Escape From Davao (24 page)

On the heels of that seminal event was another surprising development: the Japanese distributed a series of postcards to the prisoners, for most the first opportunity they had had to communicate with their loved ones since before the fal of the Philippines. They were not postcards in the traditional sense, but formulaic comment cards by which a POW could complete an unfinished sentence or underscore given words—the second item, for example, “My health is—,” provided four choices: “excel ent; good; fair; poor”—and communicate his condition.

Predictably, the Japanese sought to censor the cards, lest a prisoner’s statements cast an unfavorable light on Imperial hospitality. For the most part, the POWs were equal to the task. Some sought to communicate through codes and Bible verses. Of the latter, Second Corinthians, first chapter, eighth verse, was a favorite: “For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of the affliction which came upon us in Asia. We were crushed beyond measure—beyond our strength, so that we were weary even of life.” One POW, however, attempted to divulge his whereabouts by stating that his new home would be

“built seven yards north and one-hundred and twenty-five yards east of the old one.” The Japanese, recognizing the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates for Dapecol, sentenced the offender to one month of solitary confinement.

One prisoner mentioned that he was working on a chicken farm, but when the card was returned for his signature, discovered that the words “for the use of the Americans” had been added. Suspicious of Japanese intentions, many did not take the exercise seriously. A dubious Leo Boelens bet a friend that he would arrive home before his card. Another prisoner directed his senator to oppose any attempts at reinstituting Prohibition in his absence. And, sadly, there was one POW with no one to write to. So he addressed his card to Dorothy Lamour.

Though he had no idea whether the cards would reach his wife in Il inois, a resurgent Dyess had been convinced of something else, as evinced in a prophetic postcript: “I wil be home.”

Nineteen forty-three, by al early indications, certainly looked to be a year of change. In addition to the arrival of the Red Cross parcels, Major Maeda had abolished the whimsical work assignment system, giving most prisoners regular jobs in an effort to improve efficiency.

While Grashio and Boelens continued in the Japanese kitchen and in the machine shop, respectively, Dyess had spent time on the plowing detail, an exercise in futility, if not hilarity. “We would go tearing around, the Americans swearing at the cattle, the Japs swearing at the Americans and the cattle bel owing at both the Americans and the Japs,” he remembered. “After a day’s plowing, the field looked as if it had been dive-bombed, strafed, and had been fought over by tanks in a major engagement.”

Nevertheless, the Japanese thought enough of Dyess’s skil s to put him in charge of the driving the camp bul cart. It was a military demotion if there ever was one. Here was the celebrated hero who had attacked enemy ships in Subic Bay at speeds of several hundred miles per hour now creaking around the camp in a rickety cart that resembled a frontier buckboard.

Though initial y indignant, Dyess warmed to the assignment. He had a good relationship with the carabao, which he named Betsy. He had no immediate overseer, either, nor did he have to work in the Mactan mud. The cart, which transported produce, tools, and supplies around the camp, was at first inspected at al checkpoints, guardhouses, and gates. Then Dyess noticed that as the guards became accustomed to his face, their attitudes grew more relaxed. Waving him along with a greeting or a light for his cigarette, they thought little of his movements.

It was about this time that the Japanese instituted English classes for the guards and Dyess became one of the instructors. Since the Japanese wanted to learn only “cursing” words, the classes deprived the prisoners of a favorite pastime—cal ing their captors unprintable names to their faces—but “it was the nearest we ever came to good-natured kidding with our captors,” he would say.

For Dyess, though, it was al an act. Suppressing his hatred to become, in his own words, “the camp’s No. 1 good wil ambassador,” he saw a window of opportunity opened by his new social status and improved health. “I figured it was time,” he said, “to begin cashing in.” He wasn’t the only one.

As Pop Abrina predicted, the appeal to Major Maeda’s pocketbook had succeeded. Each morning, Abrina’s troupe, the main ensemble of McCoy, Mel nik, Marshal , and Spielman, plus fifteen or twenty supporting cast members, formed up at the main gate. After Abrina barked the name and number of POWs in a hodgepodge of Spanish and Japanese, “
Café, ni-ju-ichi!
” (Coffee, 21), the sentry then chalked the figure on the blackboard and waved the prisoners on to the coffee fields and, unwittingly, another day of larceny and lavish feasts.

