Escape From Davao (15 page)

“Where do you think they wil send us, Shof?” asked Hawkins.

“Don’t know,” replied Shofner, “but I hope I never see this rock again. Maybe they wil put us in some decent camp somewhere now, like Fort McKinley.”

“You expect more than I do, if you expect anything decent from these Japs.”

Hawkins was hardly surprised when he and Shofner were shoved into one of the overcrowded holds of the
Hoku Maru
later in the afternoon. As if the superheated congestion belowdecks—each of the 7,000-ton ships was packed with more than 3,500 men—was not bad enough, the vessel had been used to transport horses, as evidenced by the piles of manure on deck. “This was in keeping with the general Japanese attitude toward American prisoners,” noted Hawkins. “They persisted in treating us like animals.” The real humiliation, Hawkins and Shofner would soon learn, was stil to come.

SUNDAY, MAY 24, 1942

Manila, Luzon

A modern-day Jonah trapped inside the steamy, steel bowels of a freighter, Steve Mel nik had been both figuratively and literal y in the dark for hours. The only clues to his whereabouts had been the sounds: an anchor chain winding around a capstan; the steady, laborious pulsing of the ship’s engines. And then, in mid-morning, the propel ers suddenly stopped churning.

Crewmen entered the hold and funneled the POWs toward the lower deck entranceway where a gangplank reached to a refuse barge. Mel nik, squinting at the sun rays glittering off the water, recognized the far-off silhouette of the Manila Polo Club. Strangely, instead of tying up in the dock area, the ship had laid anchor about a mile offshore.

To Melvyn McCoy , the Japanese plan became obvious when the barges stopped short of the beach and the prisoners were ordered into the chest-high water. “The Japanese wanted to be sure we made the march through Manila in wet clothes and with wet equipment,” explained McCoy. Accordingly, the Americans floundered ashore, holding their musette bags and bedrol s above their heads. They were prodded onto Dewey Boulevard and commenced marching through the debris-strewn streets to Bilibid Prison, the high-wal ed penitentiary that would serve as a way station to another place of incarceration.

Jack Hawkins, ever inquisitive, turned to Shofner, sloshing alongside him.

“Shof, I wonder if we wil ever find old Mike again. Do you think he is stil alive?”

“I’l bet he is alive somewhere,” answered Shofner, who was usual y as optimistic as he was opinionated. “They couldn’t get the ‘little beaver’ down.”

The march soon proved a major Japanese miscalculation. The Filipinos lining the streets—the Japanese had ordered al Manilans to watch the spectacle—were appal ed by the condition of the prisoners. “Many of them were openly crying and sometimes they would furtively give us the ‘V for Victory’ sign,” recal ed Hawkins. “They tried to give us water and bits of food as we passed, at the risk of being clubbed by a Jap rifle butt.”

Nonplussed, the Japanese endeavored to end the movement quickly. Troops on horseback harried the prisoners with their mounts while foot soldiers motivated malingerers with bayonets. The column, which coiled for nearly a mile around buildings and down rubble-strewn streets, crossed over Quezon Bridge to Azcarraga Street, the prisoners supporting and carrying one another to keep the pace. Several were roughed up, but there would be no executions or outright atrocities on this march; perhaps the presence of several thousand civilian onlookers restrained the Japanese from exhibiting the bloodthirsty behavior they had shown on Bataan.

One spectator in particular wanted to do more than provide food, water and support. But for now, this man—one of their own, yet a captive of another sort—was taking notes.

In so many ways, it was excruciatingly difficult for Charles “Chick” Parsons to stand there helplessly and watch as the parade of prisoners passed by his home at 1925 Cal e Roberts in Pasay. As a man, it was painful to watch his mother-in-law and wife try to come to the aid of the POWs with a glass
garapon
fil ed with water, only to be driven off by Japanese bayonets. Parsons could not make an attempt, not for any lack of guts—before war’s end, MacArthur would cal Parsons “the bravest man I know.” At this moment, he could not risk being recognized. His heart pounded inside his barrel chest—which was covered with a tattoo of an eagle and a battleship surrounded by American flags—at the sight of his countrymen being so humiliated. After al , he should have been marching with them.

