Escape From Davao (35 page)

At de Juan’s camp, there was speculation that the Japanese were employing white-skinned German al ies to masquerade as American POWs in an attempt to lure the guerril as out and annihilate them with their superior firepower. “There are no Germans in Davao Penal Colony,” countered a skeptical de Juan.

But he could not afford to take chances. Three times he had made trips to Japanese-occupied Davao City and twice he had been questioned about the activities of the elusive guerril a leader known as de Juan. During his third visit, the Japanese final y recognized him with the help of a spy. The wily guerril a brokered a deal in which, on condition of his release, he promised to surrender his army. Once safely back in his own territory, he sent a needling message to the Japanese garrison commander: “Want us?

Come and get us.” Infuriated, the Japanese put a substantial price on de Juan’s head of 100 pesos—roughly $500—as wel as a sack of rice.

And so de Juan had little choice but to order another ambush. Tense with anticipation, the guerril as had crouched at the edge of the clearing outside Lungaog as the intruders mil ed at the wel . “Do not fire until I tel you to fire,” de Juan warned them. For several anxious minutes, de Juan analyzed the situation.

“Boys, these are not Germans,” he told them in Il onggo, a Visayan dialect, before stepping out into the clearing to confront the Americans up close.

When the Americans praised de Juan for setting the ambush at Kinamayan, the usual y boastful leader just grinned and shrugged off the compliments.

“I do not know how to command troops,” admitted de Juan. “I just use my tactics.”

Sensing that the escapees needed their rest, Big Boy rose to take his leave and ordered the townspeople to do the same. He then reassured the escapees that though the Japanese were likely stil licking their wounds from Kinamayan, he would post guards to stand watch.

“Do not be afraid,” he said. “If the Japanese come again we wil have warning.”

Approaching Ed Dyess, one youthful guerril ero did not exhibit the same self-assurance as his commander and comrades. Visibly shaken, he told Dyess, apologetical y, that he was one of the two scouts on the railroad that morning and that it was he, believing the escapees to be aligned with the Japanese, who had raised his shotgun and taken aim at Dyess. He then confessed that he had panicked and pul ed the trigger, but fortunately for Dyess the cartridge did not fire. “God must have been with you, sir,” Dyess was told.

“Little wonder,” commented Grashio, “that Ed believed in predestination.”

The distance between hel and paradise—the barrio Lungaog—the escapees discovered, had been only twelve miles. With no Japanese bugler to blast them from their bunks at dawn, they slept—ten hours on the first day. They went swimming, laundered their clothes, and caught up their diaries. And they ate. And ate. Sometimes, five meals a day. Whether he was taking them “papaya hunting”—in essence, fruit scavenger hunts in the jungle—or into his own home for sumptuous meals, Big Boy made sure that the Americans never went hungry or thirsty. At every opportunity, the Americans toasted their newfound freedom and friendships with
tuba
, a potent, rose-colored alcoholic beverage fermented from the sweet sap of the coconut palm. And they entertained a stream of visitors.

Thanks to the bamboo telegraph, visitors ventured from as far as ten miles to see the Americans who had escaped from the hated “Hapons.” Most came bearing gifts of food, everything from eggs, fruit, vegetables, and boiled fish to live animals, which were tied to stakes and penned up outside the escapees’ bamboo bil et. “We soon had a private menagerie of our own,” recal ed Hawkins.

Shofner entertained the guests with photographs he had taken in Shanghai and on Corregidor and had smuggled through prison camp in the seams of his Marine footbal jacket. The locals spent hours looking at the pictures and listening to the Americans tel stories of the atrocities they had witnessed and survived, as wel as the hair-raising tale of their escape. Some awestruck Filipinos asked the former POWs to serve as godfathers to their children.

