Pearl Deal received another Western Union telegram on April 29, stating that her son would soon be returned to the United States. On the first of May, Mo Deal, the tenth survivor of the Palawan Massacre to be liberated, was flown back to San Francisco, where he was held for further treatment.
*
ON FEBRUARY 28, 1945, an American liberation force more than eight thousand strong began its landing on Palawan. The 186th Regimental Combat Team, U.S. 41st Division of the 8th Army Task Force, commanded by General Harold H. Haney, moved ashore without opposition at Canigaran Beach—within sight of the airfield that the American POWs had built near Puerto Princesa.
Palawan’s occupiers of the last three years had long since withdrawn from the vicinity following two days of heavy aerial bombings that preceded the American landings. The remaining Japanese troops of Lieutenant General Sosaku Suzuki’s 35th Army had fled into the hills to the northwest, and Puerto Princesa was transformed overnight into a huge U.S. military camp. The town was in ruins from air raids, first from the Japanese, and now from the Americans.
As U.S. troops moved inland, the eleventh and final survivor of the Palawan Massacre was liberated. Pop Daniels, who had been in the care of the guerrilla network for forty-seven days, was on hand when American soldiers liberated Puerto Princesa. He was moved to the Fourth Replacement Depot and was interviewed by the 41st Combat Information Center on Mindoro on March 6. The following day, a telegram was sent to his half brother, Henry Blalock, in Texas to report he had been recovered and was being treated. Daniels received a joyful message from Henry on March 22: “Dear Tom, we are so glad to hear that you are in good health. Hope to see you soon.” Daniels received a double promotion from private to corporal, and began his voyage back to the United States on May 14.13
Two divisions of Japanese troops put up stiff resistance in the hills of Palawan, and more than nine hundred were killed. Many of the survivors began to surrender, including Private Tomisaburo Sawa, who had served as a rifleman during the Palawan Massacre. One week after his unit retreated into the mountains, he and a friend were in search of food when they were taken into custody by eight American soldiers. Sawa, who had taken pleasure in beating Americans and slicing them with his bayonet, now faced life as a POW. He was interrogated for a week and then moved to Leyte.14
Mopping-up actions would continue on Palawan for weeks. Coastwatcher Carlos Placido and his five-man unit received orders on April 7 to return to Australia. Before they departed via PT boat on April 19, the Brooke’s Point Filipinos threw a party in their honor. They had communicated Japanese troop and shipping movements, had coordinated the rescue of the submarine Flier survivors, had helped get others off the island (including Palawan escapee Charlie Watkins), and had coordinated the escape of nine Palawan Massacre survivors. “We all hoped that whatever little we accomplished had somehow contributed to the success of the Philippine Campaign,” wrote Placido. “We had tried our best with what equipment [was] furnished us.”15
Triny Mendoza struggled emotionally and physically during the liberation of Palawan. She had lost more than her husband. During the war that raged on the island, the Japanese had taken most of her prized possessions, including baby books, photos, and diaries that her husband had been compiling for twenty-seven years. She found that her banana plantation had been leveled to make a landing field. She, her mother, sister, and brother had to fight for enough space just to set up family tents on their own property. Ten months after the American landings on Palawan, the Mendoza family was without a home and without income, and Triny’s house had become a makeshift high school for Filipino students.
Following the U.S. landings, a search of the POW enclosure was made between March 15 and 23, 1945. Soldiers recovered fragmentary records concerning U.S. military personnel, and the remains of seventy-nine POW victims were exhumed in the camp area. The body of another American POW, likely Don Martyn, was recovered from the grounds of the Iwahig Penal Colony.
Twenty-six skeletons were piled four and five high in one excavation in the Puerto Princesa compound, their skulls each showing bullet holes, or having been crushed by some blunt instrument. The soldiers found nine total dugouts, two of which were interconnected and ran alongside the bluff. Inside the smallest was a bench built along one of its sides, where searchers found several personal items, including the papers of Captain Fred Bruni. In the larger dugouts, most bodies were found huddled together far from the entrance.
