Escape From Davao (12 page)

Muzzle blasts of orange flame ended the misery of countless others.

Those that continued on did so in a half-conscious daze. They had seen comrades tied to trees and used as targets for bayonet practice. One American had started counting the decapitated corpses he had seen littering the road, but stopped at twenty-seven for fear of going out of his mind. “The bloodthirsty devils now were kil ing us for diversion,” said Dyess.

The POWs were expected to maintain the relentless pace, regardless of whether the guards were on foot or bicycles, resulting in excruciating cramps. Many prisoners were forced to defecate in motion, further soiling their grimy bodies. Said Sam Grashio, who was marching in another column further north,

“the imaginations of our captors were inexhaustible when it came to devising ways to increase our suffering.”

For Dyess, the worst part of the ordeal began at sundown of the previous evening, when the prisoners were herded into the courtyard of a Spanish mission near Balanga. They had watched Japanese cooks dump soy sauce and cans of Vienna sausage into bubbling cauldrons of rice, but after the prisoners were searched they were marched away from the tantalizing food. “When you came here you were told you would eat and be let to sleep. Now that has changed,” bel owed a Japanese officer in English. “We have found pistols concealed among three American officers. In punishment for these offenses you wil not be given food. You wil march to Orani before you sleep.” Dyess saw through the thinly veiled ruse:

“The Japs were simply adding mental torture to the physical.”

After twenty-one hours and nearly thirty miles on their feet, they were prodded into a barbed wire compound at three o’clock in the morning. The enclosure, built to hold perhaps 500 men, immediately became a pol uted prison yard fil ed with more than 2,000 POWs. They col apsed in an orgy of aching muscles; blistered feet; empty, growling stomachs.

At dawn on April 13, the first rays of the sun began to incubate the distended cesspool, intensifying the stench. Feces, urine, and legions of gray, squirming maggots from the overflowing straddle trench that served as the prisoners’ latrine spil ed across the ground. The shouts of starved, hal ucinating prisoners fil ed the compound. Feverish POWs screaming obscenities at the Japanese had to be subdued. Many dehydrated men, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets and their lips blue, lapsed into comas. The Japanese ordered the prisoners to carry the dead outside the wire and bury them in shal ow graves. “The strain was tel ing even on the strongest men, or rather we ceased to be men—more like filthy, starving rabble,” said Dyess.

Final y, after being fed a smal bal of sticky gray rice, the prisoners resumed the march at dusk the next day. It was about midnight when the rain first started fal ing—solitary droplets pattering into the dust. It soon fel in wet, chil ing, God-sent sheets, cleansing the crust of blood, human waste, and grit from the prisoners’ bodies. With trembling hands, men clanged canteen cups, mess kits, and cupped hands into the air. Though the downpour lasted only fifteen minutes, it provided many weary prisoners with the strength to continue. “I felt like a fighter,” Dyess would write, “who has been saved by the bel .”

Wednesday, April 15, 1942

San Fernando, Bataan Province

The march would proceed north from Orion to Abucay and then on to Highway 7, which funneled the filthy, starving prisoners into the sugar mil town of San Fernando. There, the train depot buzzed with insects and rumors, the latter, of course, regarding the POW’s ultimate destination. Sam Grashio did not have enough energy to mul over the future. Only a few hours removed from a terrifying nightmare spent with 1,500 other prisoners in a squalid, sheet iron warehouse near Lubao, he was chiefly concerned with getting his bearings. “I was so close to total physical and mental col apse during the latter part of the march that half the time I did not know where I was,” he admitted. As he understood it, the prisoners were supposedly headed via train to a prison camp somewhere in central Luzon. Regardless of the destination, most were relieved to know that they would not have to walk. They believed that the worst was behind them.

Then several ramshackle, steel-sided boxcars began reeling down the narrow gauge tracks. Most were World War I–era “Forty and Eights,” so nicknamed because they were designed to ferry forty soldiers or eight horses. But the Japanese jolted open the cars’ rusty doors and prodded the prisoners inside with bayonets and rifle butts, sadistical y forcing in dozens of men until movement was virtual y impossible. The doors then slammed shut in a series of concurrent, metal ic shrieks. Latches clanged.

