Escape From Davao (54 page)

—coordinated with ensuing War Bond drives ensured that Americans’ memories did not lapse. There was a postage stamp for the Federated Organizations for Bataan Relief that featured wounded POWs suffering behind barbed wire—“We wil not let them down,” read the tagline. Among the many posters designed to incite Americans was one that featured a solemn soldier holding his doughboy-style helmet while asking, “Do you remember me? I was at Bataan.” A line at the bottom reminded the reader to “BUY

WAR BONDS.” Another poster used the Death March as a way to implore Americans to stay focused on their jobs. Above an artist’s depiction of prisoners being led into captivity, a question asked, “What are YOU going to do about it?” Below a foreground il ustration of a sneering Japanese soldier beating a POW with a rifle butt and a reprint of one of the earliest Death March headlines came a direct command:

“Stay on the job until every MURDERING JAP is wiped out!”

The message, by and large, would be received. Thanks to the efforts of the escapees, the war had final y become personal. January 28 would prove the antidote to the complacency epidemic that had infected much of the nation. Whether it was buying more War Bonds, donating more blood, combating absenteeism in war plants, scrimping and saving a little more, and complaining about rationing and other sacrifices a little less, Americans seemed more aware of what was demanded of them and better prepared for the long road ahead. And it would be long.

The victories at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal had enabled the United States to blunt Japanese advances, and the advantage held by the United States in resources and industrial capability would assure its armed forces strategic dominance in the Pacific. Nevertheless the nation seemed a long way from total victory. “ Let us face the facts and admit that after two years of war Japan is the victor,” Carlos Romulo told the Hearst newspapers. “Out of 1,366,000 square miles of land she has grabbed we have only recaptured 160,150 square miles. We have been fighting 3,000 miles from the Japanese mainland, have advanced only 200 miles and have taken only 377 Jap prisoners.” Using his January 26 birthday as a marker,
Newsweek
noted the sluggish progress being made by MacArthur: on the occasion of his sixty-third birthday on January 26, 1943, MacArthur’s forces were heavily invested in Eastern New Guinea, some 2,500 miles from Manila; one year later, they had advanced only 240 miles closer to his stated objective. In 1944, one newspaperman examined the distances involved, the logistical and political constraints facing U.S. forces in the Pacific, and remarked that “at this pace, we won’t get to Tokyo until 1960.”

Good news or bad, Americans would now know where they stood. The
Detroit Free Press
would hail the atrocities’ story as “the most important piece of journalism to come out of this war.” And perhaps it was. As Hoyt explained in
American
magazine, the release of the atrocities’ story was a pivotal victory for the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment over the oppression of officialdom. After Pearl Harbor, a

“precedent” had been set “for withholding and delaying al kinds of information, which could, if continued, make of us—the best informed people on earth—the least informed…. That kind of censorship lul s us into indifference and may, if we put up with it, destroy our freedom.”

Instead, thanks to the Dapecol escapees and a handful of dedicated journalists, a new precedent had been established. War news for the most part would no longer be suppressed or else parceled out in portions at the whim of the government or powerful officials. “The breaking of the Bataan story was tremendously important,” Hoyt later declared to a fel ow editor in his private correspondence, “because it opened the way for other stories.”

In the war-torn Pacific, news of the Dapecol escape and release of the atrocities story affected the fighting men. “In this theatre there is no doubt what is the most widely read and best remembered story ever to appear in
Life
,” remembered photographer Carl Mydans. Whether it was the
Life
or Dyess version of the atrocities, the story traveled throughout the Pacific Theater of Operations and China-Burma-India theaters, from South Pacific islands to Australia and mainland China—where there were Americans, there was the story.

Perhaps no nation needed a bigger boost than the occupied Philippines. For months, one copy of the February issue of
Life
, brought in by submarine, traversed Mindanao. Like the escapees, it traveled by banca and over jungle trails. In barrios, remote outposts, and large towns, Filipinos recognized the photos of the escaped POWs and beamed with pride and shared accomplishment. Each morning, the guerril a padre, Father Edward Haggerty, would take the tattered issue to mass; in the afternoons it was circulated at market. When eager crowds assembled at the cock pits, a sergeant was assigned to turn the pages while soldiers kept the masses from pressing too close. Stil , the worn periodical, often damp with jungle rain, always returned to him “with more loose pages, more tears, more dirty fingerprints.”

