Escape From Davao (40 page)

On the afternoon of May 10, after lunch at Vicente Zapanta’s home in Daan-Lungsod, McClish promoted each of the remaining escapees one grade. Thus, by the orders typed by McClish’s adjutant on ruled school tablet paper, they official y became officers—brevet, or “bamboo grade”—in the Army of the United States, USFIP. Though de la Cruz and Jumarong exchanged their prison stripes for enlisted chevrons, perhaps the biggest leap was made by Marshal and Spielman, newly minted second lieutenants who were assigned to the 114th Regiment. The arrangement was confusing, but each escapee felt as though he owed a debt to the guerril as. “I don’t know how we can be officers in the Marine Corps and the Army at the same time,” remarked Dobervich, “but if it’s al right with McClish, I guess it’s al right with me.”

As their comrades rummaged for insignia and weapons, McCoy, Mel nik, and Childress boarded the
Athena.
They would be taking an indirect route to Misamis Occidental, stopping first at the town of Talakag in the northwest corner of Bukidnon Province to investigate a rumor.

“My intention,” McCoy wrote in his log, “was to see a Lt. Commander Parsons, USNR, who had been left here by submarine in March, on a special intel igence mission.”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 12–THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1943

Misamis Oriental, Bukidnon, Lanao, and Misamis Occidental Provinces
McCoy knew that the popular flagship of the guerril a navy was not a commissioned U.S. Navy vessel, but he had no objections with its designation as the USS
Athena.
Not that he would have dared say anything.

“The swarthy, husky members of the
Athena
crew needed only daggers in their teeth to make them look like pirates,” he commented.

The
Athena
, in McCoy’s words, was “the strangest flagship that ever flew the Stars and Stripes.”

Stretching forty feet from bow to stern with outriggers and two tal sail masts, Zapanta’s diesel- and wind-powered ship was equal parts yacht, gunboat, and Chinese junk. There was no delineation between steerage and first class: the
Athena
’s food supply of chickens, pigs, and even a cow mingled on the deck with the human passengers and crew, which Zapanta had divided into sailors and Marines in imitation of the U.S. Navy. Despite Zapanta’s hard brand of discipline, noted McCoy, his crew was fiercely loyal and

“would have attacked a Jap battleship if he had given the order.” Fortunately for the
Athena
and her passengers, there were no hostile encounters. The ship’s most formidable piece of armament was a homemade three-inch cannon mounted on the bow. It was fired by hammering on a nail, which set off a dynamite cap. Mel nik, the artil ery expert, asked a gunner about its range. “Seer,” came the proud reply,

“it fired so far we did not see.”

Zapanta guided the
Athena
from Medina by hugging the coast, but to reach El Salvador, the town closest to their ultimate destination, he would have to proceed across the breadth of Macajalar Bay, an area fil ed with Japanese traffic. The
Athena
departed an intermediate stop at Balingasag in the afternoon in order to reach El Salvador at dawn, but the wind blew up during the night, creating rough seas. Daylight revealed three large armed enemy transports, wel within range of observers. As the Americans ducked beneath the gunwales and covered up with burlap bags, Zapanta fol owed discreetly behind the convoy until the ships turned to Cagayan, then aimed the
Athena
toward El Salvador. Recal ed McCoy, “Had we left Balingasag an hour later we would probably have ended up in the middle of these three Japanese ships.”

From El Salvador, the Americans and their local guides set out on foot and horseback for Talakag, thirty miles due south. For two days they fol owed a ridgeline trail, past breathtaking waterfal s into the high plateau country of Bukidnon, territory that (if one could ignore the omnipresent coconut palm trees) closely resembled Great Plains farmland. The infinite cornfields and grassy hil s provided a stunning contrast with the jungles of weeks past. For McCoy, a Midwesterner, never had home seemed so close, yet so impossibly distant.

They ferried the Cagayan River and then boarded a bus that deposited them in Talakag, headquarters of the 106th Division commanded by Lt. Col. Robert V. Bowler, at about 1300. Bowler, a thirty-five-year-old former col ege economics professor, was hungry for information about his brother, Col. Louis Bowler, who had been on Corregidor. Mel nik reported that the elder Bowler had been in good health when last seen in Cabanatuan. Bowler then reciprocated with information of his own: he confirmed that a Navy officer named Parsons was indeed in this locality. And then as if to shroud the presence of Chick Parsons in the Philippines storm clouds arrived and rain fel .