Padlocks clicked.

Temperatures in the poorly ventilated cars reached in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and a dreadful odor quickly fil ed the rol ing kilns. The POWs had not bathed in weeks and their bodies stank.

Floorboards were soon smeared with urine, feces, and vomit. “The stink was so overpowering, I feared I would suffocate,” said Grashio. Soon after the cars lurched forward, some men fainted. In some cars, men died upright, unable to slump to the floor.

The door to Grashio’s boxcar had not been completely closed and, unlike in other crammed cars where the strongest prisoners or those nearest the door refused to budge, men rotated positions for fresh air. As the cars clicked and crawled through the sugarcane fields, dried-up dikes, and sunken rice paddies of Pampanga Province into the great, flat emptiness of central Luzon, Grashio contemplated both his future and his destination. A desperate man in a nearby car, however, had already given thought to his next stop: Grashio watched him commit suicide by jumping from the train as it crossed a trestle.

The train panted to a stop as the doors of the sweltering, swol en railcars screeched open. Prisoners gasping for air tumbled out of their shadowy stupor into the blinding sun.

Having not eaten in two days, Ed Dyess emerged disoriented and weak. The days had melted together, grisly atrocities fused by the stultifying heat. His only recol ections of the past seventy-two hours were a handful of haunting images, a Filipino hanging on a fence, his entrails hanging from his slashed abdomen like “great, grayish purple ropes” … three Americans savagely lashed with a horsewhip … six thirst-mad prisoners dashing for an artesian wel as guards raised their rifles and in a hailstorm of bul ets two men, fatal y wounded, crawled determinedly toward the water until additional vol eys stopped them.

Unbeknownst to Dyess, he had endured the most infamous war crime in the annals of American military history, a survivor not a statistic. Others were not so lucky; nearly 700 Americans and perhaps as many as 10,000 Filipinos were believed to have died throughout the three-week-long nightmare that they would cal , simply, “the Hike.”

Upon regaining consciousness, he learned that the three-hour trip had brought him to Capas, in Tarlac Province, the location of a prison camp named O’Donnel . After a requisite session of the sun treatment, the prisoners were rousted to their feet for the final leg of their journey. Soon after reaching the crest of a smal knol , Dyess squinted through the dazzling glare to spy clusters of squatty shacks and tumbledown buildings teeming with what looked like thousands of people. The enclosure was ringed with silvery strands of barbed wire and cornered by guard towers that loomed out of the thick rug of cogon grass. Atop each of the crude timber parapets was a large Rising Sun flag. The real sun plunged behind the craggy peaks of the Zambales Mountains, bathing the bleak, rambling plain in a foreboding shadow. Dyess shuddered.

“As we stood, staring dazedly, there came to me a premonition that hundreds about to enter O’Donnel prison this April day never would leave it alive,” he said. “If I could have known what lay in store for us al , I think I would have given up the ghost then and there.”

Good Luck

Then came the bitter days when those alive

Fought in a vicious struggle to survive

When we begrudged the little strength we gave

To dig our withered dead a shallow grave.

Wednesday, April 15, 1942

Corregidor, Manila Bay

Our flag stil flies on this beleaguered island fortress,” General Wainwright had reassured President Roosevelt from Corregidor after Bataan’s surrender. But not for much longer, thought 1st Lt. Jack Hawkins. Through his field glasses, Hawkins had seen the enemy columns snaking into southern Bataan and knew that the Japanese would now focus their attention—as wel as their ful arsenal—on the Rock.

And, as Hawkins had also seen, the notion of defeat was a distasteful one. Hundreds of Bataan refugees had washed up on Corregidor, including three haggard, half-drowned soldiers he provided coffee, food, and medical attention. “They were soon revived enough to talk, but stil they were hesitant,” he recal ed.

“A dreadful haunted look was in their darkly circled eyes.” Eventual y, one managed a whisper: “It’s awful to be licked.”

