Escape From Davao (18 page)

Biggs refused to calm down, even as a searchlight il uminated the mob for the squad of Japanese guards arriving on the scene.

Remanded to the American headquarters, Biggs continued to rail against the American administration and the perimeter guards. Tonel i denied the accusation that there had been a deliberate attempt to prevent his escape. The noncom was not a member of the officers’ shooting squad and had no stake in the group’s escape. At any rate, Biggs had used the word “escape” so often in his recriminations that the eavesdropping Japanese stepped in. At 2300 hours, he was marched to Lieutenant Colonel Mori’s headquarters. There, Biggs lost both his temper and his mind. He threatened Mori that he would personal y see to it that the Japanese officer himself was punished after the war. It was a fatal blunder.

Just hours removed from his speech and now insulted in front of his men, Mori had no choice but to make an example of these men. Tonel i’s involvement was inconsequential. “There is but little doubt that had it not been for Biggs’ loud voice and arrogant attitude, the affair never would have come to the attention of the Japanese authorities,” said McCoy.

The next morning, Hawkins found a modern Golgotha atop the hil near the Japanese headquarters.

The three would-be escapees had their hands bound behind their backs, and ropes leading through pul eys affixed to a crude scaffolding above their heads had hoisted their arms behind them at such an angle as to make standing normal y impossible. They were forced to lean forward, balancing on their toes, to relieve the agonizing pressure on their arms. Yet it was likely that the battered men, hanging quietly cataleptic amid the sounds of creaking wood and twisting rope, were beyond feeling any pain.

Hawkins saw that their arms and legs had been savagely bashed and broken and their faces beaten beyond recognition, “to a bloody pulp hardly resembling anything human.” He watched in horror as the prisoners were doused with water and summoned back from unconsciousness. Unable to stomach anymore, Hawkins retreated to his barracks.

Beatings of the three men continued, growing with ferocity as the day went on. Japanese sentries forced Filipinos passing along the road to pay a cruel tol : those that refused to beat the prisoners were beaten themselves. “The Japanese never missed a chance to try to drive wedges between the Filipinos and Americans,” noted Grashio, watching the sordid scene from his barracks. Each blow, each thud of timber on bone and flesh, resounded throughout the compound. Despite the cold, wailing wind, Dyess could hear the beatings, occasional y varied with the “slither and slash” of a whip. Hawkins covered himself with a blanket in an attempt to muffle the sounds. The noon sky turned dark. “The tropical typhoon which had been gathering,” said Hawkins, “broke in al its fury.”

“I think I prayed that night that those men could die soon,” recal ed Dyess. “I had no hope that they would survive. Yet, when morning came—after I had had an hour or so of tormented sleep—they were stil there.” In a supernatural display of stamina, they remained for two more days, weathering the typhoon and the barbarous beatings. Naked and shivering, they leaned defiantly into the chil ing downpours, half-erect and half-alive, while the typhoon blew buildings down around them. The rains cleansed the bloody gashes that had clotted on their bruised, purplish bodies “like clumps of tar,” but the Japanese quickly opened new ones. Sopping and awestruck, the POWs watched silently through the barbed wire. It was almost as if their own emotions, which had long ago been cauterized in order to survive, were being ripped open once again. “No one spoke,” said Dyess. “We watched these men … and could find no words.” The Japanese were equal y incredulous—and impatient.

On the third morning, the rains final y let up and commands set Japanese noncoms in motion. After a final flogging saw a hissing whip sever the ears of one of the colonels, suspending it on his shoulder by a long thread of skin, soldiers emerged from the guardhouse carrying rifles, shovels, and picks. The escapes were cut down and their lacerated bodies loaded onto a truck. A sword-carrying Japanese officer climbed into the cab and the truck rol ed away in the direction of a nearby schoolhouse. Soon, the sound of two vol eys of gunfire snapped across the paddies, shattering the silence in the camp.

Twenty-four hours would pass before the men of the officers’ shooting squads learned their fates.