The soldiers unearthed various personal items, such as identification tags, canteens etched with their owners’ names, and various ration cans belonging to American POWs. Among the Japanese personal effects recovered was a diary belonging to an officer of the 131st Airfield Battalion. The entry for December 15, the day after the massacre, read as follows: “Although they were prisoners of war, they truly died a pitiful death. The prisoners of war who worked in the repair shop really worked hard. From today on, I will not hear the familiar greeting, ‘Good morning, Sergeant Major.’”16
General MacArthur announced news of the Palawan Massacre on March 3, 1945, in a special press release that related how American prisoners were doused with gasoline, set afire, then shot and bayoneted as they tried to escape. The scene was described as one of “wholesale slaughter.”17
*
THE JAPANESE NEVER made good on their promise to sink the USS Anderson. The transport ship finally docked in San Francisco on March 22, 1945, two and a half months after the the rescue of the vessel’s six Palawan passengers. The Anderson tied up at Fort Mason, and the escapees were soon transferred by boat to Fort McDowell. Western Union telegrams informed their families they were alive.
One night, the Palawan survivors were treated to a steak dinner in their honor in San Francisco. The group was amused when the band asked for requests. “‘Don’t Fence Me In,’” quipped Ernie Koblos. His comrades chuckled even harder as they ate their meals, which included paper-wrapped baked potatoes. Koblos, who had not seen a baked potato in years, eagerly devoured his, skin and all. Afterward, he complained that he could not stomach the taste and texture of the potato skin. His companions howled with laughter; Koblos had actually eaten paper and all in his haste.
Soon Koblos returned to his native Chicago, where he was checked in to Gardiner General Hospital on April 15 for further treatment. In San Francisco, Nielsen, Petry, Smitty, Pacheco, and Balchus were given freshly tailored uniforms before they were flown to Washington, DC, where they enjoyed first-rate hotel rooms, fancy dinners, and personal sightseeing tours around the capital in a station wagon.18
The five survivors were also introduced to General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, at the Pentagon. He showed them maps of the current war effort, apologized that the Philippines could not have been liberated sooner, and asked them to relate their ordeal. Then General Marshall pinned Bronze Star Medals on the former prisoners of war.
*
BETO PACHECO REACHED El Paso on Friday, April 5, fresh from debriefings in Washington. He was informed that Palawan had been invaded since his recovery and that any talking he did about his escape could be detrimental to the war effort.19
He cared little about talking about his hardships; his heart was being pulled elsewhere. He had spent four years thinking of the lovely Katie Valles, whom he had dated while serving at Fort Bliss before shipping out to the Philippines. In spite of her father’s objections, Beto had promised Katie he would return to her in a year when his tour of duty was completed. Neither could predict his capture and years of captivity in the Pacific.
Pacheco had no idea what had become of Katie, whether she still lived in El Paso, or even if she was still unmarried. Yet he held on to a glimmer of hope. He had two letters from her, both written long before. He hurried to the address where Katie had lived during the two months before he shipped off to the Philippines. His heart sank when a stranger answered the door. Pacheco quickly quizzed the neighbors as to the family’s whereabouts.
Beto and
Katie reunited in 1945.
COURTESY OF KATHY PACHECO MARTINEZ
“Try this one,” they said. “They moved to nine-one-one East Overland.”
Pacheco made his way to the Overland home and anxiously rapped on the door, where another stranger greeted him. He explained who he was and that he was looking for Katie Valles.
“Just a moment,” he was told.
Seconds seemed like years, and then she appeared. Katie, the girl he had fallen in love with in early 1941, was standing before him. Instead of giving him a warm smile, she stared at him in a dazed stupor. “She just looked at me like I was a dead person walking,” he recalled.
Katie’s mind finally processed the unbelievable.
“Alberto!” she shouted with joy. Years of anguish melted away as she clutched him tight.
Katie had wondered if she would ever see Alberto again, having never received a single letter from him. Yet each Wednesday for years she had devoutly offered novenas, special prayers on his behalf, with a feeling in her heart that Beto was still alive. He had no intention of letting her get away. He asked her to be his wife, she accepted, and they were filling out a marriage license application the next morning.