Yet Hawkins was confident that Corregidor would not go without one hel uva fight. The resilient garrison had adopted a molelike routine of repairing and rebuilding at night. Ammunition was plentiful and there was enough food, theoretical y, to last through June. Though they had no radar, they had Private Soochow, the Marines’ Shanghai mascot mutt. Whenever he tore across the beach for cover, the Marines wisely fol owed the canine’s lead because Japanese bombers were certain to appear. Many

“shelter-shocked” soldiers, however, avoided the relentless bombardments by refusing to leave the island’s tunnels and bunkers. Recognizable by their pal or, they were disparagingly diagnosed with

“tunnelitis.”

Hawkins, who rarely left his dugout command post overlooking the foxholes in which his men were burrowed with their water-cooled Brownings, could handle the bombs and the shel ing. He hated the waiting, which was reminiscent of the tension in the tinderbox of Shanghai, where the 4th Marines believed that any smal spark would ignite a war. Continuing to surveil the swel s of Manila Bay, Hawkins knew that the marines and the Japanese would soon final y tangle. His thoughts, as they often did, drifted to home and to his fiancée. And what of his best friend, Mike Dobervich?
“Is he still alive?”
Hawkins wondered,
“or would he be better off dead at any rate, than alive in the hands of the Japs?”

Thursday, April 16–Thursday, April 23, 1942

Capas, Tarlac Province, Luzon

Not a single prisoner suffering inside Camp O’Donnel would dare consider himself lucky, but Mike Dobervich might have been the luckiest man in the whole squalid stockade. The charmed Marine had not only recovered from cerebral meningitis in time to leave Shanghai, he had also survived three months on Bataan. Providence had shined on Dobervich once more, when a Japanese officer ordered him behind the wheel of a GMC truck loaded with sugar, thus saving him from experiencing the Death March on foot.

Rumbling in a slow convoy of captured vehicles, he had watched

helplessly—the guard riding next to him pointed a bayonet at his side—as the parade of beatings, torture, and death unfolded. He saw an American colonel shot down while dashing for a spring and bristled with rage seeing staff officers run through a looting gauntlet at Balanga.

He, too, would lose his wristwatch, two fountain pens, 500 Philippine pesos and 40 U.S. dol ars on the trek, but his uncanny good fortune had enabled him to keep his life. Yet such sights and experiences would not stay in

Dobervich’s rearview mirror. Nor would his incredible luck last.

Braking at the gates of O’Donnel on April 11, he must have felt like Dante entering the fiery depths of Inferno. The heat and the camp’s desolate location made the comparison appropriate. “The infuriating, obtuse guards looked to us as though each had horns and a tail and was carrying a pitchfork instead of a rifle … it quickly became apparent to al of us that we were doomed to eternal hel fire,” said one Filipino.

The reception awaiting the prisoners augured as much.

Dobervich was one of the first to experience the infamous “welcome” speech of Capt. Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, the camp’s commandant. “We were herded in front of the Japanese headquarters building and from general down to private, we al stood at attention and had to salute the camp commander who had us stand at attention for 16 hours in the terrific heat,” wrote Dobervich, recal ing his first dose of the sun treatment.

After a long wait, Tsuneyoshi, a stumpy, middle-aged man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a Hitler mustache, and a baggy uniform with a sword dangling from his belt, strutted onto a canopied platform, where he commenced a rambling tirade. Behind Tsuneyoshi was a youthful, fat, Filipino-Japanese who translated the rants.

Many prisoners, too tired, too thirsty, and too miserable to listen, sat stupefied in the sun, their heads bowed, their backs turned to the unintel igible shouts. One intuitive American officer sensed that the orator “breathed the very essence of hate.” Ed Dyess, who endured a similar harangue upon his arrival, speculated on Tsuneyoshi’s mental competence, remarking that the disheveled, would-be dictator

“roared at us with a pomposity reminiscent of Mussolini’s. But the loose-lipped vacuity of his expression was that of an idiot.”

“The captain, he say Nippon has capture Javver, Sumatter and New Guinyah,” droned the interpreter.

“Captain, he say we soon have Austrayler and New Zealyer.”