Escape From Davao (13 page)

There were several variations of the sulfurous speech, but a gloating summary of Japanese victories was standard. Tsuneyoshi declared that he cared little whether the prisoners, whom he referred to as

“dogs,” lived or died. He recited a long list of regulations—from the necessity of saluting al Japanese to the prohibition of escape attempts—al of which seemed to be punishable by death. His tone, his theatrical delivery, and his message ultimately remained the same.

The interpreter continued: “The captain, he say America and Nippon enemies. Always wil be enemies.

If Nippon do not defeat America this time, Nippon fight again and again until America is defeated. Always wil be war until America is Nippon’s.”

Reaching a crescendo of hysterics, Tsuneyoshi spewed forth such a volume of verbal venom that even the most exhausted prisoner was forced to lift his head and take notice.

“Captain, he say you are not prisoners of war. You are sworn enemies of Japan. Therefore, you wil not be treated like prisoners of honorable war. Captain, he say you wil be treated like captives.” The interpreter, himself worked into a frenzy, spit a final promise: “Captain, he say you wil have trouble from him.”

Satisfied with his performance, Tsuneyoshi clicked his spurred boot heels and stomped off the stage.

Many things could and would be said about the diminutive Japanese despot, but it could not be said that he was not a man of his word.

Although most prisoners would spend less than two months in O’Donnel , the experience would provide a lifetime of horrors. “Words cannot describe the conditions,” Dobervich would later say. “Only the eye could appreciate the seriousness of it al .”

The Japanese would attempt to cram 50,000 prisoners into the half-finished Philippine Army recruit depot original y intended to house 9,000 men, to catastrophic results. Roughly 600 acres, or just under one mile square in total area, with no electricity or sanitation, the enclosure was nothing more than an ever-expanding coop of men. Subject to the temperamental whims of an asthmatic gasoline pump that broke down every few hours and sadistic guards that shut off the water main at irregular intervals, the parched prisoners waited around the clock in meandering lines at two smal spigots to fil their canteens with tepid water. Bathing was possible only when it rained. The prisoners were fed tiny portions of lugao, a pastry rice gruel ful of floor sweepings and weevils that tasted like glue, plus occasional helpings of rotten camotes, mango beans, and other cast-off vegetables. Ravenous men were soon reduced to stealing food, scheming other prisoners for their rations, and scrambling to catch grasshoppers, rats, and stray dogs. Many traded or deferred their rice rations for cigarettes, transactions that the Grim Reaper would ultimately col ect on.

The starvation diet, begun on Bataan and continued into captivity, ushered in a slew of vitamin deficiency diseases. The worst was wet beriberi, a ruthless il ness that shut down a man’s kidneys, causing body tissues to become repulsively engorged with fluids until the bal ooned skin cracked into fissures oozing with yel ow pus and the overtaxed heart failed. Slit trenches overflowing with excrement spawned swarms of green and bluebottle flies, humming airborne agents of contagion that flew from fecal matter to festering sores to rice, spreading a vicious cycle of diarrhea, amoebic dysentery, and death throughout the compound. The entire camp, lacking mosquito nets and blankets, convulsed with the spiking, sweat-drenched fevers and teeth-chattering chil s of malaria. A hospital was set up, but without medicine, doctors were powerless to stop the plagues visited upon the POWs. Hopeless cases were sent to a ghastly vestibule to the hereafter known to the prisoners as “St. Peter’s Ward.”

Not content to let starvation and disease thin the prisoners’ ranks, the Japanese were responsible for additional deaths through abuse, torture, and outright execution. Those barely able to walk were forced into gangs for labor outside the camp. “Many came back and had to be carried to the hospital only to die in a few days,” said Dobervich. The Japanese dispensed brutal beatings for minor infractions and shot or beheaded those deemed guilty of more serious transgressions. They specialized in cruel and unusual punishments. Some prisoners were leashed to stakes like animals and left to die in the blistering heat.

