-equipped Imperial Army garrison that would undoubtedly have been dispatched from Davao City to recover the prisoners.

  Still, in view of what happened to the men aboard the Shinyo Maru, Marshall thought the attempt should have been made: “I often wondered if it would have been worthwhile, but that’s just supposition. Could we have pulled it off and what would we have done with them after we got them out of there?” Childress would be loath to credit Fertig for much during the war, but he would insist that the decision—whoever made it—to scrub the Dapecol rescue mission was the correct one. Of course, as Marshall would counter, “but then we’ll never know, will we?”

  Marshall and Spielman would henceforth devote their time into building what was perhaps the most successful guerrilla province on the island, a model outfit complete with an extensive intelligence network, a strong civil government and school system, and a hard-hitting army that kept the Japanese bottled up. Ironically, it was by toeing the line and fulfilling their mission for GHQ that the two former POWs were finally able to get some revenge. In fact, they’d get more.

  A few months after the Shinyo Maru sinking, with MacArthur’s forces rapidly approaching, Marshall’s coast watchers had noticed that the local Japanese forces—commanded by Marshall’s Japanese pen pal—were preparing to bug out. “The Japs had about 14 or 15 small inter-island boats and they were going to move all these troops in Surigao someplace else,” he remembered. The report was relayed to GHQ and Marshall received a strange reply. “I got a message saying, ‘in the morning, get up on your hilltop.’ That is all it said.”

  As ordered, Marshall, Spielman, and some others ascended his hilltop observation post at approximately 0800. Marshall’s ears soon perked up; he heard what sounded like a giant swarm of bees approaching: the humming of the engines of several dozen American fighter planes, probably F4U Corsairs, which had been dispatched from a Navy carrier task force. The guerrillas watched as the planes roared in over the water with their machine guns blazing. The Japanese flotilla did not have a chance. “[The planes] came in and when they left there wasn’t a stick big enough to float,” said Marshall. To conclude the one-sided battle, Filipinos on the shore grabbed their bolos and paddled out in barotos to finish off the survivors. The ensuing scene was wild, bloody mayhem, the result of nearly three years of pent-up humiliation. Marshall could not have stopped it had he tried. “[The Filipinos] hated the Japs,” he said. “I think we all did at the time.”

  Marshall’s fire would fade after the war but would never be fully extinguished. Like most of the escapees, he refused to drive Japanese cars, a decision attributable to both his memories of his treatment as a POW and his lifelong attachment to Chrysler. When Marshall came home, he returned to a promised brand-new black Chrysler sedan, the first of its kind in Pueblo. He also found a check from Life and three years’ back pay waiting for him. Marshall would marry, raise three sons, and work in the meat and real estate industries. He stayed in the Army Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1963, and was instrumental in helping to craft POW SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—training as recently as 1996. Marshall passed away in 2006.

  Spielman did not rush home upon his separation from the Army in 1946. He worked as the manager of a lumber company in Surigao before returning to Texas with his wife and young family in 1948. Receiving a degree from the University of Texas, he settled in Austin and embarked on a career in education as a teacher at the Texas School for the Deaf. Like Marshall, Spielman stayed in the Army Reserve, retiring a colonel. He died in 2008.

  For Melvyn McCoy and Steve Mellnik, the war came full circle in February 1945 at the most appropriate location: Corregidor.

  Returning to the Philippines with MacArthur’s forces in October 1944, Mellnik found himself in Subic Bay on Valentine’s Day 1945 answering questions on Corregidor’s topography and tunnels posed by the leaders of the assault teams that had been assigned to retake the Rock.

  Mellnik’s war ended a few weeks later. Plagued by malaria, he packed his travel orders, his razor, and a toothbrush into the same musette bag that he had carried out of Dapecol and headed off to Pier One to board the Navy oiler that would take him home. Mellnik’s postwar résumé included General Staff and command assignments in the United States and Europe. The erstwhile enlisted man retired with the rank of brigadier general in 1963. He died in 1994.

