Escape From Davao (17 page)

Since Cabanatuan was almost hermetical y sealed off from the outside world, they had no way of separating fact from fiction. Most of the rumors had come from the guards or from hurried conversations with Filipinos during a work detail. Some, no doubt, had been invented by wel -meaning men who simply wanted to boost camp morale. There was, in fact, a secret homemade radio that picked up station KGEI in San Francisco, but possession of a radio was so risky that its existence, as wel as the news it supplied, was not widely known. The Marines, however, were treated to their own nightly “broadcasts”

courtesy of Lt. Leon Chabot. Though Chabot’s broadcasts usual y possessed more style than certifiable substance, the 4th Marines’ very own Walter Winchel (Chabot often waited at the gates to speak with truck drivers returning from Manila) occasional y landed a scoop. “Wel , gentlemen, this is the latest from Manila,” Chabot declared one memorable summer night before humming his own sound effects, a few bars of “The Marine Hymn.” “The United States Marines have landed on Guadalcanal!” The skeptics in his audience shrugged off the news, but Chabot was vindicated a few weeks later when they read between the lines of an article in the
Manila Tribune
, a pro-Japanese propaganda organ, that claimed the Japanese were mopping up remnants of the U.S. Marine Corps at a place cal ed Guadalcanal.

It was heartening to know that their countrymen were fighting somewhere, but after learning that Guadalcanal was nearly 3,000 nautical miles from the Philippines, “we could judge that the United States truly was making little or no progress in the Pacific war,” said Hawkins. As the rains muddied the weeks into months, new ral ying cries revealed their sagging spirits: “ ’45 if you’re stil alive”; “ ’47 if you’re not in heaven.” For the canteen half-empty crowd, “the Golden Gate in ’48” seemed more accurate.

One sure sign of the war’s progress was the arrival of the Iwanaka Educational Unit on August 14.

Named for the unit’s commanding officer, Maj. Yasuaki Iwanaka, the unit’s mission was to train 600

Formosan conscripts for guard duty, a significant development in that it betrayed the fact that Japanese combat troops were needed elsewhere.

The Americans observed the recruits dril ing in the adjacent compound. “Al day long they would march up and down, goose-stepping, and practicing with the bayonet, to the accompaniment of their weird marching chants, which they howled at the tops of their voices,” recal ed Dyess. Unaware that these browbeaten recruits were being trained as their overseers, the prisoners found the exercises humorous.

“The bayonet practice put us in stitches,” added Dyess, “those of us who were strong enough to laugh, that is.” These laughs were much needed morale boosters, but at Cabanatuan it was the Japanese who most often enjoyed themselves at the Americans’ expense.

Guarding prisoners was not honorable or coveted duty. The assignment usual y fel to the dregs of the Imperial Army, xenophobic alcoholics, sadists, and mental y unstable soldiers—and now, colonial conscripts considered social inferiors—deemed unfit for combat. Consumed with venomous hatred, they rejoiced in reminding the prisoners of their pitiful station. Dyess could not forget the “futile rage” the prisoners felt upon seeing an American flag used as a rag or mop in the Japanese kitchen.

The guards beat the prisoners at the slightest provocation—for failing to salute, for presenting a poor appearance at inspections, and sometimes just on a whim. One POW was ordered to masturbate by a guard. When he refused, remembered Sam Grashio, he was beaten “so mercilessly he went mad and died two or three days later.” On one occasion, Bert Bank and several others were lined up face-to-face and ordered to slap each other. “[The guards] were mean, real y mean,” said Motts Tonel i. “Another thing they’d do is come up behind you and slap your ears, you know, and you’d get dizzy. They’d step on your feet; we didn’t have shoes.” One guard, described by Dyess as “a stocky, evil caricature on the human race,” gained infamy for brutalizing prisoners on a building-moving detail. As laborers slid poles under a nipa structure and struggled to raise it to their shoulders, the guard ran alongside, screaming maniacal y and beating them with the shaft of a golf club. Fighting back or resistance of any kind meant certain death, so the prisoners had no choice but to absorb both the blows and the humiliation.