Another pitiless pastime was to place a hose into a victim’s throat or rectum and pump water until the entrails ruptured. One POW who escaped the barbed wire perimeter was immediately apprehended, flogged, and strung up in front of the Japanese headquarters. Amazingly, the delirious man escaped once more, only to be recaptured and whipped into a bloody, unrecognizable heap of shredded skin. “We never saw him again,” said Ed Dyess, “but we know he didn’t escape.” The message was delivered with terrifying, unmistakable clarity: there was only one way to truly escape O’Donnel .

It was not long before the corpses began to appear everywhere. Stripped of their tattered uniforms—to be recycled for use by needy prisoners—the naked, emaciated bodies were informal y stacked like cordwood. Sometimes, they blackened and bloated in the sun for days until men strong enough to dig graves could be found.

The burial details were hard, morbid, mind-numbing work. On average, it took four men to carry one corpse; more were required to haul the distended bodies of those who died of wet beriberi, which often weighed in excess of 300 pounds and were liable to burst if mishandled. Guided by guards, they trudged outside the wire and ascended a rise to a crude cemetery—“Boot Hil ,” some cal ed it—carrying the corpses by their bony arms and legs or else in litters, to the yawning mouths of mass graves. “Then you would take the dog tag, if they had one, and put it in their mouth for burial and cover them up,” said Motts Tonel i. There was no ceremony, no prayers, just corpse after corpse, sometimes twenty or thirty, little more than bones and skul s, the remnants of men who had fought for a common cause thrown together in a common pit.

As the deaths continued, the work became increasingly more macabre. Tales of men being buried alive were commonplace, including one told to Dobervich by a fel ow Marine. “Before the covering process started one of the dead bodies began to move and there was a feeble effort to raise its head. The Jap guard ordered this Marine of mine to strike the head with a shovel,” wrote Dobervich. “He hesitated and that angered the guard so that the bayonet was thrust at him, so he was forced to obey.”

Because of the high water table, which fil ed the pits with seepage, floating corpses often had to be pinned with bamboo poles while weak men tossed weighty shovelfuls of dirt. Dogs and buzzards gnawed on the arms and legs, stiffened with rigor mortis and silhouetted in the milky moonlight, that poked through the thin blanket of dirt. Worse yet, the arrival of the rainy season in May caused corpses to rise from their shal ow graves and float back to the camp in canals of blood-tinged water.

The whole affair looked to be part of some sinister plan; the prisoners had watched, dejectedly, as Red Cross trucks carrying food and medical supplies were turned away at the gates. The death rate would peak at fifty corpses every twenty-four hours; nearly 2,000 of the 9,000 Americans that had crossed O’Donnel ’s infernal threshold in April would be dead by June. Segregated in another compound, the Filipinos fared worse. Endless, dawn-to-dusk funeral processions would ultimately bury 20,000 men, or half of the Filipino contingent. “Many Nippon die Bataan,” the guards told prisoners, “we let just as many prisoner die here.”

Starving, surrounded and stalked by death, the prisoners congregated in forlorn clusters, suffering through their surreal existence in a somnolent, hunger-induced daze. Men became so lethargic and pulse rates dropped so precipitously that it was hard to tel who was dead and who was merely asleep.

Inanition, the word scrawled on so many makeshift death certificates, was the biggest kil er. Many despondent prisoners, unable to stomach the nauseating rice ration or endure the omnipresent stench of pestilence and human waste any longer, simply gave up the wil to live. “A person had to keep his hope and courage up,” said Dobervich, “for to lose hope was a way of signing your own death warrant.”

Dobervich spoke from experience; if not for his attitude and some quinine given to him by some Czechoslovakian civilian prisoners, the former boxer would not have survived a brutal bout with malaria.