Beto returned home to Deming, New Mexico, to visit his parents and share with them his exciting news. Two weeks later, on April 22, Katie and Alberto Pacheco were married. They honeymooned in Los Angeles while he was still on a ninety-day furlough from the Army. Back pay to the tune of four thousand dollars helped the couple start their new life with some cushion.
Willie Smith spent weeks recovering in hospitals. In between straightening out his military records and collecting back pay, he had a joyous reunion with his family and friends in Hughes Springs, Texas. He was informed he could pick any post he desired to complete his military service, but instead he asked to be discharged from the Marines.
“You can’t do that,” said his commanding officer. “But you can go anywhere in the United States you want to go.”
“Well, if you ain’t going to discharge me, then send me back to the Philippines,” Smitty demanded.
He was told this was also not an option, so he finally settled on the base at Eagle Mountain Lake, just outside of Fort Worth, Texas. He served light duty until being discharged on September 29, 1945, shortly after the war ended. He returned to his rural home, where he would spend three years fighting bouts of malarial fever.20
He started dating Sarah Bess Ross, who had lived with his sister in Texarkana, where the two worked at the Red River Arsenal during the war. Smitty and Bess were married on December 1, 1945. For their honeymoon, the couple went to Gaston, Alabama, where Smitty wanted to visit the family of his friend C. C. “Greasy” Smith. C.C.’s father had contacted Smitty soon after his return, asking for information on his son’s fate. In Gaston, Smitty explained the sad news that C.C. had been cut down with a saber during the early moments of the Palawan Massacre. The two Smith families would remain in contact for many years.
Smitty (left) shares his story of captivity and survival with a reporter in 1945.
COURTESY OF NETA SMITH ALEXANDER
*
THE LAST PUERTO Princesa prsoner to return to America was Second Lieutenant Sid Wright. He was a Marine private when he and five others escaped Camp 10-A in August 1942, but during 1944, he had accepted a commission to serve as an American guerrilla with Colonel Fertig’s forces in the Philippines. After the American invasion of Leyte, Wright was evacuated to Mindanao, where he recovered from double pneumonia before being flown back to San Francisco in July 1945. Wright married Charlotte Motherwell three months later and enjoyed a long career in the U.S. Army before retiring to El Paso.
Most of the Palawan survivors were offered commissions to remain in military service, but few other than Bogue accepted. Willie Balchus was content to move on with life. He returned to live in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, married Helen M. Wisniewski, and talked little about his Palawan years. Mo Deal returned to California and was married to Alta June Hammons, a hometown friend he had known before the war. Alta was working as a soda jerk when he returned, and she broke her engagement with another man when she learned that Mo had survived the war. Deal retired from the Army as a sergeant on April 8, 1946, having been awarded two Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart, among other service medals.
Ed Petry, who had dropped to seventy-two pounds before his rescue, quickly put on weight after his return to California, where he married a widow named Priscilla Jane Spurgeon Linder, who had three older children and one young son. Gene Nielsen went home to South Logan, Utah, and met his future wife, Gwynne Allen, the day he returned. The couple was married in the Logan LDS Temple on March 7, 1946, and would begin raising a family of four children.
Pop Daniels retired as a maintenance sergeant from the 1040th Army Air Force Base Unit on February 28, 1947, and returned to Texas. Years later, evidently reflecting on how Mac McDole had helped him make it out of the Shelter C escape tunnel during the Palawan Massacre, Daniels mailed a postcard to his fellow survivor. The message was brief: “Thanks for the shove. Pop.”
