Escape From Davao (30 page)

I am awake. Across the prison yard …

The camp is deadly still

I barter choice for life, and I must pay—

Sunday, April 4, 1943

Davao Penal Colony

Just before dawn, Steve Mel nik awakened and through a window, watched as the stars faded into a pewter, overcast sky.

The day was final y here.

Mel nik dressed, tiptoed down the aisle, shook Melvyn McCoy awake, and went to the mess hal , where he found cooks preparing rice for those scheduled for Sunday labor. Picking at his food, he asked himself,
“Would everyone appear?”

Within a few minutes, al of the conspirators were present and accounted for, with the exception of Father Carberry. They sat at different tables, exchanging not so much as a glance. When the reveil e bugle sounded, rousing the rest of the camp from its slumber, they rose from their seats. “Little did that Jap bugler realize that he was sounding our cal to action,” said Jack Hawkins. That was the prearranged signal; they would assemble at the main gate at 0800.

In their barracks, they dressed and packed their possessions. It would not take long. Nearly one year as prisoners of war—in the case of Dyess and Grashio, this morning marked the 361st day they had awakened in captivity—had stripped their lives down to the barest essentials. They looked like an assemblage of military misfits. While McCoy buttoned up the suntans of an Army officer of MacArthur’s staff, which he had found on Corregidor, Shofner packed his treasured Marine footbal jacket and pul ed on a comical pair of red wool socks. “I had marched too many miles as a Marine to start flirting with foot problems now,” he reasoned.

Thanks to Mike Dobervich, Hawkins was perhaps the best-dressed member of the escape party.

Among Dobervich’s many gifts to Hawkins was a shirt that had belonged to a man who had been beheaded on the Death March and a leather AAF jacket. Hawkins also had a canvas sun helmet, complete with the eagle, globe, and anchor emblem of the Marine Corps, that he had purchased in Cabanatuan for a pack of cigarettes. He wore a new pair of U.S. Navy–issue tennis shoes—a rare gift from the Japanese, recently shipped from Manila—which he had had smeared with mud to lessen their attention-grabbing whiteness.

Paul Marshal was perhaps the poorest of the prisoners. “We were going barefoot al the time in the camp,” he recal ed. “Most of the officers had shoes, one kind or another.” Slipping on a pair of sandals made from rubber tires and throwing a smal bag over his shoulder, he resembled a hobo about to hit the rails. “I had one blanket and half a pup tent. And I had a little sack with a couple of changes of underwear and socks … that’s al I had when we went in down there [to Dapecol]. And that’s al I had when we left.”

In Barracks Eight, as Mel nik slid a razor and a worn toothbrush into his musette bag, McCoy covertly packed his belongings, including his maps and charts, medicines, and some delicate piña cloth handkerchiefs, gifts for his wife and daughters, under his clothes. He managed to find room in his musette bag for his most prized possession, a half-rol of toilet paper that he had kept since Corregidor.

Final y, he folded his mosquito net under his bulging shirt.

“Where are you going with the mosquito netting?” asked an older Army officer.

“This net? I’m going to wash it during the noon rest hour today,” said McCoy, nonchalantly. “It’s ful of bedbugs again.”

“If he suspected anything he did not say so,” McCoy later recal ed.

Back in Barracks Five, Bert Bank sensed something strange was transpiring. When Bank maneuvered close enough, it looked as though Ed Dyess was rubbing a greasy substance, perhaps some kind of cooking fat, on his pants and leggings.

“Ed,” asked Bank playful y, “you going to take a trip?”

Dyess shrugged and laughed a nonsensical answer: “I just found this stuff.” Though his eyesight had al but vanished, Bank’s other powers of perception had heightened. He now understood what was going on.

Dyess, he believed, probably felt guilty about leaving him behind. Bank, not wanting to make a difficult situation any more so, decided not to press the issue.

It was almost 0800 and there was stil no sign of Carberry. Grashio made some hurried inquiries.

