Escape From Davao (31 page)

“Good old rain,” whispered Boelens, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “It’l cover our tracks.”

“Cover our tracks, hel !” retorted Shofner, gruffly. “I wish those guys would come on so we could start making some tracks.”

The escapees sat silently in the rain. Had the Filipinos been waylaid? Had they gotten cold feet? Or were they conspiring at this very moment with the Japanese? They had just about decided to go on without the two guides when Jumarong final y arrived, alone, at 0900.

“Where’s Ben?” asked an irate McCoy.

“Ben want to know if you ready,” said Jumarong in his best broken English.

“You tel Ben come quick or we go without him.”

Although the Americans were shocked, such dilatory behavior on the part of the two colonos was in fact standard operating procedure in the Philippines, where no amount of talk or planning is enough to convince one of another’s sincerity or intentions. Jumarong and de la Cruz needed proof, needed to see with their own eyes the ten
gringos
, loaded down with gear, ready to go. “Apparently,” wrote McCoy, “they wanted to make certain we real y meant to escape.”

A wolf whistle from lookout Spielman signaled Jumarong’s return at 1030. This time, de la Cruz was with him. “They did not explain the tardiness,” explained Mel nik. “And we were too relieved to make an issue of it.”

Anxious to put distance between themselves and the Japanese, they silently formed up in a single-file line—the Filipinos at the fore, Dobervich and Hawkins bringing up the rear—to move out. One by one, with reserved exuberance, the prisoners passed through the jungle threshold.

The escape party had scarcely penetrated the fringes of the jungle, yet it seemed even more darkly foreboding than it had during the dummy run. The fugitives panted and splashed through puddles of standing water and tangles of dense foliage for nearly an hour before their exhausted lungs, unaccustomed to the musty humid air, demanded a rest.

Dobervich and Hawkins took seats on a log next to Spielman and Marshal as the latter doled out cigarettes. It was the first time that the others had had an opportunity to meet the young Army enlisted men. Hawkins studied Spielman; he knew a Texan when he saw one.

“What part of Texas are you from?” he asked.

“Carrizo Springs.”

“That’s down in the mesquite country, isn’t it? I’m from Texas, too.”

“Good. That makes three of us,” said Spielman. “I hear Captain Dyess is from Texas.”

The escapees were just about acquainted when McCoy ordered them to their feet. Covering their cigarette butts with mud, they returned to the trail, which grew more indistinct and overgrown with each labored step. Drenched with perspiration, they bridged gul ies, crossed innumerable smal streams, and stumbled over stumps, al while trying to keep from being ensnared by drooping vines. It was unlike any trail any of them had ever seen. “In fact, I could hardly believe that we were on a trail at al ,” said Hawkins.

Neither could Mel nik.

The afternoon sun breached the gloomy skies and the ceiling of thick tropical foliage, providing enough light for Mel nik to notice that their shadows were moving in the wrong direction. He pul ed McCoy aside and both officers careful y observed Jumarong. At 1400 hours, their suspicions were confirmed by a frightening discovery: their own footprints, proof that they had indeed been moving in circles. A nervous Jumarong entered into a hasty conference with de la Cruz in Tagalog.

“Victor says that he has lost the trail,” reported de la Cruz. “It has been over a year since he was on it and the trail has changed.”

Jumarong tried to get his bearings, but another hour of aimless wandering forced McCoy to cal a halt.

He pul ed out Acenas’s map, which the others examined over his shoulder.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost it for good. I imagine we are about here, but there is no way of knowing,” he said, hazarding his best guess of their location with a fingertip. “I believe the best thing to do is to try to fol ow a course general y northeast and try to hit the end of the Japanese logging railway about here.”

McCoy’s finger moved to a point some ten to fifteen miles northeast of Anibogan.

“If we go that way, we’l be getting into the swamp pretty soon,” said Hawkins.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” admitted McCoy, “but I don’t know what else to suggest. If we don’t head for the railroad we’l probably just wander on into the jungle indefinitely.”

Fol owing the compass, they proceeded on the new course. Predictably, the terrain became progressively more marshlike. The mud grew thicker and deeper; clumps of shrubs gave way to mangles of trees.

