Escape From Davao (52 page)

railed New York Sol Bloom, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “We’l hold the rats—from the Emperor down to the lowest ditch-digger—responsible for a mil ion years if necessary.”

In the ensuing week, the shockwaves rippled out from the nation’s capital. Americans of al ages, stripes, and stations expressed their shared outrage in their own ways. New York mayor Fiorel o La Guardia suggested that if the Mikado is the “true type of Japanese gentleman, let him, in keeping with the custom of his country, commit hara-kiri to prove it.” One of La Guardia’s constituents, a Bronx housewife, could manage only a few teeth-gritting words when asked her opinion of the Japanese:

“They’re stinkers.”

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard on January 29, nineteen-year-old Margaret Truman smashed a bottle of champagne off the bow of the newly completed USS
Missouri
. As the 45,000-ton battleship slid into the East River, her father, Missouri senator and future president Harry S. Truman, told the crowd of 26,000

that the “christening and launching of this greatest warship of al time il ustrates the decisive answer which the democracies of the world are making to the chal enge of the aggressor nations. May this great ship be an avenger to the barbarians who wantonly slaughtered the heroes of Bataan.”

Herby Funston, a young boy from Keota, Iowa, wrote General Marshal to tel him that he wanted to do more for the war effort than “sel ing and buying bonds and stamps and salvaging.” The Army chief of staff was evidently so moved that he took time to respond to Funston’s missive on February 2: “My dear Herby, I like your letter, the fact that you want to do your ful part in licking these Japs … [but] these things must be done, so somebody must do them and that seems to be your duty at the present time. But I sympathize with you in your desire to avenge the ‘nice kid’ from your town who became a prisoner in the Philippines.”

Security was added to the internment camps scattered throughout the West, a precautionary measure to prevent angry mobs from seeking retaliatory action. The threat, believed Western Defense Command chief Gen. Delos C. Emmons, was very real. After al , a forty-year-old Los Angeles hotel clerk was almost consumed by his burning hatred of the Japanese—literal y. The man, who had confessed during an arrest in January to setting more than 200 fires in “cheap Jap flop houses” since Pearl Harbor, was booked again on suspicion of arson after two fires had broken out in his own hotel fol owing the release of the atrocities story.

The news quickly went global. The
Chicago Tribune
was successful in arranging with the Associated Press for the distribution of the Dyess story to Cuban and South American newspapers, and by the first week of February two British newspaper groups, along with publications in Canada, were said to be bidding for the rights. The Soviets, though not at war with the Japanese, publicized the American atrocities stories.

In London, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden related tales of atrocities committed against Commonwealth citizens and military personnel to an enraged House of Commons. The most notable of these stories included the sinking of the unmarked hel ship
Lisbon Maru
, which had been carrying 1,800

British POWs from Hong Kong to Shanghai in October 1942. Nearly 850 of the prisoners had died in the disaster, many belowdecks after the Japanese had locked the hatches to prevent their escape. “The Japanese have violated not only the principles of international law but al canons of decent civilized conduct,” Eden said.

The Japanese responded to the Al ied accusations by claiming through the official news agency, Domei, that the charges were “a mere reoccurrence of the enemy’s vicious propaganda.” And then, abruptly abandoning the denials, Japan launched an inflammatory, if not self-incriminating, propaganda assault. “If the American and British leaders are so ready to raise a hue and cry over the ‘maltreatment’

of their war prisoners, why don’t they teach their men to stand up and fight to the finish?” prodded Tokyo radio. “The way the Americans threw up their hands at Corregidor and the way the British gave up at Singapore … surely shows that these men must have carried on their backs a pretty wide streak of yel ow.”

The ultimate significance of the escape was yet to be determined, but one thing was for certain: the secret was out. Somewhere, Ed Dyess was smiling.