“It was an odd sensation to be treated as if we were conquering heroes,” said McCoy, “when in fact we were bedraggled fugitives from Japanese brutality.” But that same brutality was the reason for the sympathetic hospitality they were now experiencing. It was what drove men like Casiano de Juan, a storekeeper from Capiz, Panay, to become guerril as. Though they had not been corral ed, starved, and tortured, they, too, had suffered abhorrent treatment at the hands of the Japanese. The visitors were rich and poor, educated and il iterate, old and young, but al told tales of poverty, oppression, and humiliation under the Japanese regime. Al Filipinos, the Americans learned, were forced to bow to the Japanese. If not, they received a vicious beating. Shofner befriended a young boy who was missing his fore and middle fingers, cut off by the Japanese so that he could not fire a rifle. If a woman resisted the advances of a Japanese soldier, they learned, she was severely beaten in public. “My daughters must not be defiled by the filthy Japanese,” one Filipino, a cultured refugee from Davao, told Hawkins. “I wil hide my family here in the interior until the Japs are driven out.”

The escapees, however, had no such luxury. It would be only a matter of time until the Japanese picked up the fugitives’ tracks. In fact, the sudden appearance of Sgt. Aquilino Baguilod on April 9 proved that their story had spread far and wide. It also served as evidence that the guerril a movement was in fact a sprawling entity, not just localized. Baguilod introduced himself as an emissary sent on behalf of Capt.

Claro Laureta of the 130th Regiment. The deference that Big Boy showed to Baguilod was immediately perceptible.

“[Laureta] is the leader of al people in this part of the country,” explained Baguilod. “He heard that you were here and sent me to invite you to come and see him.”

Though the request seemed more like an order than an invitation, the Americans communicated their intention to travel to the coast and procure a boat for a trip to Australia.

“The captain wil be
The One
to assist you,” countered Baguilod, tel ing them that it was a three- or four-day hike to Kapungagan.

“That’s a long way,” said McCoy.

“Yes, commander,” agreed the messenger. “But it wil be the direction you wish to go.”

Since any direction away from Dapecol seemed a good direction in which to travel, and Laureta seemed to be an authority figure who could make things happen, they accepted the invitation. They would leave the next morning.

Big Boy furnished sixteen guerril eros to serve as guides, armed escorts, and
cargadores
, that is, carriers of the Americans’ accumulated gifts, which now included a sixty-pound pig that “rode protestingly” hanging upside-down on a bamboo pole, remembered McCoy.

The party proceeded first to barrio Luna, four kilometers north of Lungaog and the location of a sugarcane plantation owned by Onofre Beldua. Beldua’s hospitality would rival that of Big Boy. Despite their endless eating, their food fixation seemingly grew even more powerful during this time. Consider Austin Shofner’s diary entry for April 10:

Hot coffee and bananas were served less than ½ hr. after our arrival. As I am writing this, I am listening to phonograph play the first American music I heard in a long time. For our noon meal we had corn with chicken—papaya and black eyed peas with basi (sugar wine). Pineapple desert. In the afternoon, we played bridge—read and listened to a 3 piece string band play native and popular music. In the afternoon we rambled around looking at the plantation and watching the sugar cook off. About 5:30 we had coffee, rice flour cake with molasses—real nice. For dinner we had rice with the pig we brought with us—the pig was cooked three ways—spare ribs, fried pork and another native way—very good. Tuba (much) was served with the meal and coffee and bananas after dinner. The moon was about ¼ new and the heaven was ful of stars. We retired at 9:45 for a very restful sleep.

An easy five-kilometer hike the fol owing morning brought them to Sampao—Lungaog’s sister vil age, whose barrio lieutenant, or mayor, was the brother of Lungaog’s chief civilian official—and another banquet. The inhabitants of each successive destination, it seemed, desired to outdo their predecessors in hospitality, a situation the escapees welcomed. Late in the afternoon, after they crossed a smal river in an outrigger banca, their movable feast final y reached Kapungagan, headquarters of Captain Laureta.

Surprisingly, they were welcomed not by Laureta, who was attending to affairs elsewhere in his district, but by the town’s mayor, Eligio David, a Davao businessman who had fled to the interior with his wife and five children when the Japanese landed. David’s hospitality would surpass that of al others.