Although highly rewarding, their act had become considerably more complicated, not to mention hazardous. An early reconnaissance had revealed that the coffee patch was bordered by the colony’s chicken farm. “There’s our meat ration,” McCoy had said, licking his lips and looking at the wire coops ful of thousands of clucking hens. “Al we need now is a bit of luck and guts.”

“And a hel uva lot more information!” added an ever-pragmatic Mel nik.

The chicken farm was almost as heavily guarded as the main POW compound. Above the barbed wire perimeter fence that surrounded the henhouses was a thirty-foot watchtower. Dense jungle bounded the pen on two sides and there was about twenty-five yards of open space separating the edge of the coffee patch and the coops, leaving only one logical approach via a foliage-lined cart trail. Additional reconnaissance revealed that the lone guard rarely appeared between noon and one o’clock, when he took his post-lunch nap.

The plan, which Mel nik named “Operation Chicken,” required each man to perform a specific role.

While the “snatcher” was directly responsible for entering the enclosure and retrieving the chickens, the

“watcher” patrol ed the access trail. The role of the “guard sitter” was to prevent any guards from wandering onto the scene. The “coordinator,” stationed in a concealed position near the “snatcher” and the insertion point, a camouflaged depression beneath the fence, was the triggerman. He communicated through simple signals: raised hands indicated “al clear”; doffing a hat and wiping one’s brow postponed the insertion. Once the snatcher entered the enclosure, the coordinator “talked” to him by throwing pebbles. A single pebble bouncing off the roof served as a warning; a handful was a general alarm. Once safely inside, the snatcher purloined as much poultry and eggs as he could. “We made it a point of honor never to take less than two [chickens] on a single raid,” said McCoy.

Hardly a day passed without the sound of pebbles clanking off the galvanized iron roofs. Each successful mission seemed to raise the stakes ever higher, with freelancing guards and squawking hens breeding an increasingly disturbing amount of close cal s. More than once, no smal bit of luck was the difference between a last-second, feather-fil ed flight and capture. On one memorable mission, Marshal climbed the rafters of a bodega and hung for thirty heart-pounding minutes as a group of guards mil ed below him. “It was risky,” Spielman admitted, “but not as risky as being too weak to actual y escape.”

Their synchronized stealth enabled them to liberate 133 chickens in three months. The hens were

“quanned” with vegetables in five-gal on “quan” cans in the coffee fields, “quanned” meaning to clean and cook the birds. The single most important word in the prisoners’ vocabulary, “quan” was derived from the Tagalog “kuwan.” Although primarily used to describe anything edible, it became a “whatchamacal it,” an al -purpose linguistic widget that grew to possess multiple meanings and uses.

Though they did smuggle in food for needy POWs, the chicken thieves held their quanning parties—chicken-sharing parties, that is—in the fields to avoid bringing the stolen birds inside the compound. The source of the quan had to be kept secret because the Japanese wanted desperately to solve the mystery of the missing hens. “After we had stolen 75 of these chickens the Japanese noted their losses,” said McCoy. “Thereafter we had to work with infinitely more guile, for we knew that, if caught, we would be punished with a severity ranging from a mere flogging to death by torture.”

Confounded, the Japanese took out their frustrations on the chickens: one POW witnessed a guard throw a hen against a wal in some strange method of interrogation; the Japanese also withheld feed as punishment for the chickens’ lack of egg production or else their perceived complicity in al owing the Americans to snatch their eggs. Of course, such odd behavior was not unusual. The Americans had seen their bedeviled captors pry open the hoods of broken-down trucks and beat engines—in effect punishing the recalcitrant motors—with sticks. Another sliced the tail off a stubborn bul on the plowing detail so that the animal would “lose face” among his peers. A nerve-racked Pop Abrina, however, did not find the Americans’ antics or the responses of the bumbling Japanese entertaining. “You’re taking a big gamble every day!” he told McCoy. “And one of these times you’l lose!”