Official y, Parsons was not a civilian. Robust and handsome, the forty-two-year-old businessman was also a Navy Reserve officer who had been cal ed to active duty in December. The chaos of the Christmas retreat had trapped Parsons in Manila, forcing him to burn his uniforms and devise a contingency plan. But it did not take him, a man who would develop a reputation for thinking on his feet, long to do so. And it was perhaps no coincidence that Parsons, an amateur magician who possessed an uncanny skil for card tricks and other sleight-of-hand maneuvers, would attempt to solve his problem with an il usion.

Parsons’s partner in the Luzon Stevedoring Company, away at the start of the war, had been named the honorary Panamanian ambassador to the Philippines due to the fact that their company handled a significant amount of shipping under that country’s registry. So, in his partner’s absence, the engaging entrepreneur ceased being Lt. Charles Parsons, and assumed, not entirely fraudulently, the identity of the
consul de Panama
, a neutral nation. (It was a common practice in the prewar era for smal nations with limited resources to enlist the heads of companies as envoys to represent their diplomatic interests in distant countries.)

With his jet black hair and bronzed skin, the result of his two decades in the islands, Parsons looked the part of a South American diplomat. He embel ished the ruse by unfurling a Panamanian flag outside his house and speaking only Spanish. It was the only choice. Other American civilians and their families were carted off to the internment camp at Santo Tomas University on Cal e España; a repatriation of diplomats was likely his only chance to escape the Philippines, save his family, and rejoin the war. But Parsons did not intend merely to survive.

Parsons used the freedom afforded by his counterfeit diplomatic privileges and his extensive array of contacts to cast a wide-ranging intel igence net. It started with cocktail parties with neutral friends and expanded to clandestine conversations and conferences with priests and business associates. Soon, peddlers stopped at his back door, ostensibly to sel their wares, but instead to perform a transaction of information. He reportedly even ventured outside the city, canvassing outlying areas in disguise to gain more information.

With the help of his wife, Katrushka, cal ed Katsy, Parsons began to col ate his gathered information: issues of the Japanese-run
Manila Tribune
; the estimated size and disposition of enemy military units in the islands; the prices of foodstuffs; the mood of the people; the sight of Filipinos he had seen strung up in trees near Rizal Stadium; the stories he had heard of government officials, civilian nationals, and regular Filipino citizens being rounded up by the dreaded Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, and never seen again; the names and numbers of individuals, as wel as conditions, inside the various internment and POW camps. The murmurings of the Death March and other atrocities committed against American military personnel were of particular interest. “Eyewitnesses, with whom I talked later, shuddered when recal ing the sight of the prisoners of war on their trek from Bataan,” he would write.

The deception worked—for a time. In late April, he was arrested and taken to Fort Santiago, the old Spanish citadel in Intramuros, which the Kempeitai had transformed into a dank dungeon where enemies of the emperor could be interrogated, tortured, and, if necessary, executed. Parsons endured whatever the Japanese could dish out, but the threat of death was never relaxed. One day during his confinement, several Chinese consular officials were led away and beheaded. “Look out,” sneered a Kempeitai officer, “the same may happen to you.” Through it al , Parsons did not talk. After several agony-fil ed days, he was released to the commonwealth prison at Muntinlupa and later, to Santo Tomas.

Parsons had been temporarily furloughed in order to recuperate from his ordeal at Fort Santiago—he was inordinately pale and his wife noticed that the fingernails on his right hand were just beginning to grow back—and was present at his home the day the Japanese paraded the American POWs through Manila.

Luckily for the dehydrated prisoners lying in Parsons’s front yard, the third attempt by the Parsons family to

come to their aid proved the charm. Six-year-old Peter, the middle of Parsons’s three young sons, successful y reached the POWs with a water jug

with the assistance of the Japanese soldier-sentries who had been assigned to guard the compound of the suspicious Panamanian consul on Manila Bay.