For the Americans watching through the barbed wire, one of the new arrivals stood out, a veritable Japanese giant with a muscular, six-foot, 190-pound frame. Handsome and immaculately attired in clean, sharply creased uniforms and shiny leather boots, this towering officer was a noticeable contrast to the sloppy guards whose fatigues, observed Grashio, “usual y looked slept in.” “He looked more like an Occidental than an Oriental,” commented another prisoner. His adamantine luster, noble presentation, and tyrannical parade ground demeanor suggested that impressions were important to 1st Lt. Yoshimasa Hozumi. It would take but a few weeks for him to make an indelible impression on the prisoners.

After a guard had been kil ed, presumably by local guerril as, Hozumi led a punitive expedition to a nearby barrio. The prisoners heard the echo of gunfire and saw plumes of smoke laze across the sky.

The detail returned later that day, several hundred soldiers singing and shouting while triumphantly parading through the gates in a display, according to one witness, reminiscent of a “col ege snake dance after a footbal victory.” One could cal it a victory: the barrio had been razed and fifty of its inhabitants, including women and children, were rumored to have been kil ed. Hozumi rode at the head of the riotous procession on horseback, fol owed by two soldiers who carried aloft a severed Filipino head, which, according to the same startled witness, “stared wildly in transfixed and sightless terror as its murky juices oozed down the pike on which it was impaled.” The grisly trophy was transferred to a fence post near the gate and a sign affixed, an inscription in English and Japanese, which read, “A Very Bad Man.”

As if the wanton cruelty of their captors was not enough, the men were also forced to deal, in the operative sense of the word, with the greed of their own countrymen. Even as prisoners were dying by the dozens on a daily basis, there were some Americans trying to turn a profit in the camp’s burgeoning black market. It was a strange partnership, yet a highly lucrative one. The Japanese bought canned goods, cigarettes, and candy bars from Filipinos and then distributed the items to the Americans to peddle around the camp. The exorbitant prices—a can of corned beef purchased for 80 centavos, or 40

cents, for example, sold for 10 pesos, or

5 U.S. dol ars—separated many prisoners from what little money they had. A few frugal, future-minded individuals held on to their money. Hawkins remained relatively affluent because of his foresight to sew $200 in cash, along with his Annapolis ring and his watch, into the seams of his uniform. Dyess secreted his cash between his toes. “While it rubbed blisters and sometimes made walking painful, I held on to it,”

he said. The alternative—poverty—was potential y much more painful.

Nearly everything in the prison camp had its price. Just about the only thing that no amount of cash, rank, or influence could purchase, however, was freedom. Some would pay the ultimate price making that discovery.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27–FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1942

Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

Though the entertainment value was admittedly low, Steve Mel nik was curious to learn the reason for the cancel ation of the evening’s prisoner production. “Our three escapees are back,” a passing prisoner informed him. “The Japanese are making them put on a show.”

The three escapees were Naval Reserve ensigns who had fled from Cabanatuan before the five-strand barbed wire fences and four-story guard towers had sprouted from the abandoned paddies. After more than three months on the lam, the fugitives had turned themselves in, for reasons no one yet knew.

“We did not know what turn this ‘show’ would take, and we looked forward to it with foreboding,” said Mel nik.

A hush fel over the audience as an odd procession mounted the outdoor stage later that afternoon.

Leading the way was the camp commandant, Lt. Col. Shigeji Mori, fol owed by bodyguards and an interpreter. To some, Mori was faintly recognizable; he had reportedly owned a bicycle shop in Manila before the war. Next came the escapees, their hands bound behind their backs. Another failed escapee, a prisoner of Hispanic or Native American descent who had attempted to pass himself off as a Filipino, was led to the stage with a rope. “He had been kept in solitary confinement for months now and he was always led like a dog on a leash when he made his infrequent walks from his cage,” said Hawkins. The

“show” commenced with Lt. Col. Mori’s words, fol owed by those of his interpreter.