Two men, recal ed Haggerty, were permitted to peruse the magazine at their leisure: Paul Marshal and Bob Spielman. “They both expressed satisfaction at knowing now that the people back home had learned about the Jap treatment of our people,” Haggerty wrote. As one Spyron operative claimed, the ragged copy of
Life
was “a symbol, of joy to many, and a satisfaction to others … a tangible 1944 link with the U.S.A.; the first most of them here had had since 1942.” It would prove not only a tangible link to America, but a bridge to future victories.

And what of those fighting a day-to-day battle for their lives, the prisoners of war stil held captive by the Japanese? Would the revelation have any positive effect, as believed by Ed Dyess and the other escapees, on their plight? Hanson Baldwin, for one, was not optimistic. “Whether or not this course wil be effective in relieving our prisoners of some of their misery is doubtful,” wrote Baldwin in the
New York
Times
. “But it is certain that the policy of ‘suffer in silence’ has ended.” That much was true. The escapees had at the very least successful y accomplished part of their mission: lifting the curtain of silence that the Japanese had closed across the Philippines in 1942.

As time would reveal, there would be consequences. It was probably with great satisfaction in the spring of 1944 that Melvyn McCoy made a broadcast via shortwave radio that he hoped would reach his former comrades in captivity. “ Be of good cheer,” McCoy’s message read. “Your hour of deliverance wil not be long delayed. Meanwhile, I have reason to believe your stay in prison camps is to be made more bearable. The Japanese government recently announced that it was preparing to permit International Red Cross and Y.M.C.A. to al eviate the horrible conditions that prevailed in Japanese camps in the past.”

Feeling the weight of world opinion, the Japanese had been forced into action. In March 1944, the Imperial vice-minister of war sent the fol owing edict to al POW camp commanders: In light of the recent intensified enemy propaganda warfare, if the present condition continues to exist, it wil needlessly add to the hostile feelings of the enemy and it wil also be impossible for us to expect the world opinion to be what we wish it to be. Such wil cause an obstacle to our prosecution of moral warfare. Not only that, it is absolutely necessary to improve the health condition of POW’s from the standpoint of using them satisfactorily to increase our fighting strength.

POW historian E. Bartlett Kerr added that “this admonition was fol owed by instructions to be sure that the prisoners were given their ful al owance of food and clothing and that efforts were made to improve medical care.” As the decree indicated, Japan’s decision to improve the lives of its prisoners was not entirely motivated by shame nor by a desire to right past wrongs. Japan’s leadership was more preoccupied with propaganda and tapping the deep labor pool of prisoners to prop up the crumbling war effort. So mistreatment continued, as did the deaths. Al the same, the escapees had, to a certain extent, correctly gauged Japanese psychology. They had forced their former captors into demonstrating at least some semblance of humane treatment, resulting in the saving of lives. While a shocking percentage of Al ied prisoners—37 percent—would ultimately perish at the hands of the Japanese it was probably due in part to the Dapecol escapees that the number was not significantly higher. (In comparison, only one percent of Al ied POWs—excluding Russian prisoners—held by Germany died during the period of their confinement.)

Though the remaining imprisoned defenders of the Philippines could not have known it at the time, the relief columns that they had dreamed of in 1942 had final y arrived, albeit the relief, in the most indirect way, had arrived in the form of newspaper columns, syndicated stories, magazine features, and editorial cartoons. The escape from the Davao Penal Colony had proved that not only was the American pen mightier than the Japanese samurai sword, but that perhaps the most important weapons in America’s arsenal were its typewriters, printing presses, microphones, radios, and cal s of corner newsboys, as wel as the most powerful weapon of al , an infuriated, wel -informed, and galvanized civilian population.