Carberry was laid up in the hospital, he was told. Malaria. “I went there at once,” recal ed Grashio, “and found him lying in bed. He told me that he hoped to go with us but that he was too weak to make the attempt now; that we should go without him.” Carberry could not bring himself to tel Grashio the truth, that he had feigned

the malaria attack because he had been forbidden to participate in the escape by Father Albert Braun, the senior chaplain. Braun was il and short-handed—one priest had died

—and feared that a priest’s participation in an escape would cause Maeda to abolish religious services.

Carberry’s mission, as Braun saw it, was to stay and minister to the prisoners, not to save his own life.

(Carberry’s faithful obedience would cost him his life. After suffering through nearly two more years in Japanese prison camps, he would survive the bombing of the POW transport
Oryoku Maru
by U.S.

planes only to die in late January 1945 while en route to Japan aboard another hel ship, the
Brazil Maru
.) On his way back to the main gate, Grashio met a POW named Chuck O’Neil, a friend and flying school classmate he considered safe. Grashio confided in O’Neil that he was attempting to escape and asked him in the event that he made it home and Grashio did not, to inform Grashio’s family of what had happened to him. O’Neil agreed. “He said I was crazy,” said Grashio.

Pop Abrina, in al probability, had been praying. Standing in the doorway of the chapel, he watched anxiously as the escapees formed their respective groups—six coffee pickers and four plowers—and proceeded to the main gate. They had no idea that Abrina was watching them from afar, but another pair of eyes hardly mattered since it seemed as though the entire camp—or every Japanese, at least—was watching.

With McCoy out front, the first group, composed of Mel nik, Dyess, Boelens, Marshal , and Spielman, marched up to the gate.

“Detail, halt,” ordered McCoy.

It had come to this. Months of planning, mounting mental strain, and hushed conferences. The enormous weight of worry that had accompanied their constant fear of discovery by the Japanese or, worse, betrayal by their own. Every surprise inspection, search, and shakedown, every stolen, borrowed, bought, and careful y concealed piece of gear, every prayer, every painstaking detail, every careful y concocted story,

every angle worked, every gamble taken. It had al been for this moment.

Each single bead of sweat seemed a river coursing down their brows. They thought that they could hear the thumping of their hearts. And that the Japanese could, too. Watching from a few feet away, Jack Hawkins sucked in a deep breath and stood like a statue. Believing that each of them looked

“suspiciously bulky,” he wanted to remain motionless, invisible. “I don’t suppose there was anything particularly unusual about my appearance,” recal ed Hawkins, “but I felt as conspicuous as if I were dressed in prison stripes.”

“I knew that the next minute or two would bring the supreme test for us,” remembered Dyess. They stil had several additional sentry posts to pass, but none was more important than this one. It was the gateway to freedom, the point where al work parties leaving the main compound were required to check out.

Usual y, the sleepy sentries made a swift count, chalked the number of departing POWs on the blackboard, and al owed the detail to pass. But not this time. Though McCoy had counted twice, the sentries remained curiously unimpressed. One stepped out from the guardhouse to inspect the party, doing so with what seemed to Dyess to be unusual y intense scrutiny. If the Japanese knew of their plans, as Shofner had feared, now would be the time for a theatrical interception. Dyess realized that at this point the mission was in the hands of a higher power.

“If the Old Man is with us,”
he said to himself,
“we’ll make it. If He isn’t, we won’t.”

As the guard strode up and down the file of prisoners with narrowed eyes, they could not blink or breathe—there was nothing left to do but believe.

Final y, after several seconds—which seemed like an eternity—the guard turned and barked his decision over his shoulder: “Okay.” McCoy presented a customary salute and with a command

—“Forward march”—moved the detail out. As each prisoner passed though the gate, another guard chalked up the numbers on the blackboard.
Ichi. Ni. San. Yon. Go. Roku.

Six clear, four to go.

“Come on gang, fal in,” said Shofner, moving the plowers into the spot vacated by the coffee pickers.

Hawkins could tel that Shofner’s voice was unusual y shaky.

“Easy now, Shof,” whispered Hawkins. “Just like every day.”

