Escape From Davao (51 page)

“Wel , the Secretary didn’t have the facts presented properly to him,” said Bissel . “If I had known the Joint Chiefs of Staff had taken as firm a stand as they did I would have told him that the action was based on their recommendation.”

That firm stand should no doubt be credited to Davis and Price. They had swayed Leahy and the Joint Chiefs to the point that the latter realized that the release of the atrocities stories could conceivably be a boon to American arms. The change in policy was also a seminal victory for Davis, Price, and their staffs, not to mention the
Chicago Tribune
and the Fourth Estate. Yet there was hardly a hint of a congratulatory tone in the announcement Davis distributed to his staff. Time would not al ow for a celebration.

Via Early, Davis had been directed by the president to coordinate with the British on the release of the atrocity announcements by both nations. The Army and Navy, meanwhile, were scrambling not only to cooperate with each other and OWI on a joint release, but had to do so without al owing their long-standing interservice rivalry to turn the event into a race for recognition. Yet perhaps in that regard, it was too late. Once the ban had been lifted, the corol ary question now facing al of the involved parties was how best to facilitate the release of the individual atrocity stories in an appropriate manner. There was now the Dyess–
Chicago Tribune
story and also a McCoy-Mel nik story that had been prepared under the auspices of the Navy Office of Public Relations with the help of an officer named Lt. Welbourn Kel ey.

The existence of the latter story suggests that McCoy had been at least somewhat successful in cal ing the Navy’s bluff. In al likelihood, the Navy had acquiesced to McCoy’s demands and assigned Kel ey to take down his story before McCoy was transferred—tucked away, real y—to a posting in the Bremerton Shipyards in Washington state.

The Army final y began reading the Dyess story on January 21—while several sets of eyes would pore over the material, General Marshal had declared that he himself would be responsible for the final edit—but the McCoy-Mel nik col aboration had not yet been sold. At this date,
Collier’s
reportedly held the leading bid of $20,000, but
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Reader’s Digest
, as wel as
Life
, were stil in the running.

A flurry of phone cal s and messages was exchanged between the OWI Army, Navy, and the
Chicago
Tribune
—these mainly involved Navy personnel who were trying to keep the Army and the
Tribune
from releasing the story in advance of McCoy and Mel nik’s piece—but the Navy was operating at a distinct disadvantage because the McCoy-Mel nik story was Navy-produced and control ed, whereas the Dyess story was control ed by a civilian entity and ostensibly outside the military’s reach. Fortunately for the Navy, other circumstances and influences, both internal and external, would buy additional time.

Bissel had told Grogan during their conversation on January 21 that he had heard that “G-1

[Personnel] and Service Commands both suggest delay in implimentation [sic] of the President’s order….

They have good reasons for suggesting delay, but they’re not questioning the ultimate decision. They think that certain things should be brought about which would bring about a rather appreciable delay if it were carried out—for certainly about three months.”

“Wel , of course they may,” Grogan replied. “In the meantime the Dyess story may be broken.”

“They understand that,” replied Bissel , “but they feel that that’s one of the things you have to take a chance on.”

Grogan’s assumption, that the
Chicago Tribune
would likely exhaust its patience in the event of another delay, was probably correct. Elmer Davis, addressing the external factors that had recently come into play in a January 22 memorandum distributed to Surles, Healy, Lattimore, and others within OWI, warned of such a possibility:

Steve Early telephoned me tonight and said that the British and the State Department had protested to the President against the release of the Dyess-McCoy story on Monday morning, January 24. The President accordingly had determined to give the British another week to prepare any simultaneous release of their own which they might desire. They are to be advised that we shal release in any event in morning papers of January 31. In the meantime if the Dyess story should be broken in Congress or elsewhere we shal release the joint Army-Navy statement immediately.