Even so, an overwhelming number of the American prisoners stil in Japanese hands, most of whom had nearly two more years of captivity awaiting them, would not learn of the Dapecol escape nor have any inkling what it meant to them, their country, and the war. And though many of these captives would perish, the escape and the story of the escape was nevertheless a victory—one of the most important if least known of the entire war. A victory won by twelve extraordinary men who dreamed, then dared to attempt, and then ultimately accomplished what had seemed impossible.

We’ll have our small white crosses by and by

Our cool, green lawns, our well-spaced, well-cared trees

Our antique cannons, muzzles to the sky,

Our statues and our flowers and our wreaths.

The release of the atrocities story was significant for many reasons, but above al it signaled the successful conclusion to the escapees’ epic quest. “I felt very satisfied,” Jack Hawkins would say,

“because I knew the story was worldwide. I felt very good that we had done al we could do.”

Yet in early 1944, there was stil plenty of war left. The paths that each escapee took to V-J—“Victory over Japan”—Day were extensions of their escape odyssey, divergent, yet sometimes intersecting, and fil ed with adventures gratifying and depressing, bewildering and banal, but in the end, enduring.

Sam Grashio had been Ed Dyess’s understudy, and after Dyess’s death, his replacement: upon Dyess’s death, Grashio’s orders were changed again, transforming him from squadron leader to Treasury Department spokesman.

For much of the next two years, he traveled the country on the War Bond circuit, speaking everywhere from Spokane to Jersey City, where he gave fifteen speeches in one exhausting day. He spoke in churches, schools, theaters, factories, mil s, and shipyards, before Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, chambers of commerce, the Red Cross, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the YMCA, and, of course, the Bataan Relief Organization. No audience was too smal or too large—he addressed a crowd of 50,000 that had gathered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles to jointly commemorate Easter and Bataan Day

—and, according to Grashio, “no publicity gimmick was left unused.” At one munitions plant he posed for a photograph next to a 400-pound bomb to which he had affixed his signature and a message for General Tojo: “In appreciation of your hospitality.”

While the size of the crowd or the location might change, Grashio’s speech was the same. He condemned the Japanese loudly and vehemently—one of his favorite, crowd-pleasing lines, which had been written for him by Colonel Frank Capra, the director who was then making training films for the Signal Corps, was “I can’t tel you very much about the education or the training of the Japs, but I can tel you what the result is. The finished product is a lying, rotten, bul ying son-of-a-bitch!” He would then exhort his audience to do their part, lest his long-suffering comrades “wil al perish miserably at the hands of the cruelest captors in the world.” The results varied as little as the speeches. “Large crowds attended the war bond ral ies everywhere, accounts of the Death March invariably left many listeners crying, and bond sales skyrocketed,” he remembered.

Fawned over by politicians, corporate sponsors and military brass, Grashio rubbed elbows with people like Gen. Hap Arnold, financier Bernard Baruch, actress Brenda Marshal , actor Pat O’Brien, singer Bing Crosby, boxer Jack Dempsey, and other celebrities. It was al too mind-boggling. Scarcely months earlier, Grashio had been a starving, shivering, suffering slave laborer in rags. Now he had his own plane and personal secretary. He was even the subject of an adventure comic strip. “Everywhere I went I was treated as a hero, given awards, asked to speak, taken to expensive nightclubs, fed steaks, plied with drinks, introduced to famous people, and photographed endlessly,” he recal ed. But Grashio would not al ow himself to be blinded by the glare of the klieg lights or the flashbulbs. “Despite it al , the sense of frustration never left me. Every time I ate another steak in another plush night club with another Big Name I thought of the starving prisoners left behind to a fate stil

unknown.”

Much to the dismay of his handlers, Grashio began to devote more time to the inquiries he continued to receive from those hoping to learn something about the fate of their loved ones in the Philippines. Many waited in long lines for Grashio to complete his speeches; others rushed him with photographs and questions, pleading for answers. Grashio considered the bond tour rewarding, but felt trying to answer the innumerable requests was “the most permanently satisfying thing I did during the remainder of the war.”