Escape from Davao

by John D. Lukacs

  Boelens. Boelens’s body was temporarily interred at the U.S. Armed Forces Cemetery Leyte No. 1 before being transferred to the Manila American Cemetery, where it remains today. His small white cross can be found in plot F, row 2, grave 97.

  The remaining Dapecol POWs had been shipped back to Luzon shortly before MacArthur’s landing on Leyte in the fall of 1944, with the majority continuing via hellships to POW camps in China, Formosa, or Japan. After being rescued in Cabanatuan in January 1945, Bert Bank regained his eyesight. Bank eventually operated two radio stations in his hometown of Tuscaloosa and was responsible for forming the University of Alabama football radio network. Bank would serve twelve years in the Alabama Senate and House of Representatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which time he introduced legislation requiring that patriotism be taught in all state schools. Decades after their first encounter, Bank would marry Emma Minkowitz, the 1939 Miss Georgia, whom he had known while stationed in Savannah. Bank passed away in

  2009.

  Juan Acenas, the Filipino agricultural supervisor who literally showed the escapees the way out of Dapecol, was promoted to superintendent after the war.

  After attending the July 4, 1946, ceremonies marking Philippine independence, Steve Mellnik visited Candido “Pop” Abrina, the man whose guile and guts contributed to the success of the escape. Mellnik was pleased to discover that the raconteur was still telling tall tales. “Pop,” Mellnik told Abrina, “when I asked you to help us escape, I told you our reports would make history. They did: they shocked the whole world with the news of Japanese atrocities. And they made the words Corregidor, Bataan Death March familiar to every household in America. Your country and mine owe you a great debt.” Abrina died in 1956.

  Perhaps the most capable guerrilla leader on Mindanao, Clyde Childress, retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and worked as a sales representative in the heavy equipment industry. He passed away in 2007.

  Casiano de Juan, Big Boy, reportedly received a battlefield promotion to lieutenant at the end of the war. Little is known of his postwar life.

  For the remainder of the war, Benigno de la Cruz served honorably in B Company, 6th Medical Battaltion, 110th Infantry Division on Mindanao. After the war, de la Cruz managed a pineapple farm and worked as a driver for the Joint United States Military Assistance Group in Manila before his death in 1980.

  With the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, scores of Filipino World War II veterans were permitted to receive U.S. citizenship in the early 1990s. For Magdaleno Dueñas, it seemed the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Instead, it was a nightmare. Dueñas and more than a dozen other elderly veterans moved to the United States and were in effect held in captivity by an abusive landlord who fed them dog food and cashed their Social Security checks for himself. Fortunately for Dueñas, exactly fifty years after he helped a handful of American POWs evade their captors, a group of community activists freed him from his own imprisonment ordeal in 1993. Dueñas passed away in San Francisco at the age of ninety in 2005.

  Wendell Fertig received the Distinguished Service Cross and was promoted by MacArthur after the war to colonel. Fertig’s leadership of the Mindanao guerrillas would be more fully appreciated by the U.S. Army in the postwar period—Fertig was instrumental in the creation of the Special Warfare School, home of U.S. Special Forces training, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He died in 1975.

  By all accounts, Victorio Jumarong served with the Mindanao guerrillas until the end of the war. His subsequent life remains a mystery.

  Claro Laureta ended the war with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

  Col. Ernest McClish passed away in 1993.

  After retiring from the Navy Reserve in 1948 with the rank of commander, two Navy Crosses, a Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Philippine Medal of Valor, Charles “Chick” Parsons set about rebuilding his businesses and his adopted homeland of the Philippines. Parsons passed away in 1988 and is buried in the Metro Manila Memorial Park.

  Jose Tuvilla would receive the Bronze Star in 1947 for escorting the American POWs to Medina. Retiring as a captain, Tuvilla became a farmer. He lives in Davao City.

  Fely Yap (née Campo), the nurse known as the “Florence Nightingale of Dapecol,” married a doctor and continued fighting the Japanese after the penal colony was closed. Much like the escapees, she owed a debt of gratitude to Casiano de Juan and his guerrillas for spiriting her and her husband into the hills during the war’s latter stages. She lives in Davao City.