“Colonel Mori, he say, escape is a crime,” crooned the interpreter, accenting the word “crime” with an excited inflection. “Colonel Mori, he say, Japanese are kind to you. Japanese give you food and mediseen. When war over, we friends.”

A low grumble rippled the audience, but the “show”—and the

interpreter—went on.

“Colonel Mori, he say, you not escape. Japanese keep you good, after war send you back to wife.

Colonel Mori, he say, if you escape, you wil die. Then wife have many tears. Colonel Mori, he say, escape is a crime.”

Final y, the three ensigns were summoned to the dais. They spoke, each in turn, of their failed attempt to survive in the wilds, of being beset by starvation, sickness, and poisonous snakes and of the hostility of the Filipino populace. They concluded that they were blessed to be back inside the camp where they could receive the “benevolent kindness of the Japanese.”

“We were both amused and disgusted at their speeches,” said Hawkins. From the cuts and bruises exhibited by the prisoners, it was obvious that the statements had been composed under duress. But the men in the audience also saw that the escapees were otherwise in good physical shape.

“That gives me a laugh,” said Dobervich as the Marines walked back to their barracks. “Starvation outside! Why those boys are as fat as pigs.”

The true story, the prisoners discovered, was that the escapees had lived comfortably as free men, and had turned themselves in only to prevent the executions of their benefactor, a
teniente del barrio
, or Filipino mayor, and his family. “Colonel Mori understood little of American psychology or he would never have staged the show,” said Hawkins.

Escape may not have been the most discussed topic in prison camp (food was), but it was the most contemplated and controversial of subjects. Some prisoners, mostly officers, held a vague belief that escape was their sworn duty. For most, the desire to escape was a simple matter of self-preservation, even in light of the infamous Japanese directive that surfaced as a result of the flight of the Navy ensigns. The edict, dated July 10, 1942, grouped the prisoners in “shooting squads” of ten men. It threatened that if any one prisoner escaped or attempted escape, the remaining nine men were liable to be executed. To the Americans, this was a clear violation of Article 51 of the Geneva Convention, which stated that, “after an attempted or accomplished escape, the comrades of the person escaping, who assisted the escape, may incur only disciplinary punishment on this account.” But to the Japanese, it was a method of deterrence that ingeniously joined the Americans’ burden of conscience with Japanese partiality to mass punishment.

Nevertheless, there were escapes. And after each incident, the prisoners waited with trepidation.

Eighteen men from the shooting squads of two hospital patients were col ected for execution, but the delirious, terminal y il patients had merely wandered off and were found nearby, dead. After a prisoner escaped from a work detail, the Japanese decided to execute five prisoners, picked at random from a group of 100 men, in retaliation. One soldier, recounting the incident for Dobervich, told how he watched, powerlessly, while his brother was selected. Then there was the case of the five American black marketeers who had temporarily escaped and were caught sneaking back in with sacks of canned goods. The members of their shooting squads were pardoned, but the five were punished for their recklessness with a firing squad.

The inconsistency with which the Japanese dealt with these incidents was maddening, but with escape no longer an individual risk, the American camp administration was forced to take preventive measures.

Escape attempts were expressly forbidden and to enforce the ban, POWs were assigned to patrol the inner perimeter. It was a divisive decision.

Rain-laced winds rifled the camp on the impenetrably dark night of September 30. It was so dark that one of the perimeter guards, Motts Tonel i, could not see the three men crawling through the drainage ditch that bisected the camp’s inner and outer fences. It was a perverse quirk of fate that one of the men passed directly beneath Tonel i as he stood, yawning, at the lip of the trench answering nature’s cal .

What happened next was a blur.

Cursing loudly, the angry man leapt out of the shadows and lunged for Tonel i. Stunned, Tonel i screamed for help. Shots fired by a tower sentry ripped through the mist as prisoners rushed from a nearby barracks to help the American guards subdue Tonel i’s attackers, Army Lt. Cols. Lloyd Biggs and Howard Breitung and Navy Lt. Roy Gilbert. The scuffle was short-lived, but Biggs hotly denounced the perimeter guards, saying that it was the duty of the Americans to assist him in his escape, not stop him.