Their lives were spared, but they were forbidden from leaving their barracks, except to use the latrine, for one month. Later, Dyess was told that a Japanese officer had done one of the Army colonels, presumably Biggs, the “honor of beheading him personal y.”

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3–THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1942

Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

After the storm of the preceding week, the news that the Japanese were offering a ticket out of Cabanatuan was a ray of sunshine streaming into the prisoners’ bleak world. Remembered Shofner, “It began, as al big things do in prison, with a rumor.”

It was twilight and Shofner was lying on the barracks floor, his head propped on his scarlet and gold footbal jacket—a relic of his playing days with the Marines’ footbal team in San Diego in the late 1930s

—reading a medical text when Hawkins and Dobervich came in.

“Come outside and get some fresh air, Shof,” suggested Dobervich, wary of eavesdroppers. “I’ve got some hot dope for you.”

Dobervich revealed that 1,000 men—healthy, “literate laborers”—were being transferred to a new camp. This time, there was a precedent; the Japanese had issued a cal for 400 POWs with technical skil s weeks earlier. It was unknown, however, whether the new detail was destined for Japan, China, or Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines.

“Any place would be an improvement on this hole,” said Dobervich.

Hawkins and Shofner agreed. The three Marines were the first to submit their names.

Though they were wary of being shipped to Japan, where there would be no chance of escape or recapture by friendly forces, many POWs felt that signing up was a necessary risk. In less than six months, nearly 3,000 of their comrades had died. But some prisoners were having difficulty making up their minds. Steve Mel nik waited for reasonably solid information from his high-ranking friends that the detail was headed to Mindanao before signing up.

Dyess decided to put his fate in a deck of cards. He dealt himself two poker hands, the north hand representing Cabanatuan and the south hand the blind possibility of Mindanao. He laid the cards flat in front of him; north lost to a pair of aces. “My own choice was simpler,” said Grashio. “When Ed told me he had signed up, I did too.” Though his health was failing, Bert Bank could not resist the gravitational pul of Dyess’s personality, either. “Where he goes,” Bank explained. “I was going.”

Examining the manifest, Hawkins noticed Melvyn McCoy’s name. He was not yet acquainted with McCoy, but he was wel enough acquainted with the officer’s reputation to feel confident in his own decision. As Hawkins would learn, McCoy had his reasons for signing up. The promise of more food and the opportunity to escape Cabanatuan certainly were influencing factors, but for the shrewd logician, the decision was almost purely, and appropriately, a numerical one.

“I was interested in Mindanao because, although I had had no news for some time, I knew that island to be just 600 miles closer to the Netherlands Indies, New Guinea and Australia,” McCoy later explained.

“Al areas in which I presumed United States forces to be operating.”

The
Erie Maru

Life is a morning breeze, cool in the hair;

Death is an aged crone whose life is done,

Life is a laughing girl, nude in the sun;

Death gives release from barbs that fate may hurl—

I’ll take the barbs, the breeze, the laughing girl.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26–TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1942

Cabanatuan

They had converged into Cabanatuan individual y, by chance, and now they were leaving together, by choice. But the sight of Lieutenant Hozumi, standing imperiously at the gate with a jewel-encrusted sword at his side, caused many to have second thoughts. “We thought it a bad omen that Lieutenant Hozumi should be in command of the operation,” said Sam Grashio.

Under a steady gray drizzle and Hozumi’s watchful glare, the Iwanaka Unit’s 3rd Company marched the 969-man detail out of Cabanatuan. Among the anonymous “good lucks” and “goodbyes,” a familiar voice cal ed out to Dobervich, Hawkins, and Shofner. It was that of a sergeant who had taken the young officers, as many seasoned noncoms often did, under his wing in Shanghai. “You three stick together now,” he said. “It’s three musketeers, you know, al for one and one for al .”

The movement was a reverse of the route the prisoners from Corregidor had taken to Cabanatuan nearly five months earlier: they traveled by foot to Cabanatuan City and by rail to Manila, where they slept on the concrete floor of Bilibid Prison. But the Japanese had no parade planned for the fol owing morning.