  With victory came the justice that an outraged America had demanded and that American diplomats, politicians, and military leaders had promised in early 1944. After research conducted by the office of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers—MacArthur’s occupation command would be known as SCAP—the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) convened in Tokyo in May 1946 to try the leaders and functionaries of the defeated Japanese empire. A panel of judges was selected to include representatives from each of the victorious Allied powers and a classification system was used to identify, group, and prosecute different varieties of war criminals. Those charged with crimes against peace, mostly politicians, war ministers, and other government officials, were designated Class A defendants, while those facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity were assigned B and C designations. Most military officers charged with committing war crimes in the field were classified as C criminals. As Japanese atrocities were widespread, there were trials held in several cities throughout the Far East in addition to Tokyo.

  When the tribunal wrapped up proceedings in November 1948, twenty-three Class A war criminals had been convicted. Seven—including former Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo—were put to death and sixteen given life sentences. Elsewhere in Asia, more than 5,700 Class B and C criminals were brought to trial. Of that number, 3,000 were convicted and sentenced; 920 were executed. Most notably, Emperor Hirohito and all other members of the royal family were given immunity from prosecution on the order of MacArthur. Those Japanese military personnel and civilians specifically linked to atrocities committed against American prisoners of war in the Philippines received a variety of sentences ranging from satisfactory to shocking.

  Masanobu Tsuji, the man perhaps responsible for the most excessive displays of brutality on the Death March, was never indicted for war crimes and reportedly passed away in 1968.

  Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, the sadistic commandant of Camp O’Donnell, received life imprisonment. Though he was undoubtedly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Filipinos, Tsuneyoshi would reportedly serve only ten years of that sentence.

  The commandant of Cabanatuan, Shigeji Mori, was also reportedly sentenced to life at hard labor.

  Kazuo Maeda was relieved as commandant of the Davao Penal Colony on March 1, 1944, and served in Korea until the end of the war. He was taken into custody by U.S. forces on February 15, 1946, and tried by the IMTFE. Though there were no executions or widespread atrocities committed during the period of his command, the tribunal did find Maeda guilty of starving the Dapecol prisoners and permitting an environment of mistreatment and general brutality to exist in the camp. The fifty-eight-year-old officer was sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor.

  Yoshimasa Hozumi reportedly returned to Japan in September 1943. Hozumi was interrogated by SCAP personnel in November 1947, but was never charged with any war crimes.

  After the war, Kempei Yuki lived with his family in Ibaraki Prefecture on Honshu where he was employed as a clerk in the prefecture Crop Reporting Office of the Forestry Bureau.

  Shusuke Wada, the diminuitive and despicable civilian interpreter known as Running Wada, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the deaths of several hundred American POWs who perished when the hellship transporting them to Formosa, the Oryoku Maru, was sunk by U.S. Navy dive bombers off Subic Bay in December 1944.

  It remains unknown if the other civilian interpreter e
mployed by the Japanese at Dapecol, the hated Mr. Nishamura, Simon Legree, was ever brought to justice.

  For Americans, the name of one man, General Masaharu Homma, would become synonymous with the most notorious war crime in U.S. military history, the Bataan Death March. The controversy surrounding that perception, as well as the circumstances of Homma’s death, continues to this day. Forced into retirement in 1943, the “Poet General” returned to Japan and lived out the rest of the war in virtual seclusion. After the surrender, he was taken into custody and extradited to the Philippines for the Manila war crimes trials. Unlike the other trials, which were coordinated under the auspices of the IMTFE, the Manila proceedings were coordinated by the U.S. Army, creating controversy and claims that the verdict was all but preordained. “As the Allied Commander of the Pacific Theater, Douglas MacArthur was responsible for selecting the venue, the defense, the prosecution, the jury, and the rules of evidence in the trial of a man who beaten him on the battlefield,” wrote author Hampton Sides.

