Escape From Davao (21 page)

After spending nearly a week on a buck saw with Mike Dobervich, Jack Hawkins noticed that Major Maeda possessed a special interest in the logging detail. Upon learning that the Lasang Lumber Company was owned by a Japanese civilian, Hawkins understood why Maeda had been so angry during that first assembly—and why he had promised the prisoners more food. What Tojo cal ed ideology, Maeda considered income. “No doubt by utilizing the free American and Filipino labor to furnish the valuable hardwood logs to the Japanese-owned saw mil down the river, he was finding a very convenient way of augmenting his meager salary,” said Hawkins.

The prisoners, in turn, exploited their jobs to supplement their rations. Although the Japanese instituted searches to prevent them from pilfering fruits and vegetables, many poured egg yolks into their canteens and used secret pockets in their uniforms and musette bags, as wel as hol owed-out heels of wooden shoes, to conceal food. None of these would-be thieves and smugglers became as accomplished as the Marines, whose potluck assignments had taken them to al corners of Dapecol, enabling them to sample nearly every type of food grown there. Not only did they cure their scurvy with stolen lemons, limes, and papaya, they gained weight. Hawkins gained an incredible thirty pounds in six weeks by scarfing down contraband bananas and Dobervich gained even more, so much that his bulging waistline became a source of amusement for Shofner. Claiming that Dobervich’s waist was thirty-nine inches, Shofner goaded the latter into a bet then magical y produced a measuring tape. The end result added one more

“steak dinner, Frisco” to the list in his notebook. The unselfish Marines also shared the fruits of their labors with those who were less fortunate: one-fourth of their smuggled food was donated to the patients in the POW hospital who were unable to forage for themselves.

Relationships with the Filipinos, both civilian and convict, were additional fringe benefits of their labors.

The Americans were understandably wary of the convicts in the bright orange fatigues, but “the gentlemen prisoners,” as the colonos cal ed the Americans, soon learned that they shared a common enemy. The colonos despised the Japanese not only as invaders of their homeland, but also because they had not fulfil ed their promises of amnesty. To spite their deceitful new wardens, they taught the Americans the art of goldbricking. “They showed us how to appear very, very busy without actual y doing anything,” said Ed Dyess. “We mastered the trick.” Grateful, Dyess would pay his new friends the highest possible compliment: “They were the grandest bunch of murderers and cutthroats I have ever known.”

Though al civilians, even women and children, were subjected to beatings if they were caught aiding the POWs, many accepted the risk. Prisoners working in the jungle often found fried bananas mysteriously packed in their belongings and their canteens fil ed with coffee and sugar. Other civilians slipped cigarettes and rice cakes to prisoners working near their homes.

And there were special patriots like Fely Campo. Not long after the Campo clan evacuated to Dapecol, the nineteen-year-old nursing school graduate was cal ed by the Japanese to work at the Filipino hospital.

When the Americans arrived, the eye-catching, raven-tressed Campo responded to her own orders. She threw quinine pil s into the wire stockade and smuggled needles to doctors by sewing them in the hemlines of her skirts. She conspired with a chaplain to clothe the prisoners, giving the priest shirts, which he layered beneath his cassock and distributed during services. Few prisoners learned her real name, but Campo’s sobriquet—the “Florence Nightingale of Dapecol”—proved that her daring efforts were greatly appreciated.

Not al of the aid, however, was material. One day, a little girl and boy, only three or four years old, toddled out to the spot where Hawkins and Dobervich were cutting grass in a ditch and spontaneously broke into a rendition of “God Bless America.” Their Formosan guard, a choked-up Hawkins noticed, paid no attention to the performance because he did not understand what the children were singing. “But Mike and I did,” said Hawkins. “This was the indomitable spirit of the Philippines, alive and dominant even in its tiny children.”

Their itinerant labors also more closely acquainted them with their jailers. Because of rampant disease and the awful odors, the Japanese had mostly stayed on the periphery of previous camps. But at Dapecol, captors and captives regularly mixed, creating a unique new vantage point.

