Escape From Davao (45 page)

Ashford was the perfect place to quarantine Dyess and his story. Located 250 miles from Washington in southeastern West Virginia, the resort had first served as a detention center for enemy diplomats.

Before war’s end, more than 24,000 Army patients would be treated there. But for Dyess, Ashford was no sanctuary. Although one needed a special pass to gain access to him, he had nevertheless been besieged for two weeks by what one newspaper would cal a parade of “literary sharks, Hol ywood stooges, and syndicate agents.”

He had the Associated Press and wel -meaning friends to thank for that. The Dyess legend might have begun with his raid on Subic Bay, but in the States stories about him had been appearing since he had passed into captivity. The earliest appeared in the
New York Times
on July 26, 1942. In that article, correspondent Byron Darnton told of being summoned to an Australian field hospital. “I didn’t want you to come to see me so I could talk about myself,” Lt. Ben Brown told Darnton, “I want to tel you about Captain Ed Dyess. I don’t think his story has been told back in the United States and it ought to be.”

Brown briefed Darnton on Dyess’s exploits, and Darnton relayed the story to the
Times
Manhattan headquarters. Ensuing stories effectively built up Dyess’s legend. Some of his visitors had informed him that arrangements had already been made for the publication of his story, regardless of his cooperation.

He summoned his wife’s attorney, August Meyer, to deal with his unwanted visitors. Al Dyess wanted was to tel his story and return to the Pacific in the cockpit of a fighter plane as soon as possible. Then Marajen Dyess remembered that the
Chicago Tribune
, one of the nation’s largest, as wel as most powerful, daily newspapers, had been the first to request an interview with her husband.

Meyer contacted Walter Trohan, the
Tribune
’s Washington bureau chief, and Trohan transmitted the facts of the situation to assistant managing editor Don Maxwel in Chicago. Wasting little time, Maxwel selected Charles Leavel e, an experienced, middle-aged reporter, to accompany him on a trip to West Virginia. Maxwel arrived at Dyess’s bedside and told him that the
Tribune
would beat any offer. But, as Dyess explained, money was not the most important consideration.

“The thing I must do—the thing I’m going to do—is to tel the American people what the Japs have done and are doing to their sons and husbands and brothers out in the Philippines. I want the American people to understand Japanese psychology and the way they make war. I am going to tel my story through the medium that wil get it to the most people most effectively.”

“We gave him the facts,” Leavel e would write. “The best of the magazines could tel his story to two or three mil ion people a week. The
Chicago Tribune
and associated newspapers could tel it to 12 to 14

mil ion people a day.” Maxwel also told Dyess that he would not have to pay for Leavel e’s services. This saccharine concession was not lost on Dyess, who had, in fact, offered what amounted to a disclaimer in his deposition. “I had tried to put into words some of the things that I have experienced and observed during these past months, but I fail to find words adequate to an accurate portrayal. If any American could sit down and conjure before his mind the most diabolical of nightmares, he might perhaps come close to it, but none who have not gone [through] it could possibly have any idea of the tortures and the horror that these men are going through.”

The
Tribune
offered $21,000, only $1,000 more than the highest standing offer from
Collier’s
, but Maxwel and Leavel e had impressed Dyess.

“It’s a deal,” said Dyess, raising himself off his pil ow to extend his right hand. “In the last few days al I’ve heard is talk about percentages on this, cut-ins on that, and slices of something else. Nobody would talk about how they were going to present this story … or about the number of people that would read it.

That’s al I’m interested in. I don’t care about money and apparently you don’t either. I want the story told and that is what you seem to want above everything else. We’l start work as soon as you can fix it up in Washington.”

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9–TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1943

Washington, District of Columbia

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

September 9, 1943

SECRET

MEMORANDUM FOR:

The Secretary of War.

The Secretary of the Navy.

Subject: Japanese Atrocities—Reports of by Escaped Prisoners.

1. I agree with your opinion that any publication of Japanese atrocities at this time might complicate the present and future missions of the GRIPSHOLM and increase the mistreatment of prisoners now in Japanese hands. I request, therefore, that you take effective measures to prevent the publication or circulation of any stories emanating from escaped prisoners until I have authorized a release.

2. It might be wel for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make recommendation as to the moment when I should inform the country of the mistreatment of our nationals.

s/FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Copy to: Admiral Leahy

Mindanao’s bamboo telegraph had nothing on wartime Washington. So fast did news travel—even of top secret White House memoranda—that the ink had hardly dried on FDR’s signature when an alarmed Don Maxwel learned of the executive moratorium on atrocity stories. Maxwel cal ed Walter Trohan.

Trohan, in turn, dialed up Brig. Gen. Alexander Surles, chief of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations. Trohan reached Surles at 5 p.m., September 9.

“I wanted to put a couple of things up to you because I know you wil be fair and honest and want to do the right thing,” opened Trohan. “Between you and me, we want the prestige of releasing it…. That’s laying it completely and coldly on the table.”

Trohan then suggested that until publication permission was granted, only three copies of the story—in addition to Dyess, one each for the Army and
Chicago Tribune
—would be printed.

“Nothing is going to happen on this thing for at least six weeks,” Surles assured him.

“Yes, but we’d like to spend about that much time writing it, if it could be arranged.”

“I’l see what they say on it and let you know.”

After Trohan and Surles hung up, the discussion about what would eventual y be cal ed “the Dyess story,” as wel as the larger subject of censorship, began in earnest.

On the home front during the dark days of early 1942, before the advent of ration stamps and gasoline stickers, America’s first chronic shortage was war news. Censorship restrictions were responsible for the information famine, and though these restrictions originated from the highest levels of the military and the civilian government, two government agencies were largely responsible for waging the news war: the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information, more commonly referred to by its initials, OWI.