The message reached Chick Parsons at the ranch where he was staying with a Jesuit missionary priest named Father Edward Haggerty. The sopping-wet courier unscrewed the cap on the bamboo tube that he had clenched in his teeth as he swam the raging Ipanan River. Parsons swiftly scanned the note, then readied to head out into the storm.

“You’l want to come, Padre,” he said. “These men have just escaped from the Davao Prison Camp.”

Despite their incredible story, the escapees did not make a good first impression on Haggerty. He seemed put off by the escapees’ insistence that they be immediately evacuated to Australia. “We needed good men here to help us, and we didn’t consider escaped prisoners any more heroic than the rest of us who had never surrendered,” wrote Haggerty, an active guerril a in spite of his priestly vows.

But Parsons understood the titanic effort it had taken to escape from the Japanese, and the escapees’

determination to help their stil captive comrades. He empathized with them in a way that only one had who shared nearly the same experiences could. Parsons, after al , was a member of their exclusive fraternity, although he could not tel them that. “Though outwardly frank,” recal ed Mel nik, Parsons “was most mysterious about his origin and mission.”

Neither McCoy nor Mel nik knew that Parsons, while playing the role of Panamanian consul, had witnessed their humiliating march down Dewey Boulevard. It’s unlikely that they would have believed the amazing story of how Parsons had managed not only to sneak his family out of the Philippines in a repatriation of diplomats, but, with the help of his son Peter, to smuggle a briefcase containing intel igence documents. Or how, just before boarding a Douglas DC-3 in Formosa, he had so thoroughly charmed the police commandant that the official requested that he “remember to tel the people at home,” referring to Panama, “the truth about Japanese hospitality.”

“Believe me,” promised Parsons, thinking of American authorities, “I’l certainly do that,
amigo
.”

Nor would the Americans have believed that he had managed to keep his true identity secret during voyages on neutral ships from Shanghai to Singapore to South Africa and, ultimately, to New York, where his escape had ended on August 29, 1942. After al , the FBI did not believe Parsons.

“I’l radio your story to Australia,” Parsons reassured McCoy and Mel nik. “MacArthur wil be glad to hear someone final y broke out of a Jap PW camp.”

Parsons’s war, in al actuality, had only just begun when he arrived in New York Harbor. Shortly after he began work on a joint Army-Navy intel igence-gathering plan, a telegram arrived at the Navy Department:

“SEND PARSONS IMMEDIATELY.” It was signed, “MACARTHUR.” Freshly promoted, Parsons trekked back across the Pacific to become the one-man office of Spyron, a derivative of the words “spy squadron,” a unit that had been created under the aegis of the Philippine Regional Section of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area. GHQ in Brisbane. There, Parsons convinced the Navy that using submarines to ferry supplies and agents to the Philippines would ultimately pay dividends with the establishment of coast watcher stations. He was joined by an Army officer named Charles Smith, who had effected his own astounding escape from Mindanao to Australia on a smal yacht. It was Smith who suggested that Mindanao be Spyron’s initial objective and that he accompany Parsons on the first of several trips to the occupied Philippines.

Some in GHQ thought that Spyron’s plans were a waste of time and resources, that Parsons was insane for agreeing to return. He had slipped through the grasp of the Japanese once; they would not let it happen again. But Parsons was not about to sit out his family’s personal war with Japan. His businessman brother-in-law, Thomas Jurika, had stayed behind to fight the Japanese in Cebu and Mindanao. Jurika’s older brother Steve, the former naval attaché in Tokyo, had briefed the Army B-25

pilots on

the USS
Hornet
prior to the Doolittle Raid. Parsons’s mother-in-law, Blanche Jurika, had remained in Manila and was working clandestinely with the resistance. Parsons was sure of himself and his mission, which was to set up a communications net, learn the extent of the guerril a movement, and determine the competence of its leaders.