The prisoners rarely saw Major Maeda. And what they did see was hardly impressive. Five feet tal with horn-rimmed glasses, a single gold tooth and a double chin, Maeda “looked the nearest thing to a pig for a human being that I ever saw in my life,” recal ed one POW. The fifty-three-year-old officer was also reportedly a heavy drinker. A 1910 graduate of the Imperial Army Academy at Ichigaya, Maeda preferred to while away the war in a beer- and sake-soused state of seclusion, making rare public appearances clothed in rumpled fatigues or a kimono.

Maeda’s nefarious subordinate, Hozumi, on the other hand, was sober and stern, obsessed with discipline and disconcertingly omnipresent; one never knew when he might strut out from the jungle for a surprise inspection. He regularly abused his guards, but there was no better indication of the terror he inspired among his own men than after one had been caught stealing a prisoner’s watch—Maeda, in one of his few admirable decrees, had prohibited thievery—the man preferred suicide to facing the tempestuous officer’s wrath. Just as his guards could never salute with sufficient smartness, the POWs could never work as productively as Hozumi demanded. “[Hozumi] seemed to be of the opinion that the prisoners could grow enough food for the entire Japanese Army,” said one American. According to the prevailing rumor, Hozumi had shamed himself in battle, hence his current assignment. “He seemed bent on proving his bravery by smacking around every American prisoner in reach,” noted McCoy.

Some Formosans shared cigarettes and pictures of girlfriends or turned their back so that the prisoners could steal food, but they were a distinct minority; most of the “Taiwanese yardbirds” shared Hozumi’s proclivity for violence and delighted in dispensing vicious beatings. “We have been waiting 100

years to do this to you,” one informed a POW. The abuse became so common that prisoners asked each other, “Did you make the ‘hit parade’ today?” Some guards preferred psychological tools of torture, such as a form of Russian roulette. A guard would place a pistol to a prisoner’s head and pul the trigger.

The hammer always swung to a dead, relief-fil ed click and no prisoner was ever believed to have been kil ed by this sadistic game, but death was not the point of the exercise. “They had the power to kil you if they wanted to, and they kept your nerves on edge with al this harassing they’d do,” said one POW.

The only way the prisoners could strike back was with words, so they coined nicknames based on the guards’ distinctive physical traits or behavior. Hozumi’s dapper dress, vanity, and violent nature earned him the monikers “Tailor’s Dummy” and “The Crown Prince of Swat.” Maeda’s aide, Lt. Hiroshi Oura, aka

“Five O’Clock Shadow,” always seemed in need of a shave. The prisoners dodged mud slung by an odious guard named “Skeleton Face,” and rulings from “The Judge,” a corporal rumored to have been a former justice of the peace. “Big Speedo” supervised work in the fields, as wel as sadistic subordinates such as “Mussolini.” “Clark Gable” had big ears; “Betty Boop” plump cheeks and a bubbly demeanor.

Dyess hated to admit it, but a wel -built guard cal ed “Robert Taylor,” after the American actor, was

“genuinely handsome.” Though only four foot ten, ninety pounds, Mr. Nishamura lived up to the reputation of his namesake, “Simon Legree,” the brutal slave dealer in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
, and grew to become a giant problem for the POWs. The civilian interpreter, who had reportedly once lived in the United States, enjoyed beating the prisoners with a riding crop or an iron pipe wrapped in leather. Interpreter Shusuke Wada could not match his col eague’s affinity for violence, but the bespectacled hunchback was no less animated in his hatred. Always on the move, rushing to order around POWs, he had the best epithet of them al : “Running Wada.”

But the guards would be the least of their worries. Impatient with the prisoners’ slow recuperation, Maeda rescinded his order for extra rations. He reduced the menu at the prisoners’ mess hal —some sardonic wit placed a sign over the entrance proclaiming the building “Ye Old Rice Bowl”—to a watery soup containing kang kong, a thin green weed, and rice ladled proportional y in different-sized scoops according to the labor they performed. Those who worked at Mactan received the highest al owance, 600

grams per day. The smal est scoop, reserved for nonworkers and hospital patients, contained only 450

grams and was cal ed “The Death Dipper.” If they were lucky, the rice contained dried, wormy fish, or stringy pieces of carabao that they derisively cal ed “NRA” meat—meaning from the neck, ribs, and anus.