There was no sign of a Japanese search party, but they were hardly alone. Doves flapped away upon their advance and they heard the grunts of wild hogs. Mosquitoes invaded their nostrils and ears and attacked any exposed skin, as did the leeches. Once gorged with blood, the half-inch-long parasites were capable of doubling, even tripling in size. And for fear of infection one could not simply pul off the bloated blue blobs. During breaks, they singed the tiny parasites with lit cigarettes. The nicotine also provided a much needed spike in energy. Stil , by the time they encountered their first major obstacle, a large stream, Dyess and Grashio were noticeably flagging in the oppressive, late afternoon heat.

Shofner suggested fel ing a tree across the stream. “Shof was always quoting the Field Manuals,” said Hawkins. “As we say in the Marine Corps he knew ‘the book’—or claimed he did.” Thanks to Boelens’s prowess with a bolo, their bridge was in place minutes later. Placing one foot careful y in front of the other, each man slowly felt his way across. The last, Grashio, was only two feet from the bank when he wobbled off and splashed into the water.

“Haw, haw, haw,” laughed Shofner as he helped Grashio ashore. “Old Surefoot himself. That’s the Air Corps for you. Boy, how did you ever pilot a P-40 with balance like that?”

“Oh, shut up, Shifty,” was al Grashio, dripping and embarrassed, could manage in reply.

“Jeep pilots, that’s what you Air Corps boys are,” joked Shofner.

“Don’t talk about the Air Corps,” interjected Dyess. “What have the Marines done in this war anyway?”

“Ever hear about Guadalcanal?”

“Toot, toot. The Marines have landed. Why don’t you quit blowing your horn.”

“Okay, boys, let’s knock off the Army-Navy game,” said McCoy, hustling them forward.

Only later would Grashio understand that Shofner’s ribbing was not without purpose. They needed to be prodded forward by any means necessary, be it the whip of Shofner’s tongue or otherwise. “His judgment was remarkable about who could profit from a few words of encouragement, who needed a few minutes’

relief from carrying his pack, and what kind of half-joking, half-jarring remark would pick us up a bit,”

recal ed Grashio. “Shofner knew what had to be done, how to do it and possessed the dynamic leadership to get it done.”

Hawkins, though, wasn’t one to open his mouth very often. He did not think McCoy was checking the compass often enough to maintain an accurate course heading, but for the time being he decided to keep his thoughts—as wel as his fears that they were again covering familiar ground—to himself.

They encountered another large stream at approximately 1745, and with nightfal near decided to set up camp rather than attempt another crossing. After a dinner of canned corned beef, deviled ham, and cold rice, they drained their canteens. Ready to refil his with swamp water, Hawkins asked de la Cruz for the water purification tablets from the first-aid kit. Instead, the Filipinos pointed out an alternative water source: the long, fibrous buhuka vines festooned around their bivouac. The Americans were surprised to learn that when sliced open, a six-foot length of inch-thick rattan yielded a half-canteen’s worth of sweet, pure water.

“I never knew my porch furniture was good for drinking,” cracked Hawkins.

Jumarong then demonstrated how to use strips of the vines to bind saplings and branches into raised sleeping platforms that would keep them out of the leech-infested mud and water, the level of which would inevitably rise with the nightly rains.

They finished their beds in the darkness and were just about to turn in when they heard the sound of drumbeats pulsing the jungle. “It was a dul throb,” Shofner wrote, “like the heartbeat of the primeval rain forest.” Hypnotized by the ghostly cadence, they stopped slapping the persistent mosquitoes to listen.

The rumors of cannibal tribes that inhabited the swamp, previously dismissed out of hand, had suddenly become audible reality. They had heard of the Atas, Manobos, and Magahuts, but just which, if any, of these indigenous tribes was responsible for the strange, rhythmic beats was unknown. The message being pounded through the jungle was equal y puzzling.

“What is it?” asked one unsteady voice.

“Drums,” deadpanned another. “Wild people.”

“Do you think they know we’re here?”

“Hard to say.”

Shofner, sensing that the moment was ripe for rail ery, decided to break the spel . In time with the drumbeats he chanted, “Heads are available! … Heads are available! … Heads are avai—”

“For Christ’s sake, Shof, shut up!” came an interruptive reply out of the darkness.

