Escape From Davao (16 page)

TUESDAY, JULY 7–SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1942

Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija Province, Luzon

“You won’t like it here,” the officer, a prewar acquaintance who had survived the savage aftermath of Bataan, told Melvyn McCoy. McCoy, just arrived from Manila, was beginning to understand why. The awful stench had hit him even before he had set foot inside Cabanatuan.

“Good God,” he gasped, pointing to the rows of fly-covered corpses awaiting burial.

“You’l get used to that,” replied the officer, casual y, continuing his rote summary of the events that transpired on the Death March and in O’Donnel as he moved McCoy along.

Only after reliving the macabre litany of atrocities did McCoy’s docent offer some animated, and astute, commentary.

“Those things don’t happen to Americans, McCoy. I know we’ve heard of Hitler starving and kil ing people by the thousands; and we’ve heard of the Japs using living Chinese for bayonet practice. But we’re Americans, McCoy! Nobody ever taught us about that.”

That much was true. They had not had any formal survival training. Boot camp had taught men how to dig foxholes and clean rifles and about venereal disease. Officers had been taught to fly planes, to range artil ery, and to lead troops in battle—but not what to do in prison camp. They had no idea how to conduct themselves while being starved, tortured, or while facing a firing squad. Not only had they not been given the means to achieve victory, they had not been prepared for losing. Of course, nothing could have prepared one for Cabanatuan.

Located seventy-five miles north of Manila in Nueva Ecija Province, Cabanatuan was composed of three separate sites, Camps One, Two, and Three, situated six, twelve, and eighteen miles north of Cabanatuan City, respectively. Some 9,000 Americans, which included al of the Bataan POWs, as wel as most of the officers and some men from Corregidor, cal ed Camp One home. (Al of the participants in this story were confined in Camp One. In future references, the terms “Cabanatuan” and “Camp One” wil be used interchangeably.) The former Philippine Army cantonment was parceled into four compounds, three of which were heavily guarded and contained the prisoners’ barracks. It was fitting that the Japanese had planted Cabanatuan in the midst of neglected rice fields that were overgrown with weeds; nothing but the hardiest, most resilient of men would survive the inhospitable conditions.

“We used to say in Shanghai that we may be eating fish heads and rice one of these days,” said Jack Hawkins. “The whole trouble is [in Cabanatuan], we didn’t even get the fishheads.” Some prisoners augmented their diets with lizards, frogs, and dogs. The Marines, however, made it known that they would skewer any man who dared look at their mascot, Private Soochow, with hungry eyes. Watching the dog share the Marines’ meager chow pained many of the more commonsensical prisoners, but the protein-poor menu at Cabanatuan, tasteless, soggy rice, served thrice daily and infrequently flavored with wormy camotes or tiny bits of dried fish, was in itself another form of torture. “The artful Japs,” said Ed Dyess,

“gave us just enough food to keep us in agony of hunger at al times.” Food thus became an obsession that dominated their thoughts, their conversations, and even their dreams. Each night, Hawkins dreamed of fried eggs, crisp bacon, and buttered toast. And each morning, he woke “with a drooling mouth and a pain in my empty stomach.” While Dyess’s cravings made a circuit, from Hereford steaks to eggs and chocolate milkshakes, Sam Grashio remained fixated on ice cream and lemonade.

Dysentery prevented them from keeping what little food they did get in their systems: the buildup of gas caused them to prematurely expel their bowels before their bodies could col ect vital nutrients.

Avitaminotic diseases like scurvy and pel agra tormented the men, the former characterized by painful, bleeding gums and the latter by scaly sores and hal ucinatory delusions. Elephantiasis, encephalitis, and tuberculosis, sicknesses that most medical personnel had only read about, appeared. Mosquitoes were responsible for the exponential increase in cases of malaria, the bane of every prisoner, and dengue fever, known as “breakbone fever” because one felt as though his bones were being pounded by a hammer. It was therefore hardly any great surprise then that at any one time, one-fourth to more than one-third of the camp’s population was crowded into the sawali-sided nipa shacks that masqueraded as a hospital. “The hospital was a place without beds, the men lying on raised bamboo shelves,” said Dyess.