Mac McDole was released from active duty with the Marine Corps on November 25, 1945, two months after the formal Japanese surrender. He joined the Reserves and settled in Urbandale to begin taking classes at the American Institute of Business. Thoughts of Palawan never left him. It was not long before he contacted a fellow survivor, Walt Ditto, who lived in Des Moines. Ditto and Bob May had been badly beaten for planning an escape from Palawan, and the two had been returned to Manila after surviving the lengthiest torture ever handed out at their camp.21
McDole and Ditto grew close. They were out for beers one night when one of Ditto’s neighbors asked if he and his sister could catch a ride back home with the two. Ditto was happy to offer a ride to Johnny Moody and his eighteen-year-old sister, Betty. McDole thought Betty was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and they soon began dating. They were married on August 10, 1946, in a simple ceremony in Adel, Iowa. The next major event of Mac’s postwar life came a year later when his childhood dream of becoming an Iowa Highway Safety Patrol officer was realized; he was accepted and began training. He was first stationed at Creston, where he was working when he received a letter from the War Crimes Branch in Washington.
Asked if he could be available to testify at the Palawan war crimes trial to be held in Japan, he received permission to take a leave of absence. The next few months would be a new challenge for McDole, but it would offer him and many others a chance to gain some resolution to the Palawan Massacre.
21
TRIALS AND TRIBUTES
THE FIRST JAPANESE soldier arrested for his part in the Palawan Massacre was Kiyomasa Okamoto. Tracked down at his home in Japan by U.S. investigators, he was brought in for interrogation on June 11, 1947, and was questioned for eight hours before being released.
He would never live to see a tribunal.
Okamoto had served in the 3rd Platoon of Lieutenant Sho Yoshiwara’s 131st Airfield Battalion company, the unit that carried out the murders of scores of Puerto Princesa prisoners. After his lengthy interview about the events of December 14, 1944, Okamoto wrote out a polite note later found on his body, thanking his interrogators for their kind treatment and adding, “I was not able to give a truthful answer. Please pity my faintheartedness.” That evening, Okamoto committed suicide by jumping in front of a moving train.1
Soon after World War II had ended, America and its Allies convened the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. Military investigators spent more than two years tracking down and interviewing former American prisoners of war. Their affidavits would be key evidence in future war crimes trials for Japanese defendants accused of abusing and murdering thousands of POWs held in the Philippines and Japanese mainland camps.
Yet the effort to round up the Japanese who had participated in the Palawan Massacre proved to be difficult. Some of the murderers had been killed in action when American forces seized the island in early
March 1945. Many of the survivors were never located, as countless Japanese records were destroyed or burned when American troops swept into Japan to free the prisoner of war camps.
Okamoto’s eight hours of testimony led to the apprehension of a second Palawan Massacre participant, Private First Class Shoniro Nagano of the Yoshiwara Tai. Nagano claimed to have been assigned to other duties away from the Puerto Princesa compound on the day of the mass killings. Others subsequently rounded up and questioned about their role would make the same claim. But a third suspect, Tomisaburo Sawa, taken into custody on June 30, 1947, admitted to his part in the massacre. Two and a half years after the ghastly murders, war crimes investigators finally had good information with which to bring the perpetrators to justice.2
The Japanese government claimed that only two members of the 131st Airfield Battalion had been repatriated in 1945; all others were missing or killed in action. The U.S. Investigation Division was dogged in its work and soon found evidence that ex-Japanese army officials were interfering with their investigation and were failing to produce all known evidence. Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. Rudisill, the chief investigator, assigned two lieutenants to conduct a thorough search for other battalion survivors.3
They determined that a good number of the 131st Airfield Battalion soldiers had indeed been killed in fighting on Palawan after the Allied landings, and that other Japanese survivors had hidden themselves on Palawan and in the mountains of Borneo after the war. They found that only six known members of the unit had been repatriated to Japan.
They also attempted to track down the senior officers who held command over the Puerto Princesa camp for various lengths of time. Captain Kishimoto, the original commander from August 1942 to March 1943, could not be located. First Lieutenant Kinoshita, who commanded the Palawan compound from March 1943 to July 1944, had been killed in action on Luzon in 1945. Captain Kojima, the commander of Palawan who carried out the massacre, was declared missing by the investigators. Manichi Nishitani, the brutal camp cook, was found living in the Hiroshima area and suffering from illness. Kinhichi Tomioka, “the Bull,” was captured in Manila and held for a time, but he managed to escape.4
As Good As Dead Page 27