The drums silenced just as quickly and mysteriously as they had begun, but the incessant pounding reverberated in their heads as they dozed. According to Dyess, the fugitives were jolted awake by more sounds—“a resounding crash fol owed by heavy splashes and the most spectacular profanity”—only to learn that they were not under attack from headhunters or the Japanese. The Marines’ bed had col apsed, dunking the occupants into the watery ooze.

A steady, soaking rain, as wel as their crude bunks and escalating anxiety, ensured that the night was a miserable, largely sleepless one. But there were others who were restless that night, too.

SUNDAY, APRIL 4–MONDAY, APRIL 5, 1943

Davao Penal Colony

Bert Bank had experienced many a restless night since the start of the war, but nothing quite like this. For Bank and more than 500 others, the ordeal had begun around 1800, during evening
tenko.
As per usual at day’s end, the POWs were lined up and counted. But this time, they were recounted. Then counted again. No matter which way the Japanese figured it, ten American POWs and two Filipinos were unaccounted for. Word quickly spread down the lines of assembled prisoners and was transmitted across the colony: the unthinkable, the impossible—an escape—had happened.

It was a testament to the degree of secrecy with which the escapees had both planned and executed their breakout that almost nobody at

Dapecol—American, Filipino, or Japanese—could believe it. At the Filipino hospital, a stunned Fely Campo remembered an innocuous conversation that she had had a few days earlier with another nurse named Maximina Orejodos. “Some things are going to happen,” Orejodos had said, cryptical y. Campo knew that Orejodos and Ben de la Cruz had become romantical y involved, but she never for a moment considered that he would be participating in an escape attempt with American prisoners.

“The Japanese were beside themselves,” remembered Carl Nordin, who, like the rest of the POWs at Dapecol, was at the same time proud, bewildered, and fearful. “They kept counting and counting and counting. Of course, they couldn’t figure out how it could have happened…. I don’t think they realized that they had let themselves in for it, that they had gotten too lax.”

But the Japanese promptly and characteristical y assigned responsibility for the escape to the remaining prisoners. Manny Lawton, a friend of Bank’s, recal ed standing at attention at sunset as the detested interpreter known as Running Wada delivered a rambling oration on behalf of Major Maeda:

“For every man who escape, de other nine in his squad wirr be shoot kirred. You are arr guilty of herping them escape. De major say you wirr arr be confined to camp untir he decide what what other punishment wirr be necessary.”

This revelatory pronouncement signaled either an alarmingly abrupt reversal of Japanese policy or a major miscalculation on the part of the escapees in judging Maeda’s character. While some POWs maintained that the Japanese never brought up the subject of shooting squads—not upon the prisoners’

arrival in November 1942, nor in the chaotic period immediately fol owing the escape—others believed that the “ten for one” rule enacted at Cabanatuan was in use at Dapecol. A consensus was never reached and wil likely forever remain a point of contention. “I never knew that there was a change in that order,” said Jack Donohoe, but, because it was so difficult to predict Japanese behavior, also said, “I didn’t know if 100 people would be kil ed or not.”

Nobody knew. Bank believed that the Japanese intended to spil the prisoners’ blood in retribution for their wayward comrades’ indiscretion. It certainly seemed that way. The Japanese first marched the new American camp commander, Col. Kenneth Olson, as wel as the leaders of the barracks where the fugitives had lived, to Maeda’s headquarters for questioning. The sounds of the beatings leaked out to the compound. “The Japanese worked some of them over pretty good,” remembered Donohoe. The Japanese then secured the names of those who slept next to the escapees. These men, the Americans were reportedly told, were to be executed, a summary guilt-by-association judgment. “Sleeping between

[Dyess and Grashio] did not make me too popular with the Japanese,” said Bank.

There was plenty of blame to go around. The Japanese knew that the POWs had had help. Pop Abrina returned from Davao City that evening to find the camp in an uproar and a squad of soldiers, led by Hozumi and Lieutenant Tsubota, waiting at his home. Feigning surprise, Abrina denied that he had anything to do with the escape. He truthful y told Hozumi that he had last seen the Americans the previous afternoon. He had been in Davao City and the driver of the Japanese truck could vouch for him.