The Japanese had mostly forbade religious services. Many men recal ed long-dormant faiths and personal prayer. Older men with families endured in the hope of seeing loved ones again. Others, like Tonel i, engaged in symbols and ritual. Once finished with his grisly burial labors, Tonel i would dig up his Notre Dame class ring, which he buried in a metal soap dish beneath his barracks to confound would-be thieves. After having been stolen by a guard during the march, it had been miraculously returned by an English-speaking Japanese officer who had been educated at the University of Southern California and had seen Tonel i score the winning touchdown in the 1937 game between the two schools. The ring momentarily transported Tonel i far from O’Donnel , to a stadium ful of cheering people, reminding him of better days. Complementing his strong Catholic faith, the ring became an existential talisman. Perhaps never would the school’s Latin motto—
Vita Dulcedo Spes
, “Our Life, Our Sweetness, Our Hope”—which was inscribed on the ring, mean so much to one alumnus.

Each night, as the searchlights swept the dark compound and the mournful, tinny clinking of the canteens of men waiting in the water lines sounded through the rows of shabby barracks, many struggled to find something similarly worthwhile to hold on to. And for an explanation. “We used to lay in the bunks and guys would say, ‘God, why are You doing this? I never did anything wrong.’ These young guys would be praying to God
out loud
,” said Tonel i.

Many prisoners, likewise whirling in emotional and spiritual vertigo, had other troubling questions.

“Where was America?” asked Capt. Bert Bank. “America’s abandoning us. We live in the greatest country in the world and here we are, prisoners of the Japanese.” The myth of American invincibility had been shattered. Bataan “was one time,” commented one American officer, “that the cavalry didn’t come over the hil to the rescue.”

As the reality of the surrender sank in, the prisoners’ morale plummeted. Fear and doubt permeated the camp. Tsuneyoshi had boasted to Sam Grashio’s group that Japanese forces had bombed California and even Chicago. Though skeptical, their spirits were so low that they half-believed the bombast. “We had heard no war news for so many days so we feared that the whole tale might be true,” said Grashio.

It had once been inconceivable to think that in this epic conflict of contrasting cultures Japan could ever, even temporarily, hold the upper hand. But now it did. The taunts of English-speaking guards communicated that notion. “The Japs kept asking us where the wonderful American Army and Navy were and where was the Air Corps about which we boasted so much,” wrote Bank. Numbed by the trauma of their defeat, the prisoners had no reply.

Bert Bank’s enlistment in the Army ROTC battalion at the University of Alabama in the mid-1930s, he would claim, was attributable to friends who thought he looked good in uniform. But it was no secret that Bank, intensely patriotic, possessed a deep love of country. He also needed a way to pay for col ege.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bank

grew up in the coalfields of Tuscaloosa County near the mining town of Searles. Jovial and dynamic, he possessed the makings of a successful lawyer—a friendly face with a permanent smile, a politician’s handshake, and the chatty charisma of a Southern raconteur from the pages of Twain or Faulkner. But after enrol ing in law school, Bank was cal ed up to the AAF’s 27th Light Bombardment Group and assigned to Savannah, Georgia, where he dril ed by day and romanced his share of Georgia bel es—including Miss Georgia, 1939—by night.

Just as he would never work a courtroom, Bank would never sit in a cockpit. The ship carrying the unit’s A-24 dive bombers was rerouted to Australia, and Bank, forced to join the ranks of planeless pilots, received a rifle and infantry training. The twenty-seven-year-old’s most valuable contribution to the war effort was his contagious sense of humor. While bathing in a jungle stream, he amused his comrades by posing for a photograph wearing nothing but a palm frond. Nothing bothered the affable Alabaman. Not the lack of food—Bank’s nickname was “Garbage Mouth” because he ate everything—nor the wound he received from a strafing Japanese plane. Every war cloud over Bataan had a silver lining. “If this damn war keeps going on,” he told his comrades after a promotion, “I am going to be a general pretty soon.”

Al Bank had now was his sense of humor and his fel ow prisoners. Thankful y, making friends had always been easy. He had had no shortage of friends in col ege, including one notable classmate, a gangly footbal player named Paul Bryant who would become the celebrated coach of the Crimson Tide.

Bank had befriended Ed Dyess on the third day of the march, when both had attempted to drink from an artesian wel and were almost kil ed for their temerity. Dyess and Bank navigated the remainder of the march together, during which time Bank procured a piece of sugarcane that Dyess later credited as having energized him to finish the ordeal. They would continue their friendship in captivity.