Americans, riveted to and revolted by the Dyess story, received another sickening shock when the February 7 issue of
Life
hit newsstands. The issue, which contained an exclusive feature entitled “Death Was a Part of Our Life” authored by Cmdr. Melvyn McCoy, Lt. Col. Steve Mel nik, and Lt. Welbourn Kel ey, included photographs of al ten escapees plus artists’ conceptions of events related by the authors. The fifteen-page exposé was a sensation that at once rivaled and complemented the Dyess story by adding fuel to an already massive conflagration.

The indignation was not limited to the atrocities. Angered that Congress had been kept in the dark, Chairman Elbert D. Thomas of the Senate Military Affairs subcommittee announced that Army and Navy intel igence officers would be summoned to hearings. “My committee is going to get al the information it can through the proper channels,” said the Utah Democrat.

In the meantime, exclamations turned into question marks and

Americans—public officials, the press, and the public alike—began to speculate as to the reason for the strangely sudden announcement. Why had the story been released now, almost a ful year after the escape, and six months since the escapees’ homecoming? There is no single answer to that question.

An examination of both concrete and circumstantial evidence suggests that the story was released when it was for multiple reasons, or, at the very least, multiple, credible hypotheses.

President Roosevelt said at his February 1 press conference that his “first impulse” was to make the atrocities known to the public immediately after the escaped POWs returned to the United States, but that discussions with Britain and China resulted in withholding the stories for “humanitarian” reasons.

Interestingly, when meeting with reporters fol owing the release, Press Secretary Steve Early would cal this the “on-the-record” reason. Early did not elucidate upon any “off-the-record” reasons for the suppression of the story, but the implication that there was one or perhaps more “off-the-record”

reasons, as previously suggested, is noteworthy. Despite the doublespeak coming from the White House, the motive of protecting the
Gripsholm
’s mission—the main “humanitarian” reason—remains, in al likelihood, partial y legitimate.

The second reason, or piece of the political puzzle, had been strategical y set in place before the release. Just as one could not walk down the street, open a newspaper, or view a newsreel without being reminded of Japanese atrocities, it was no coincidence that the release appeared at the time of the Fourth War Loan Drive.

The War Finance Committee had been tasked with the purpose of engaging the American public to purchase bonds that would help the U.S. government finance the conflict. The first of what would be eight War Loan Drives began in November 1942; the Fourth War Loan Drive, with a target sales goal of $14

bil ion, had commenced on the 18th of January, barely ten days before the release of the atrocities story.

While Elmer Davis and Palmer Hoyt would argue that the timing of the release with the Fourth War Loan Drive was “purely coincidental,” a close examination arouses suspicion to the contrary.

Soviet successes on the Eastern Front, coupled with the surrender of Italy in early September 1943, brought clarity to a picture that had been muddled for the better part of two years: the European war would be ending in the foreseeable future, perhaps sooner than anyone had imagined. As Davis would note, this belief gave birth to a sense of complacency—stagnant bond sales and increased absenteeism in war plants served as solid indicators—during this pivotal period of the war. And it was none other than Hoyt who had claimed in 1943 that the responsibility of OWI was to provide accurate news information so that the public and industry could cooperate in war programs and drives. It should be as plainly obvious to any contemporary observer as it was to the powers-that-were at the time that some kind of perfect sales pitch, a reason for Americans to reach for their wal ets, was needed.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s men had been working on the problem for some time. “The men on the Treasury’s bond staff, committed to advancing sales in 1943 … utilized market research to develop improvements in their program,” wrote historian John Morton Blum. What the Treasury Department discovered was that Americans’ motivations for buying bonds had little to do with

“enthusiasm for the New Deal or the Four Freedoms, or even from a sense of national peril …

consumers’ preferences … cal ed emphatical y for an appeal to hatred.” It is not difficult to comprehend how the sudden appearance of several POWs with a blockbuster story that was al but guaranteed to arouse a slumbering nation must have seemed heaven-sent to a cash-strapped government waging an ultra-expensive global war. The release of the atrocity stories to coincide with the Fourth War Loan Drive was perhaps the perfect manifestation of an “appeal to hatred” and cannot be dismissed as coincidence.