The plotters decided that they had to tel their Filipino friend about their inchoate escape plan. It fel upon Mel nik to break the news one day during lunch.

“We must tel the world what the Japanese are doing in the Philippines,” he declared. “We must make the horrors of O’Donnel , Cabanatuan and Davao a matter of record. And we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach MacArthur’s headquarters and influence history. We can’t do it alone, Pop; we need your help!”

Abrina was not moved by Mel nik’s plea. Abrina was so startled, in fact, that he avoided the conspirators, renouncing his vow of silence only to denounce McCoy several days later.

“You and the major [Mel nik] are crazy,” he said to McCoy, “because you risk your lives for nothing. It’s impossible to escape—no one has yet tried! How wil you cross the swamp? What wil you do about the headhunters who live on the other side?”

Perhaps it was his latent patriotism, or else it was the thought of participating in a real adventure, instead of living vicariously through fabricated tales, that brought Abrina around. He approached the two officers, the raconteur’s gleam evident in his eyes.

“I was thinking, Major, that a convict might lead you through that swamp! But you’d have to offer him something.”

“We have influence in high places,” chimed in McCoy, elatedly, before explaining that Mel nik had worked for MacArthur. They could not promise anything, but they would do everything in their power to secure a pardon for any colono who assisted them.

Abrina’s support was a major coup—they would need as much help as they could get. The Second World War was fil ed with countless impossible missions, but perhaps none more inherently difficult to execute than escaping from a Japanese prison camp. Some Al ied POWs, officers mostly, felt duty-bound to attempt to escape. A few even succeeded. Handfuls of Australians, Britons, and Dutch were able to filter from Ambon, Borneo, Burma, Hong Kong, and Thailand to friendly territory. Mostly, those rare successes were smal -scale escapes, piecemeal breakouts by lone actors or pairs of POWs.

But for every success story, there were hundreds of failures, almost al of which were fatal. According to one American POW who recorded a history of escapes at Cabanatuan, it was estimated that of the twenty-three prisoners who attempted to escape, fourteen were executed outright. The fates of the others—many of those recaptured were removed to other places of incarceration or else executed elsewhere—were immediately unknown, suggesting a terrible success rate. That dismal percentage was a deterrent itself, yet there were a multitude of other reasons why the vast majority of Al ied prisoners in Japanese hands did not seriously entertain thoughts of escape.

If, as the preeminent POW researcher Gavan Daws suggests that, a prisoner’s white skin was a

“prison uniform he could never take off,” his general y poor health was a weighty bal -and-chain. Men living in a near-death state knew that they could not survive on the lam in a dense, malarial jungle. The Japanese line of thinking was clear: feeding or caring for the prisoners’ medical needs might have the corol ary effect that they would grow strong enough to escape or harm their captors. So, opined one Dapecol POW, “they didn’t, and we didn’t.”

The shooting squads and the grisly public torture spectacles also curbed most prisoners’ desire to stray. The kowtowing of their officers to the Japanese in some cases bordered on treason, and, in many camps, an escape attempt would require them first to elude perimeter guard details composed of their comrades.

Geography was perhaps the most formidable impediment to freedom. Nearly al Al ied POWs were surrounded by Japanese troop concentrations in depth on land and by thousands of miles of water patrol ed by the Imperial Navy. On Mindanao, the further the group ventured from Dapecol the more dangerous its situation would be. The swamp that encircled the penal colony was only the first hurdle.

“The question was, ‘how do we rejoin the forces?’ ” said Spielman. “There is no point in escaping and hiding underneath a rock somewhere.”

After traversing the swamp and sixty miles of jungle, their next goal, would be the town of Cateel on the eastern coast of Mindanao. There they would acquire a vessel to sail to Australia, 1,300 miles distant, the closest friendly territory according to the news reports supplied by Acenas’s radio. Despite the distance, McCoy was confident that he could reach the continent by dead reckoning. What he needed was manpower, a crew of at least nine men to staff three watches. Expanding their ranks would diminish their already infinitesimal odds for success, but, as Mel nik had told Abrina, the group had higher, historical y significant aspirations. They had no choice but to organize and operate on a grand scale.