“There was a primitive operating room that almost never was in operation and a dispensary that seldom dispensed

anything.”

Many ultimately ended up in “Zero Ward”—so named because should one land there, his chances of leaving alive were zero—a larger version of O’Donnel ’s St. Peter’s Ward. The Japanese did issue some antitoxin when a diphtheria epidemic threatened their own personnel, but they remained largely indifferent to the prisoners’ suffering. “Buried 52 today,” read one of Mel nik’s late June diary entries. “Camp is gloomy morgue. Dead men lie on streets until noon.” Hawkins recal ed bul dozers aiding in the disposal of the corpses, but most of the details remained dependent on human labor. Likewise, the dwindling number of living prisoners relied on the only individuals that they been able to count on since the war began: each other.

When Hawkins was stricken with acute diarrhea and began to lose the wil to eat, Dobervich waited in line for hours to fil Hawkins’s canteen and forced rice, as wel as a bitter black charcoal paste, a homemade remedy that produced positive results for some dysentery patients, down Hawkins’s throat.

He also resisted efforts to admit Hawkins to the so-cal ed hospital. Hawkins turned the corner after ten touch-and-go days.

Not long after Hawkins’s recovery, it was Shifty Shofner’s turn. A gruesome tropical ulcer in one of his feet had bored its way to the bone, becoming so painful that he could not walk. Hawkins and Dobervich dutiful y served as human crutches, helping their buddy to the latrine until some salicylic crystals and rest healed the sore.

Ed Dyess felt he had someone looking out for him, too, after jaundice and dengue fever had rendered him almost bedridden. Bank and Grashio helped nurse Dyess back to health—or what passed for health at Cabanatuan. After six weeks, Dyess emerged from his ordeal weighing only 120 pounds, nearly one-third under his normal weight of 175. He explained how his unique perception of God had kept him alive:

“I never thought of God or addressed Him as a distant, awesome being somewhere in the sky. I felt much closer to Him than that…. I thought of Him as ‘The Old Man’—the affectionate, respectful title soldiers apply to a commanding officer…. I would say to myself: ‘I have nothing to worry about. The Old Man wil see me through.’ ”

Dyess’s understanding of predestination and fatalism had been formed during his youth, but “it was a Jap bul et that crystal ized these teachings into belief.” He had been flying over enemy lines on Bataan when a slug ripped into his P-40. Had he not been leaning to one side, the bul et would have plowed into his brain, kil ing him instantly. His recent il ness, therefore, was no different from the bul et incident: it simply had not been his time.

Mel nik noticed that the prisoners reacted to their predicaments in various ways. Heavier men, he observed, were unable to endure the starvation diet and succumbed to death earlier than smal er prisoners. “Those who had imbibed a great deal and exercised rarely did not survive either,” he said.

Others convinced themselves that it was their time, demonstrating that survival was as much a mental and spiritual battle as it was a physical one. Shofner learned a valuable lesson in motivation when a fel ow Marine entered his bay for a chat.

“Shof,” the officer told him, quietly, “it’s easy to die.”

“What do you mean, easy?”

“Last night I was awake when Joe died. It was real peaceful. No struggle, no pain …”

“Hey,” replied Shofner, angrily. “Knock it off. That’s no way to talk. You got to live, boy, live. Think about your wife and kids. This won’t last forever; and remember, you’re not alone here, not by a long shot.”

“Shof, we’re not going to get out of this, you know that. Every day just prolongs the agony. It’s senseless, Shof. I’m going to die.”

And he did; Shofner helped bury the Marine four days later. Sam Grashio had made up his mind, too—he was not giving up. “It is hard to kil a man by mere il treatment if he is determined to live, and I was … I wanted to see my wife, family and friends again. I wanted to let the American people know what we and the Filipinos had endured.”

Grashio credited his reflexive retreat into his Catholic faith for his outlook. He had developed a strong conviction that he had no explanation for, a powerful belief wel ing inside of him that “somehow, God would not let me die in a Japanese prison.”