Across the country, War Bond sales soared. In New York state, sales of Series E bonds, the type favored by most citizens and smal investors, exceeded $8 mil ion, twice the daily average, on the day of the atrocity story’s release. Sales of other types of bonds, like Series F and G, to wealthy individuals and companies, skyrocketed, too, with sales of Series F securities quadrupling. Treasury Department officials reported increases of nearly 100 percent in individual sales in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., and a national gain of $156 mil ion in a twenty-four-hour period from February 1 to 2

that was attributable to “mounting indignation over the Japanese atrocity reports.” In Maywood, Il inois, the suburban community twelve miles west of Chicago that was the home of the American Bataan Club, long lines of angry Americans waited for the bond sales office to open; when doors closed that evening, sales had increased 50 percent over the previous day’s total. In Indianapolis, Melvyn McCoy’s hometown, long lines were reported at downtown banks and post offices. Total sales on the day after the story’s release reportedly reached $2.6 mil ion, more than $1 mil ion above average. In Utah, nearly $900,000 worth of bonds were sold the day of the release, more than double any previous day’s total in the Beehive State. “The more figures we receive and the more people we talk to,” said Nevil Ford, executive manager of the New York State War Finance Committee, “the stronger is our substantiation of the fact that vastly stimulated bond buying is resulting from the Bataan disclosures.” These nationwide trends would continue throughout the remainder of the drive.

It was a team effort. After an impassioned address by Lt. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, commandant of the Marine Corps, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wal Street ponied up nearly $104

mil ion for war bonds. Fifty thousand Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts in the greater New York area were deputized by the Treasury Department to commence a doorbel -ringing sales drive. Singer Kate Smith kicked off a special around-the-clock bond sale broadcast on the CBS nationwide radio network at 8 a.m.

on February 1. Sixty volunteers working four-hour shifts fielded an average of five cal s per minute. By the time Smith signed off after her last appeal, a record-breaking total of more than $100 mil ion in bonds had been sold. Albert Einstein participated, too, by donating two manuscripts—one of which was his treatise on the theory of relativity—which would be auctioned off and the proceeds added to the drive.

The biggest celebrity presence during the Fourth War Loan and subsequent drives, which remains to be discussed in detail, were those men responsible for the revelation itself. In a staggering succession of events, the stateside escapees had their gag orders removed and were prodded onto the national stage.

During the first weekend of the announcement, for example, Sam Grashio was in high demand for newspaper interviews and made several national radio appearances on the Mutual and NBC networks.

McCoy, too, was drafted by the Treasury Department. In a giant, ful -page advertisement in the January 31 edition of the
New York Herald Tribune
, McCoy implored Americans to support the Fourth War Loan Drive. Beneath a large photograph of a grim-faced McCoy, there was a title that read, “Japanese Barbarism Speaks to the American People.”

Jap brutality is beyond description…. I urge al of you—those with brothers, sons and fathers who are seeing action in the Pacific Theater—to back them up by buying Bonds so that they would have the necessary supplies to avenge our men who have suffered at the hands of the Japs. There is no way we who stay at home can avenge this revolting cruelty. What we can do is pathetical y little. If al of us put every cent we can into War Bonds, it would stil be only the humblest gesture to the boys who are doing the fighting, the suffering, the dying.

It remains unknown whether the words were actual y McCoy’s, but ful -page advertisements complete with photographs and government-approved copy do not appear in large metropolitan newspapers overnight. A significant amount of time, undoubtedly several weeks’ worth, would have been necessary to coordinate numerous government agencies, to concentrate resources and to organize, publicize, and ultimately capitalize on such a situation. It was no wonder then that Gen. Clayton Bissel had told Col.