These agencies were separate entities and their missions entirely different.

Censorship, headed by Byron Price, the former executive editor of the Associated Press, was tasked with reading, evaluating, and editing news content before it appeared in the nation’s print publications and radio broadcasts. Whereas Censorship was largely a filter between writers and commentators on one side and the country’s printing presses and microphones on the other, OWI was charged, in the words of President Roosevelt, who signed the agency into existence with Executive Order 9182, “with the duty of formulating and carrying out information programs designed to facilitate the development of an informed and intel igent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, aims and activities of the Government.” OWI, in so many words, was the public relations arm of the wartime U.S. government.

The mission of OWI chief Elmer Davis, a popular CBS commentator, was extraordinarily difficult. As
Time
magazine explained, Davis and those at OWI had, in effect, taken an oath “to tel the truth, but not the whole truth about the U.S. to its friends and enemies, and to neutrals abroad.” Davis, a fifty-something Hoosier with horn-rimmed glasses, was the quintessential American journalist—Edward R.

Murrow cal ed him “fair and tough-minded.” He would have to fight not only enemy propaganda abroad, but public misconceptions (the residual effects of American propaganda during the First World War), Washington policymakers, and military brass at home, al while trying to keep a lid on internal squabbles.

Though the tide of war seemed to be turning in America’s favor in the fal of 1943, Davis, and Price to a certain extent, were steadily losing ground in their efforts to educate the American people.

So stringent were the censorship regulations that it was not until the September 20, 1943, issue of
Life
—a ful twenty-one months since Pearl Harbor—that the public saw the first images of dead U.S.

servicemen in the war. Previously, thousands of images captured by combat photographers had been locked in a War Department vault known as the “Chamber of Horrors.” Written accounts of battles were also edited to eliminate gory details. In order to foster optimism, authorities believed that it was best to withhold the truth concerning the state of the Al ied war effort, not just the casualty statistics and strategic failures, but also the visual proof of the dead and maimed bodies that was real war. The Office of Censorship had asked American journalists and media outlets to “lay off” reporting atrocity stores as early as February 1942.

The government, mindful of the effect on the public of the most recent war news from the Philippines, had no wish to reopen old emotional wounds at this time. The news of Bataan’s surrender had been devastating when final y delivered in ful , deflating detail in the spring of 1942. A funereal gloom had shrouded the country as newspapers, radio, and newsreels revealed that approximately 36,000 U.S.

troops were believed to have been surrendered to the Japanese, qualifying the defeat as the largest and most ignominious in U.S. military history. The reverberations caused by the capitulation had rippled through the nation. It was not long after the fal of the Philippines that Americans began to question the

“Europe First” strategy. A Brooklyn man sent $100 to Secretary of War Henry Stimson with the stipulation that the money be used to purchase “bul ets or bayonets to avenge Bataan.” Perhaps the most noteworthy national response was the formation of grassroots organizations designed to lobby for action in the Pacific and for POW support. Among many others, there was the MacArthur Club of Fort Worth, Texas, the American Bataan Club of Maywood, Il inois, the Sponsors of Philippine Heroes in Hol ywood, California, the Philippine Society of Kansas in Wichita, and the Philippine Hero Club of St. Joseph, Missouri. Foremost, however, was the Bataan Relief Organization, created by Dr. V. H. Spensley, an Albuquerque dentist whose son was a Japanese POW. Within months of the Philippines disaster, the BRO would claim more than one mil ion members in affiliate chapters nationwide.

Despite the efforts of these organizations, the martyrs of Bataan and Corregidor faded from the national consciousness in 1943. As the war in Europe took priority in terms of strategic planning, personnel, supplies, and media coverage, it seemed to many Americans, among them Mrs. August Mensching, a member of the American Bataan Clan from Des Plaines, Il inois, that “too many people have forgotten that there was a Bataan.”

Perhaps some occupying the loftiest levels of the government would have preferred that. In a telephone conversation with one of General Marshal ’s aides on September 14, General Surles stated his belief that the mounting confusion concerning Roosevelt’s memorandum and the buzz in official Washington behind the Dyess story were “al tied up with a great many factors, including the visit of the GRIPSHOLM and other things.”

The
Gripsholm
was a merchant ship of neutral Swedish registry that was carrying medical supplies and food for Al ied POWs in the Pacific. The U.S. government was worried that publicizing Japanese atrocities might jeopardize the delivery of those supplies. The government was also concerned about the possible reaction of the volatile Japanese to any atrocity claims on Al ied POWs. But there were other reasons behind the executive suppression of Dyess’s and any other atrocity stories.

While civilians, some segments of the press, and certain high-ranking brass clamored for action against the Japanese, the Pacific war remained the stepchild of the global conflict. Stories about the war with Germany dominated front pages, while the Pacific war was relegated to the inside pages.

Worse, the Pacific theater was working on a shoestring budget. In December 1943, the U.S. Army had slightly more than 900,000 men deployed in the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters, as opposed to nearly 1.5 mil ion men in the European, Mediterranean, and North African theaters. And only a fraction of supplies was al otted to the Pacific. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, an outspoken critic of the Europe First strategy since the Arcadia Conference of late 1941 and early 1942, estimated that in late 1943, despite the fact that most of the noteworthy battles of the war thus far had taken place in the Pacific, only 15

percent of the prodigious amount of supplies rol ing off American assembly lines was reaching the Pacific. King believed that American industry was capable of producing enough war matériel for simultaneous offensives against Germany and Japan; he also thought Britain was shirking her responsibilities as an al y in the Pacific struggle.