  Nevertheless, someone had to be held responsible. Though Homma pled not guilty to the charges levied against him, he was doomed by testimony from Death March survivors. According to Sides, Homma was sentenced to death on the “slippery concept of command responsibility.” It was Homma’s duty as commander of the Japanese 14th Army to know what his officers and men were doing. Ignorance was not a believable or acceptable plea. “The death penalty does not mean I’m guilty,” a defiant Homma wrote his children in a final letter, “it means, rather, that the United States had avenged itself to its satisfaction.”

  Shortly before 1 a.m. on April 3, 1946, in the town of Los Banos, Homma was executed by firing squad.

  Unlike Camp O’Donnell or Cabanatuan, the Davao Penal Colony was not a death camp in the sense that substantial numbers of American prisoners of war perished within its barbed wire boundaries. In fact, only sixteen American POWs are believed to have died in Dapecol. But the effects of one’s incarceration at Dapecol would be revealed by time. Call it the curse of Dapecol: of the 2,009 estimated total number of POWs held in Dapecol during the period of its existence from October 1942 to June 1944, only 805 would survive the war, a mortality rate almost 25 percent higher than the total average of Allied POWs thought to have died in Japanese hands. Before the official surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945, nearly 60 percent of Dapecol prisoners were destined to die—most when the hellships they were traveling on were bombed or sunk by friendly fire, but many in subsequent Japanese prison camps due to their debilitated conditions.

  After the war, Dapecol reverted to the control of the Philippine Bureau of Prisons. Today, the rechristened Davao Penal Farm continues to serve as a rehabilitation complex for violent criminal offenders. The notorious swamp that once bordered the camp, however, has long since been drained and the land transformed. Banana trees now stretch as far as the eye can see. Although none of the original structures remains, the camp layout remains virtually unchanged from its wartime configuration; when a building rotted away or collapsed, a replacement was constructed on nearly the same spot.

  Preservation, in all regards, seems both a challenging and worthy task. Just as the seemingly insignificant wartime date of April 4, 1943, and the escape that took place on that day are only dim memories, like a curio box in a trunk left in the cobwebbed attic of American military history, there is little at the penal farm to indicate the historical significance of the location. The only tangible evidence that American prisoners of war had once been incarcerated there is a small, weather-beaten bronze memorial plaque affixed to a petrified kapok tree stump anchored near the baseball field.

  Acknowledgments

  Telling an epic World War II escape story, like attempting to break out from an escape-proof prison camp, requires meticulous planning, patience, dedication, a bit of luck, and, most important, a team effort. Accordingly, I am indebted to dozens of individuals and organizations without whose assistance this book would not have been possible.

  I am grateful to the late Mario Tonelli, because it all started with Motts. If not for him, I would not have known of the Dapecol escape, nor commenced an amazing journey in search of the full story of that adventure.

  In keeping with my firm belief that to truly know an individual means to walk the very same earth, I found myself in places such as Albany, Texas, and Shelbyville, Tennessee, and later, following an inevitable progression, more distant locales such as Mariveles, Bataan, and Lungaog, Davao del Norte, Philippines. I felt as though I was treading on common ground with my main characters and indeed I was—in more ways than I immediately understood. I soon sensed that I was both physically and spiritually following in their footsteps, that I was being conducted from one town, one phone call, one e-mail, one handwritten letter, one clue to the next by some inexplicable, guiding force.

  At each stop—be it a street address or an e-mail address in cyberspace—I was greeted by archivists both amateur and professional, storytellers, sons, daughters, spouses, veterans, friends, and researchers who had dutifully preserved the diaries, letters, telegrams, yellowed newspaper clippings, photographs, yarns, and anecdotes entrusted to them, in some cases for decades, as if in anticipation of my—or someone’s—

  long-awaited arrival. These individuals graciously opened their hard drives, attics, address books, and basements to me, fed me, put me up, and put up with me; and then, in ways both direct and indirect, pointed me forward.