He had been in the midst of that mission when the escapees arrived. He had planned on leaving that morning for Malaybalay to negotiate with a renegade Moro leader, so it was sheer luck that he was stil in Talakag. Parsons asked the Americans to wait. He promised that upon his return, he would take them to Misamis City and the mysterious Fertig. They agreed.

Later that evening, as Parsons and Haggerty swam their horses across the Ipanan River, they discussed what they had heard and learned. Once he had been able to absorb the whole sordid tale of the escapees’ imprisonment, Haggerty’s sympathies were squarely on their side. He told Parsons that he hoped McCoy and Mel nik “would get south and inflame America.” Parsons was optimistic about their chances to do so, but also guarded.

“They wil do some good,” he said, knowing what—or, more precisely, who—awaited them back in the States. “If they’re ever al owed to talk…. I tel you, because I argued with some of them, as Mel nick [sic]

and McCoy wil do. They are an unsentimental bunch.”

In Medina, it was hard to tel which traveled faster: the rumors of pending Japanese attacks or the crowds of panicky, evacuating civilians. Leo Boelens knew a retreat when he saw one. “Nips push a little on Tagoloan,” he wrote in his diary on May 21. “Maybe this is it al over again.”

Not long after McCoy and Mel nik’s departure, the word from agents in the enemy stronghold of Cagayan was that the Japanese were preparing for an expedition against Medina. “We get rumors like this al the time,” said an unruffled McClish. “If the Japs actual y make a move, we’l hear about it before they get here.”

Despite McClish’s confidence, the civilians had evacuated most of the coastal towns and barrios by late May. To American ears, the Filipino pronunciation of the word “evacuate” sounded more like

“bokweet.” They soon further Americanized it to “buckwheat,” which would become guerril a slang meaning to place as much distance between oneself and the Japanese as possible.

One could not fault the escapees had they wanted to buckwheat, too. Paul Marshal strol ed into McClish’s office one day holding a mimeographed leaflet that had been brought in by a Surigao-based spy. Printed in red ink, the flyer proffered a business proposal—of a sort: The commanding officer, Japanese Imperial Forces at Butuan, hereby offers a reward of 1,000

pesos to any loyal Filipino who wil deliver … the severed head of the American known as Paul Marshal . Al Filipinos are warned that any person who aids, comforts or harbors an American wil be put to death.

The notice, signed by a Japanese captain, meant that not only had the Japanese not given up on their pursuit of the escapees, but that the bamboo telegraph was a two-way communication device; informers had evidently reported the presence of the Americans in northern Mindanao.

Unfazed, Marshal drew up a leaflet of his own, decorated with a skul and crossbones, offering 1,000

pesos for the head of the Japanese captain. Fol owing Marshal ’s instructions, the intrepid Filipino tacked the flyer to the door of the captain’s house in Butuan one dark night.

Despite Marshal ’s brazen riposte, it did not take long for additional circulars promising rewards for the heads of the other members of the escape party to start appearing. It was unsettling that the Japanese always seemed to know where they were. “Apparently, they don’t want us in one piece,” remarked Dobervich wryly.

The Japanese were clearly closing in. The escapees hoped, for al of their sakes, that McCoy and Mel nik were also closing in on their goal. “I’m running at bowels,” bemoaned an il Boelens, and soon,

“probably at feet.”

Dawn had just broken over a seemingly stil slumbering Misamis City as McCoy, Mel nik, and Parsons made their way along weed-covered roads lined with run-down residences being reclaimed by the jungle.

It was Sunday, May 30, and there was not a living soul present, much less the typical welcome party.

Misamis City was more ghost town than guerril a capital. “Why did people abandon a town?” Mel nik recal ed. “Were they afraid of disease? Enemy attack? There was something scary about the ghostly structures; we trotted in silence.”

During the sixty-mile, one-week, land-sea voyage from Talakag, they had been competently conducted from one safe area to another, “like batons in a relay race,” said Mel nik. Their experiences in the charge of Bowler’s men had been nothing short of outstanding, and consistent with the treatment they had received from the guerril as since their first encounter with Big Boy’s men outside Dapecol. That was what made Fertig’s behavior so bizarre. While waiting for Parsons, McCoy had radioed Fertig to inquire about the messages sent from Anakan. Despite the fact that communication with Misamis City was easy, there had been no