Manila was a ghost town. There were more Japanese flags, which were displayed on nearly every building, than people. There were underfed calesa ponies clopping the empty streets, and gaping holes where lampposts once stood; every scrap of metal, as wel as other valuables, had been carted off to Japan. “I can’t see much of this ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity’ here, can you?” crowed Dobervich.

Prodded into the port area to Pier 7, they sat amid piles of rubble and waited as their ship—identifiable to most by only the number 684 painted on its side—was loaded with cargo. Only a few months earlier, the
Erie Maru
, a decrepit, coal-burning tub with a displacement of 7,000 tons, would have seemed out of place at this mooring, a long, expensive quay built to accommodate luxury liners and thus nicknamed the

“Mil ion Dol ar Pier.” Now in October 1942, the bay was fil ed with sunken ships whose rusting superstructures and masts protruded up through the surface like so many crooked tombstones in a watery graveyard.

Sam Grashio had not expected first-class accommodations, but he had been optimistic when boarding the ship. “It seemed wonderful y refreshing just to be out of camp and on a ship of any kind,” he said. “I should have known better. Anything connected with the Japanese that was half-pleasant or promising always had a catch in it somewhere.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27–THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1942

At sea aboard the
Erie Maru,
Philippine Islands

There were several catches. First of al , the vessel was carrying countless drums of aviation gasoline, meaning that one torpedo could turn the ship into a floating funeral pyre. The chance of such an attack was high because the Japanese had neglected to mark the ship as a prisoner of war transport. Viewed through the periscope of an American submarine, it would look like just another Japanese merchant vessel, an inviting

target.

The environment belowdecks was more immediately troubling. The prisoners were crammed into two sweltering, poorly ventilated holds, which had been partioned into sleeping compartments, ten feet deep, five feet wide, and three feet high, along the bulkheads. The Japanese endeavored to fit twelve men into these berths, which more closely resembled those on the African slave ships than anything offered by modern vessels. Similar, and, in most cases worse, conditions would cause their comrades on other voyages throughout the Far East to refer to these vessels as hel ships.

While most prisoners were forced to remain in this malodorous tangle of limbs and filth, some managed to sneak topside and escape the noxious gasoline fumes and colonies of bedbugs and lice.

The Marines mil ed about the ship’s afterdeck with hundreds of other prisoners before spying a platform, twelve feet in height, of rice sacks. They scaled the canvas-covered mountain and, finding that there was enough room to lie down, claimed the high ground with nary a complaint from the guards. It was atop this perch that Jack Hawkins caught his first glimpse of Corregidor in nearly six months. The recuperative powers of time had al but healed the Rock’s war wounds. Hawkins hardly recognized the island, astonishingly verdant in the fading daylight.

Corregidor, like the prison camps and their col ective experiences since December 1941, slid behind them as the ship churned through Manila Bay. On the horizon was the South China Sea, the crossroads of their future. If the ship continued its westerly course, they were headed north, for Japan. South meant Mindanao. Shifty Shofner couldn’t resist the opportunity.

“Which one of you boys would like to make a little bet on which way we turn?”

“How are you betting?” asked Hawkins.

“I say we turn south.”

Hawkins declined the offer; he, too, thought they were destined for Mindanao. Dobervich, however, was wil ing to indulge Shofner. After pondering the stakes, Shofner suggested a steak dinner, payable in San Francisco.

“You’re on!” agreed Dobervich.

“I hope you win, Shof,” said Hawkins, remembering the “four coats cold” winters the Marines had shivered through in China. “In Mindanao, at least, it would be warm.”

“Yes, and don’t forget, old buddy,” Shofner reminded him, “Mindanao is closer to friendly territory.”

Hawkins noticed that Shofner’s face “turned suddenly thoughtful.” Shofner’s grin widened much more noticeably when the bow of the
Erie Maru
plunged due south. It was with great ceremony that he took out his tattered notebook and recorded the victory: “Beaver owes me one steak dinner—Frisco.”