  My most cherished stateside stops were Fredericksburg, Virginia; Lake Oswego, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, the hometowns of Jack Hawkins, Paul Marshall, and Robert Spielman, the three surviving escapees I had the privilege of befriending throughout the course of my research. Heroes all, these men welcomed me into their their lives and patiently endured what must have seemed like a never-ending interrogation—several years of interviews, questions, phone calls, and letters—with nary a complaint. They gave freely of their time, thoughts, emotions, and support, and for that I am eternally grateful. It was an honor to tell their story.

  I am also beholden to the multitude of other World War II veterans, privates and generals alike, many of whose names do not appear in this narrative and who have since mustered out of this world. All of these men had retired from military service many decades before I commenced my research; many, too, had long since retired their painful memories of that period. And yet they unhesitatingly reenlisted in my cause, dredging up memories, stories, documents, and photographs, as well as providing me with insight, suggestions, phone numbers, and addresses. They include Abie Abraham, Malcolm Amos, Charles Ankerbery, Bill Azbell, Tony Bilek, Ramon Buhay, Clyde Childress, John Cowgill, Jack Donahoe, I. B. Donalson, Magdaleno Dueñas, Ben Farrens, Dick Francies, Val Gavito, Richard Gordon, Ray Heimbuch, John Kinney, Lou Kolger, Joe Merritt, Joe Moore, Carl Nordin, Robin Olds, John Olson, Father Bob Phillips, Louis Read, Everett Reamer, Walt Regehr, Jose Tuvilla, Don Versaw, and Edgar Whitcomb.

  The late Bert Bank deserves special commendation for his time, his remarkable powers of recollection, and also for his consummate generosity.

  Shortly before his death, Motts Tonelli told me to call Mrs. Devonia Grashio. I thank her for picking up the phone and giving me Jack Hawkins’s phone number—a pivotal event—but also trusting me with family keepsakes ranging from photographs to phonograph records. I also appreciated the unfettered access to her husband’s personal papers, scrapbooks, and records, the terrific hospitality I received from the Grashio family during my visit to Spokane, and the prompt replies to my numerous queries. The insight and encouragement I received from Grashio’s son, Sam, a Vietnam veteran who followed in his father’s footsteps in more ways than one, were deeply appreciated.

  I’ll never forget the warm welcome I received from the Shofner family during my trips to Tennessee and the generosity and support I continued to receive throughout the duration of my work on this project. In so many ways, Dr. Stewart Shofner helped me see this project and his father with clarity, as did Michael Shofner
. Wes Shofner’s basement yielded a treasure trove of documents, including perhaps the last surviving copy of the 400-page film treatment that Jack Hawkins had prepared for 20th Century–Fox in 1944. It was that document—the only raw, uncensored account of the escape story written so shortly after the event, while the memories were still vivid and fresh—that enabled me to accurately reconstruct dialogue and re-create many of the dramatic events featured in this

  book.

  Nor will I forget the outstanding hospitality I enjoyed during my visit to Lake Jackson, Texas, to visit Elizabeth “Nell” Denman, Ed Dyess’s

  sister. I want to thank Nell for her crucial help in supplying me with vital information and source materials, for patiently and thoughtfully

  replying to each e-mail, and, finally, for introducing me—in a manner of

  speaking—to her brother.

  In Towson, Maryland, Kyle Richards catalogued a wealth of materials on his grandfather Steve Mellnik. Mellnik’s daughter, Thelma Basham, contributed a significant amount of personal insight and information.

  I traveled to Fargo, North Dakota, to meet Lois Dobervich and left with newspaper clippings, photographs, and, most important, a better understanding of her husband.

  I thank Paul Marshall’s sons—Bob, Scott, and Tim—for the practical assistance they rendered after their father’s passing, as well as their encouragement.

  Lucy Spielman’s hospitality during my visit to Austin was greatly appreciated, as was Margaret Spielman’s help in scanning and copying images of her father.

  Thelma Kost, Leo Boelens’s niece, was one of the most dedicated and enthusiastic supporters of this project. I owe Thelma a debt of gratitude for sending me copies of her uncle’s diary and sharing her personal recollections. The same goes for Jeanie Peterson, who provided me with rare family photographs.