  Though Melvyn McCoy would often joke in early 1944 that the only sea duty he had had during the war was the twelve-day journey to Mindanao aboard the Erie Maru, he stressed that he had a “score to settle” with the Japanese. “When the Philippines are invaded, I expect to be there,” he told the Indianapolis Times. Like MacArthur, McCoy made good on his promise: he was the executive officer on one of the cruisers in Manila Bay providing fire support for the invasion of Corregidor. McCoy and Mellnik reunited on the Rock several days after the island was secured and posed for a celebratory picture, photographic proof that they had come, both literally and figuratively, a long way together from the muddy rice fields of Mactan.

  McCoy would also participate in the last major land battle of the war, Okinawa. One of his most memorable contributions to the fight was hosting a hungry Marine visitor aboard his cruiser—Shifty Shofner. McCoy would command two ships in the postwar period, the oiler Severn and the destroyer tender Markab. He retired from the Navy in 1951 with the rank of rear admiral and continued to live the itinerant lifestyle characteristic of a sailor. Late in his life, McCoy would frequently relive his famous escape by temporarily breaking out of an assisted living facility in El Paso—he was always tracked down at his favorite watering hole a few blocks away. He died in 1988, his body cremated and his ashes scattered to sea.

  Okinawa would be Jack Hawkins’s last shot at combat. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he was assigned the role of assistant operations officer in the 1st Marine Division. “I got my revenge on the Japs that way. Not with a gun in my hand, but with operations orders, writing them every day. I can remember when we would confer with everybody before writing the order of the day and it always started out, ‘The First Marine Division attacks.’ Every one that way. Every day.”

  After Okinawa, Hawkins was assigned to an industrial incentive tour. He would spend the war’s final months much like Sam Grashio, giving pep talks to factory workers and bond buyers whose efforts were needed to keep America’s assembly lines rolling as the invasion of Japan loomed. Hawkins had the routine down pat. He was caught off guard, though, just before taking the stage in a crowded theater in Baltimore on August 15, 1945. Japan, he was just told, had surrendered; the war was over. Hawkins would have to discard his prepared script and make his final speech off-the-cuff. He announced the surrender news and thanked his audience for its hard work and help in winning the conflict. As the audience streamed out to join in the massive public celebration unfolding across a triumphant natio
n, Hawkins must have felt much like Ed Dyess had, standing alone in the Texas night in November 1943 with everything and nothing to say.

  The war might have been over, but history, as well as fate, was not finished with Hawkins. In the Korean War, he commanded the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines at the Inchon landing, the capture of Seoul, and operations in North Korea. His next assignment—as a military adviser to the CIA—placed him in the middle of tactical planning for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Upon learning that the site of the invasion had been changed and that there was no solid commitment for air cover for the paramilitary landing forces, Hawkins informed Richard Bissell, CIA deputy planning director, that Fidel Castro’s fighter aircraft (if not destroyed), would sink the invasion fleet and the operation would end in disaster. Bissell did not relay to President John F. Kennedy Hawkins’s recommendation. Instead, he urged Kennedy to go ahead even as the president further cut by half the already inadequate air operations plan. The result was exactly as Hawkins predicted. Involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco may have cost Hawkins a general’s star, since the president and secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, used Hawkins as a scapegoat. Hawkins retired from the Marine Corps in 1965. The last surviving Dapecol escapee, Hawkins, ninety-three, lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  Although he had been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, Ed Dyess instead received the Soldier’s Medal for committing a heroic act not involving an armed enemy. On December 1, 1956, Abilene (Texas) Air Force Base was officially renamed Dyess Air Force Base in his honor. “If Ed was watching in the Great Beyond he probably would have laughed,” Sam Grashio would write, “for it was a bomber base while he was a fighter pilot.”

  Thanks to the efforts of Madge Miguela Martin, the remains of an American serviceman were found buried in a shelter near Balingbing, Lanao in early 1947. A makeshift dog tag—a 50 centavo coin on which the individual’s name and Army serial number had been engraved—found among the skeletal remnants identified them as those of Leo