To put their consumption into perspective, consider that a soldier’s daily ration in the peacetime U.S.

Army was four pounds, seven ounces, or 2,013 grams. At Dapecol, even the most wel -fed prisoners were laboring on a fraction of the necessary nutritional requirement. And who could say what they real y received since Lt. Sumio Shiraji, the corrupt, overweight quartermaster, often forced the POWs to sign for more supplies than were actual y delivered.

They had lived with hunger for months, but it was not until they were literal y surrounded by food at Dapecol that it became a universal psychosis. They traded recipes and arranged menus for the restaurants they were going to own at war’s end. Their lust was so intense that men no longer ogled pin-ups and traded tales of amorous liaisons. Instead, they fantasized about food advertisements from old magazines and told lurid stories of home-cooked meals.

As the battle of nutritional attrition raged, the casualties continued to mount. The sick lay on wooden bunks or shelter halves fil ed with cottonlike kapok fiber, yet without medicine, the hospital staff could not stop or reverse the effects of the POWs’ steady deterioration. The Marines’ smuggled food and the clandestine help of Fely Campo and other Filipinos could not make enough of a difference.

Unsanitary living conditions worsened the problem. Their barracks were infested by bedbugs and rats scampered over them while they slept. Dengue fever and malaria were unremitting tropical plagues, yet it was the appearance of some bizarre new il nesses that was most alarming. Those suffering from dry beriberi, an affliction that caused excruciating joint pain, massaged their aching hands and feet for days at a time without sleeping. Some hunched for so long that their nutrient-deprived bodies locked into a grotesque state of living rigor mortis. They were also plagued with numerous skin disorders, the worst of which was “rice rash.” The
Schistosoma
parasite caused men to scratch their itchy legs raw and bloody, then the parasite caused throbbing headaches and debilitating nausea.

Some men awoke to find that they had lost use of their arms or legs. One POW suddenly and unexplainably lost the ability to speak. Those stricken with drop foot, a condition caused by paralysis of the flexor muscles of the leg, lurched around in a sad, shuffling gait. One prisoner endured a hernia operation with limited anesthetic only to have each of his 125 stitches burst open after a malaria attack.

After forty-two days, the wound final y healed. Less than twenty-four hours after being discharged from the hospital, the POW was assigned to a work detail. Deferments, even for partial y paralyzed men, were almost unheard of. American officers, protesting the forced inclusion of malaria patients on work details, were hushed by Maeda: “We treat you like we wish.”

Such a policy looked to spel Bert Bank’s doom. Bank had lost fifty-five pounds; an attack of wet beriberi had swel ed his feet so badly that he had been forced to cut off his shoes; and, worse, he was slowly losing his eyesight due to vitamin deficiency. Each day, his ability to move about, to work—and thus eat—diminished. His friends began dissolving into blurry smudges, recognizable only by their voices.

Nevertheless, Bank worked the fields. “Wel , hel , I was cutting, instead of the weeds and vines, I was cutting the vegetable stems,” he said. While most guards kept hitting him over the head, as if he were a broken machine, one perceptive guard realized Bank’s blindness and he was reassigned to a rope-making detail. Other il or elder prisoners were assigned similar less-taxing tasks such as making straw hats or weaving baskets. One aging officer became Father Time at Dapecol. Since he possessed one of the few functional timepieces, his only duty was to ring the bel that dul y heralded the hours throughout the day.

Although the wanton cruelty of Cabanatuan—thus far, reportedly only six prisoners had perished and there were few incidents of outright torture—had as of yet not fol owed them to Mindanao, Dapecol was on the verge of becoming a death camp. Here, the Japanese seemed content to kil slowly, by starving and working their slaves to death. It was a case of simple, yet fatal, arithmetic: their forced labor burned more calories than they were consuming.

Most prisoners, feeling powerless to alter the trajectory of their fate, continued to work, to waste away, and to acquiesce to the protracted lobotomy of their spirit. But a few, sensing that each POW was only marking time to an inevitable end, were stirred to action.