Staying inconspicously in the background, Chick Parsons was cataloguing the scene, adding it to the other intel igence items he had painstakingly gathered over the past few months. But before he could share that information, before he could become one of the most important yet little known espionage legends of the Pacific war, and before he could aid his captive countrymen, he first somehow had to engineer his own escape from the occupied Philippines. It would require his greatest trick yet—a disappearing act for the ages.

We saw an open grave, waiting for him.

We watched him from our fence, in silent throng

Each with the fervent prayer, “God make him strong.”

Tuesday, June 2–Thursday, June 4, 1942

Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

Steve Mel nik thought that he had seen the worst of it during his two weeks in the 92nd Garage Area. That optimism disappeared when the trucks carrying the survivors of Camp O’Donnel growled into Cabanatuan.

The Americans climbing and tumbling from the trucks—the Japanese, alarmed by the staggering death rate of the Filipinos, had issued a mass pardon and sent them home to die—presented a pitiful spectacle.

They were little more than sunburnt scarecrows with scraggly beards, sunken faces, and chopstick arms and legs. “An icy shiver of fear went through me,” recal ed Mel nik. He identified a former enlisted orderly who tottered up and feebly grasped his shoulders. “Sir,” he asked, “is it different here—wil they treat us like humans?”

Jack Hawkins, unable to find Mike Dobervich in the wobbly mob, launched an exhaustive search the next morning. Invariably, his queries met with the same laconic reply: “Never heard of him.” Final y, a corporal from the 31st Infantry referred Hawkins to the hospital, where he believed Dobervich was fighting “the bad sick,” or malaria. After waiting for the gate sentry to turn his back, Hawkins slid beneath the barbed wire fence and skulked across the road separating the main compound from the hospital. In a dysentery ward, he scanned the sorrowful faces of the living skeletons lying on the excrement-covered floor.
“My God,”
he whispered to himself,
“I hope Mike is not here.”
He wasn’t. Nor was Dobervich found elsewhere. Renegotiating the wire at sunset, Hawkins raced to his barracks and, out of breath, fel into line for
tenko
, the Japanese word for rol cal . That night, Hawkins resigned himself to the fact that his best friend was, in al likelihood, dead.

Morning found Hawkins on the ground outside his barracks, absorbed in his miserable breakfast of watery lugao. He did not even look up when a pair of army shoes stepped directly into his line of vision, engulfing him in a sizeable shadow. “Give me some of that,” demanded a voice. It was a voice Hawkins had never expected to hear again.

He was severely underweight, but it was no ghost—standing in front of Hawkins was Mike Dobervich, bare-chested and wearing a broad-brimmed straw sombrero. Hawkins was flabbergasted, but it was, after al , mealtime. Springing to his feet, he embraced Dobervich with a flurry of questions. Dobervich, producing a coconut, nodded. It was his turn to share some food.

“It’s a long story,” said Dobervich.

Dobervich provided a ful account of his ordeal. He told of driving the truck out of Bataan and the terror he had witnessed through the dusty windshield; Captain Tsuneyoshi’s welcome speech; the burial details.

“I did not interrupt him often as he spoke,” said Hawkins. “But sat in rapt attention, picturing in my mind the horror he was describing.”

“That two months in O’Donnel was the worst nightmare I ever went through,” continued a shaken Dobervich, pausing to throw pieces of the coconut shel at a rock. “The men were dying off like flies.”

“That’s the most awful thing I ever heard of in al my life,” responded Hawkins. “What do you suppose the people back home wil think when they hear about it?”

“Oh, they won’t believe it. The American people never believe anything terrible. They wil probably stop up their ears and say, ‘Oh, this is too terrible. It must be propaganda.’”

“I wish every American could have a chance to see what we’ve seen, and then they could realize they’ve got to be tough in dealing with these Japs. They’re not human beings.”

“Mike, the American people have got to completely crush Japan—destroy their cities, beat their Armies, sink their Navy, and put doughboys into what used to be Tokyo.”

Dobervich’s appal ing tale had awakened them to two complementary truths: that America must somehow learn of the prisoners’ plight and, once sufficiently roused, strive for total victory. Just who would be responsible for that revelation, though, was beyond their ken. At Cabanatuan, more basic concerns, like surviving to see the next sunrise, would require their attention.