• • •

War had, at the very least, kept them busy. Weapons needed to be cleaned; paperwork shuffled. But prison camp was different. There were few distractions from their dul , miserable existence. Making matters worse, the forced intimacy that accompanied sharing a crowded prison camp with thousands of other sick, smel y, and disgruntled men, oddly juxtaposed with feelings of loneliness and abandonment, frayed nerves. “The strain of captivity and prison life can snap the tiny threads of reason,” noted Shofner.

To preserve their sanity and to prevent menticide—the death of the mind—those that chose to live became combatants once more.

Their Yankee humor and ingenuity proved powerful weapons. Inspired by the omnipresent mud—the ruthless sun might have taken a sabbatical, but the rains of the monsoon season had mired Cabanatuan into a giant bog—the rank stench, the swarms of flies, and their inability to bathe, the Marines founded a fraternity of filth cal ed “Skunk Patrol, Alpha Chapter.” They greeted each other with a sign and countersign ritual: a lifted leg was acknowledged by a handclasp of the nose. Because Shofner possessed a notebook, he held the office of “stinkitary.”

The mucky roads and al eys that connected Camp One’s compounds soon had familiar names like Main Street, Michigan Avenue, and Broadway. “A Milwaukee man had named a path for himself,” noted Dyess. “It was Buboltz boulevard and led to the latrines.” And there was a hustler on every corner. Since many guards suffered from venereal disease and were wil ing to trade anything for sulfa tablets, some resourceful POWs took Japanese-issued tooth powder, formed it into tablets with a spent cartridge, stamped the pil s with a “W,” the trademark symbol of the Winthrop Company, which made the drugs, and then sold the product back to their unwitting captors. Their racket did not last long, but the sight of a wretched guard slinking off to take a dose of phony pil s was more enjoyable than the cigarettes the men received in payment.

Prisoners produced shows and musical performances, or focused on practical pursuits such as fly-kil ing contests or compiling rosters and death lists. Some signed up for labor details to escape the drudgery of the camp, but they soon learned to avoid anything that involved close contact with the Japanese, namely to avoid contact
from
the Japanese. Language courses were popular, too; Steve Mel nik, for example, practiced his Russian with other officers. In a bizarre act of benevolence, the Japanese issued, of al things, softbal equipment. It was an absurd gesture. “I couldn’t have run around a basebal diamond if the devil himself had been chasing me,” said Hawkins.

Some prisoners taught classes in subjects relating to their civilian careers or special interests.

Hawkins remembered seeing Melvyn McCoy sitting on the ground, twitching his mustache while reciting logarithms, from memory, to a circle of pupils. But Hawkins skipped McCoy’s lectures to sit in on the ubiquitous card games. Gambling was the favorite prison camp pastime. Prisoners bet on everything, from whether a POW rushing to the latrines in a broken gait would make it in time, to the number of worms in their rice. The stakes usual y involved cash or cigarettes, the latter an emergent form of camp currency. Many bet their rice rations, mortgaging their meals and their futures. Outside of food wagers, most bets were made on the cuff—if a man died, his debts were forgiven. That was good for Shofner, a regular in the camp’s high-limit poker game—a regular loser. “That guy McCoy is a shark,” he often complained, disgustedly, to Hawkins. There also was the matter of the bet that he had made with a friend on Corregidor in February, for $10, that the United States would recapture Manila by the Fourth of July.

Marking the date in Cabanatuan, Shofner had to settle the wager, scoring it as “Lost. (Pd).”

Nevertheless, he continued making bets and the prisoners refused to snuff their few flickering flames of hope, for which rumors served as so much emotional kindling.

Germany’s surrender was among the first rumors “reported” at Cabanatuan, but the most popular ones natural y revolved around phony tales of America’s great Pacific offensive. Considering that their conversations focused on food, they hoped to eat “Thanksgiving turkey in Albuquerque.” “In ’43 we’l al be free,” they also liked to say. Some believed that Uncle Sam was arranging a prisoner exchange; Dyess had heard that a steamer in Manila Bay was being readied to transfer the prisoners to Ecuador.

According to another universal y accepted rumor, FDR had deposited $50 mil ion in Swiss banks to help the Red Cross care for American prisoners. One officer kept track of al the rumors to have circulated Cabanatuan, reportedly col ecting more than 2,000. None was ever confirmed.