Shofner saluted and barked the Japanese word for plowing,
“kosaku.”
Unlike McCoy’s group, the plowers didn’t even receive a raised eyebrow. The guard wagged his finger at the Americans, counting and chalking off four men. With a salute from Shofner, they were on the way. “My feet felt light,” said Hawkins, “as if they were scarcely touching the ground.”

Abrina had a jaunt in his step, too, as he strol ed from the chapel. Each Sunday, a truck traveled into Davao City and a handful of spots was reserved for civilians who wished to visit relatives or purchase supplies. Believing that an alibi would be highly valuable, Abrina had made plans to be absent from Dapecol during the prisoners’ evening
tenko
.

Their first hurdle cleared, the two details went in different directions, ostensibly to their work assignments. As Shofner led the plowers to their shack, McCoy’s men executed a sharp left outside the main gate and began marching paral el to the fence line, passing in rapid succession the row of barracks.

Their path took them directly beneath the guard towers. Mel nik glanced up anxiously. “Though we were moving a regulation 128 steps per minute, I felt as though we were crawling. I had an insane desire to run.”

“We walked as nonchalantly as possible,” recal ed Dyess, “but it seemed to me that my heart was beating my brains out. I thought I could actual y feel the guards’ eyes on the back of my neck.”

They had almost cleared the compound area when the residents of Barracks Eight emptied toward the mess hal . That was when Frank “Siki” Carpenter, a good-humored officer and one of Mel nik’s close friends, spied Mel nik—or, rather, Mel nik’s musette bag.

“Hey, Steve!” Carpenter’s piercingly loud voice cried out across the compound, “your toothbrush is sticking out of the back of your musette bag. Are you planning to escape?”

If ever there was an occasion when Carpenter’s brand of humor was in poor taste, this was it. And if the POWs had learned anything during their period of incarceration, it was that al Japanese knew the meaning of at least one word in English: “escape.” The mere mention of the word, of course, had sealed the fate of the three would-be escapees at Cabanatuan.

But Carpenter had no inkling of what was transpiring. Luckily for the escapees, neither did the Japanese. Mel nik, pretending not to hear Carpenter, lowered his head as they double-timed it from the area. The adrenaline surge was so powerful that they were almost jogging.

“Hold it down,” snapped McCoy. “The tower sentries are stil watching. If they see Americans rushing to work, they’l know damn wel something is wrong!”

As they decelerated, familiar sights passed in sentimental slow motion.

“Dammit,” said Spielman, wistful y, while skirting the poultry farm, “I hate to leave those 2,800 plump hens. In a way, I almost gave my life for them.”

Because the coffee patch was located on the far southwest quadrant of the colony, the journey of McCoy’s group to the rendezvous was not only longer, but also potential y more perilous. In the process of making two left turns and doubling back via interconnecting roads, they encountered another guardhouse. Whispering last-minute instructions, McCoy warned them to be ready to jump the guard if necessary, but to otherwise proceed according to plan.

“Act military,” said McCoy. “Give him one he’l always remember.”

Once they got within range, McCoy bel owed the command: “Eyes left!”

As he snapped his right hand to his head, six heads jerked in unison, a show of parade-ground precision. Stiffening to attention, the guard, recal ed McCoy, was “so surprised that he returned the salute and smirked toothily as we marched on past.”

In the span of several minutes they skulked, singly, unseen across two heavily patrol ed roads near the Japanese bil et and headquarters area, depositing them into the banana groves.

“The Old Man
is
with us today,”
Dyess thought to himself.
“What we’re having is more than luck; a lot
more than luck.”

Though it seemed a lifetime, the entire movement took al of thirty minutes. According to McCoy’s log, his group reunited with Grashio and the Marines at the plowers’ shack at 0830. Locating their stashed supplies, they discovered that most of their gear was waterlogged. After wringing a week’s worth of rainwater out of their blankets and wrapping the salvageable supplies in shelter halves, they tied their heavy bedrol s around their shoulders in horseshoe fashion and dispersed into the brush to wait for Ben de la Cruz and Victor Jumarong. Ten nervous minutes passed. Then twenty. The dreary sky began to spit a heavy downpour.