The fun-loving Filipinos, they soon came to learn, would throw a fiesta, or party, on any pretext. In this particular case, as the twelve attractive Filipinas sent to their palatial quarters—the town’s municipal building—informed them, the fiesta was being held in their honor. Moving toward the music, the escapees were escorted in a torchlight procession to a plaza crowded with people and tables heaped with food.

Colored lanterns strung between trees, torches, and oil lamps arrayed throughout the jungle clearing lent a festive glow.

“Now this,” said a smiling Ed Dyess, “is the way to fight a war.”

Dyess was perhaps the only one capable of speaking. The others just stood, dumbfounded, waiting to wake up. “Less than a week earlier, we’d have cal ed a man insane if he had predicted our presence at a dance,” McCoy would write. It would take Grashio much longer, many years in fact, to find the appropriate words with which to describe the emotions they felt that night. “After twelve months of brutality, starvation, and degradation, an abrupt change to such hospitality left us midway between tears of gratitude and utter bewilderment.”

They sat down to a dinner of chicken and roast pig, which they washed down with copious amounts of tuba while being entertained by a conga dance featuring smal children and a hula dance by a pretty Filipina. Once lubricated, they mustered enough courage to join in the dancing. The Filipino men remained seated as a courtesy to the guests, and the Americans took off their bulky shoes before whirling their partners around the dirt dance floor. The crowd, however polite, could not help but snicker at the sight of Shofner’s red socks. It was good-natured kidding, but Grashio was not game.

“As a dancer I was no Arthur Murray so I drank tuba and regaled an admiring audience of teenagers and children with my exploits as a P-40 pilot perpetual y engaged in mortal combat with squadrons of vil ainous Japanese,” he recal ed. Grashio’s performance was an infamous traveling act destined for other children in other barrios. Complete with hand motions and vivid descriptions, each story would invariably begin with Grashio seated among his audience: “There I was in my crippled P-40 at 20,000

feet …”

After a group of girls sang a set of native bal ads, the hosts made a startling announcement: it was the guests’ turn. “We had a hasty consultation,” wrote McCoy, “realizing that this was a crisis. Our hosts might be offended if we failed to sing.”

As per usual, it was Dyess who valiantly stepped forward. Despite the fact that his drawling rendition of

“Beautiful, Beautiful Texas” was terribly off-key and the tiny band—which featured a trumpet, banjo, and guitar—struggled with the accompaniment, the applause was tremendous. Emboldened by Dyess, Paul Marshal stretched his vocal cords, too. Shofner then ascended the stage and proceeded to do his own version of the “Tennessee Stomp.” The forceful performance almost brought down the house—literal y.

At 2230, with the dance winding down, the crowd gathered and, at the request of Eligio David, sang

“God Bless America.” Once the moving tribute concluded, the crowd began to disperse. That’s when McCoy stepped forward.

“We’re not through yet,” he announced in a choked-up display of emotional extemporization. After asking the crowd to make some minor lyrical changes, he signaled for the miniature orchestra to resume playing, saying, “Let’s sing ‘God Bless the Philippines.’ ”

At the conclusion of the song, remembered Grashio, it mattered little whether one was Filipino or American, “there were no dry eyes afterward.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1943

Davao Penal Colony

Tears wel ed in the eyes of the POWs congregating outside the barbed wire boundaries of the special compound holding a group of prisoners. “Our friends who were working around the barracks came up with tears in their eyes and told us to take it like men, and that we were giving up our lives for other Americans, and that it was a wonderful way to die,” remembered Bert Bank. Major Maeda and a phalanx of rifle-toting guards—the firing squad, no doubt—goose-stepped into the compound at 0845.

Japanese military jurisprudence dictated that
someone
had to pay. In the tension-fil ed days fol owing the escape, the POWs at Dapecol had received regular news bul etins from the “manhunt front.” They had been repeatedly assured that the search party had picked up on the escapees’ trail, that the fugitives had been surrounded, that their recapture was imminent. Yet when Hozumi’s patrol returned empty-handed (with the exception, of course, of their own dead), it became apparent that either the swamp had proven more competent than the search party or that the escapees had achieved the impossible.