Once again, undertakings in Europe would have a direct bearing on, or exercise a degree of control over, an aspect of the Pacific war. The remaining escapees were not out of the jungle, be it the politicized, bureaucratic one in Washington or the real one on Mindanao, just yet.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 22–TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1944

Baroy, Lanao Province, Mindanao

Perhaps Leo Boelens thought it was another false alarm—the bamboo telegraph, after al , seemingly never stopped buzzing with reports of Japanese activity in the area. Perhaps he thought he could reassure his men by appearing confident. Or maybe Boelens was just in need of some excitement. As his diary attested, the pickin’s had hardly been good. There was ample evidence of a dul life dominated by bouts of boredom, chronic il ness, and, despite al usions to a romantic relationship with a mysterious woman named Miguela, persistent loneliness.

In any event, Sgt. Wenceslao “Ben” del Mundo had been right.

Boelens and the others had moved to the evacuation area shortly after the first shots were heard in the direction of Maranding at 0715. That afternoon, del Mundo, Sam Grashio’s old bodyguard, had suggested to

Boelens that he stay put. Though the Japanese had probably moved on, there was no reason to take chances, argued del Mundo. But Boelens shrugged off the advice, grabbing his carbine and five magazines of ammunition before heading back toward the airfield—
his
airfield. Evidently, he intended to return soon. “Before moving out,” del Mundo would write, “he gave me his last word that if anything was lost among his things he would find my dead body right beside them.”

Fol owing orders, del Mundo did not leave his post, not even when he heard gunfire less than one hour later. When Boelens did not return the fol owing morning, del Mundo went to investigate. He found no sign of the American, nor the Japanese at the airfield, but the latter nearly discovered him sleeping in Boelens’s quarters the next morning. Slipping away undetected, he watched from a distance as Japanese soldiers ransacked Boelens’s bil et, destroying a safe and several drums of crude and coconut oil that had been buried nearby. When he final y made his way back to the evacuation area, a shaken del Mundo learned that the losses were greater than he had imagined.

A civilian led him to the edge of the airfield, where he found the mutilated body of Boelens; the Japanese had final y reclaimed one of the Dapecol escapees and their punishment had been severe.

Sam Grashio was later told that Boelens had been shot by a hidden sniper and recaptured before being

“put to death cruel y.” From the descriptions in del Mundo’s after-action report, there is evidence that Boelens may have been tortured before his execution. After a close examination of the body, del Mundo said that the corpse contained “two wounds at the back, a bayonet thrust behind the left ear and several knife wounds at the back of the head.”

The next morning, del Mundo and several others burned Boelens’s body and respectful y buried the remains in a four-foot grave. Even in death, Leo Boelens continued to inspire: “His personal belongings are stil intact in my hands and have not been touched,” wrote del Mundo.

Chances are, Boelens did not know of Ed Dyess’s shocking death exactly one month earlier, much less the circumstances that precipitated it, but his own tragic end was jarringly similar in that it might have been prevented by some patience, or perhaps better judgment. As it was, Boelens would be the only American escapee not to return to the United States.

For some men, legacy trumps survival, and so it was with Leo Boelens. His legacy, however, would not be tangible: when he died, so did Farm Project No. 1 and his dream of building an airfield out of the Mindanao wilderness. Boelens’s enduring legacy, as time would reveal, would not be what he did, but what he convinced others to do.

Our faith is in the blood of weary men

Who take the coral beaches back again …

My country—Oh, my country—well we know

That final victory will be your part …

FRIDAY, JANUARY 28,–MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1944

Washington, District of Columbia

After months of interminable intragovernmental feuding, interservice rivalry, indecision, intrigue and executive esoterica, the official Army-Navy statement regarding atrocities committed by the Japanese military against American prisoners of war was final y released to the nation’s media with military precision at exactly 12 a.m., Eastern War Time, on Friday, January 28, 1944.

Later that morning, General Strong cal ed General Surles to assess the initial reaction. “You’ve got to give [the newspapers] 24-hours to get their editorials running,” answered Surles.

It would not take that long. In cities and towns large and smal from Long Island to Los Angeles, Americans were startled and stunned by black, blaring banner headlines such as the one appearing on the front page of the
New York Times:
“5,200 AMERICANS, MANY MORE FILIPINOS DIE OF

STARVATION, TORTURE AFTER BATAAN.” Sensational subheads such as the
Times
’s

“AMERICANS BURIED ALIVE” and “Men Worked to Death—Al ‘Boiled’ in Sun—12,000 Kept Without Food 7 Days” invariably led to “a horror story,” proclaimed the Associated Press, “scarcely paral eled in the annals of modern war,” eleven pages of “factual and official” testimony from Dyess, McCoy, and Mel nik that spanned the fal of Bataan to the murder of a Dapecol POW. As per official orders, no details were provided about the method and route of escape, nor was there any mention of the guerril as who aided the escapees. But in the midst of the resulting national furor, the absence of such details went largely unnoticed.

Radio, jammed telephone exchanges, and word of mouth relayed the shocking news of the Bataan Death March, the existence of charnel houses of horrors cal ed O’Donnel and Cabanatuan, and the appal ing stories of systemized starvation, slave labor, burial details, torture, and calculated enemy brutality to every corner of the country. The news traveled al across America, it was like nothing the nation had known before.

That Sunday, the first instal ment of the Dyess story ran on the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
, as wel as in 100 associated newspapers. There would be twenty-four total instal ments, one appearing each day for the better part of the next month. To the public, it must have seemed as though the deceased pilot was daring them to close their eyes and imagine the horrors he and his comrades had endured. “To my commanding officers I repeated the story of what I had seen and experienced in the Philippines after the fal of Bataan,” Dyess had opened. “And from each of my superiors came the warning: ‘The Public won’t believe it.’ Perhaps the public wil not. But the story I am about to tel is true.” Though what they would read seemed beyond belief, believe it they did.
Newsweek
would later claim that the revelation was a bombshel more explosive even than Pearl Harbor: “the American emotion … was a fury such as had never before gripped the nation in this war.”

Washington was the epicenter of the outrage. “According to the reports of cruelty and inhumanity,” said Secretary of State Cordel Hul , “it would be necessary to summon … al the demons available from anywhere and combine the fiendishness which al of them embody to describe the conduct of those who inflicted these unthinkable tortures on Americans and Filipinos as the report recites.”

“Neither you nor I can express our reaction in words,” America’s ambassador to Japan, Joseph C.

Grew, told a reporter from the North American Newspaper Al iance. “I have used the words ‘fiery rage,’

but my feeling is far too deep to try to express in language. My anger against those responsible for these dastardly acts is inexpressible.”

The most vociferous reaction emanated from Capitol Hil . Texas rep resentative Eugene Worley, a Navy officer who had spent four months on active duty in the Pacific in 1942, attacked the Europe First policy, asserting that, if they did not know so already, “the American people now know their number one enemy—the inhuman, despicable Jap.”

Members of Congress, blind with rage, demanded immediate retribution. While Missouri senator Bennett Clark wanted to “bomb Japan out of existence,” Alabama senator Lister Hil desired to “gut the heart of Japan with fire.” Andrew J. May, a Kentucky Democrat and chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, wanted the Pacific fleet immediately dispatched to Tokyo to “blow it to Hades.” Cal s for the hanging of Hirohito as a war criminal were widespread.

Assigning blame was a natural, secondary reaction. “Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins,” charged Indiana representative Gerald W. Landis, identifying Hopkins’s role as the major policymaker behind Lend-Lease, “are directly responsible for not getting supplies to Gen. Douglas MacArthur that would have saved these men.” As for the perpetrators of the crimes, “let these Japanese know in plain and no uncertain terms that we’re going to hold them responsible for this nasty, damnable, despicable business,”