Escape From Davao (55 page)

But that did not mean it was easy. He sat for hours scanning photographs, trying to recal faces and names. It was painful y difficult for him when he was unable to identify an individual or provide some piece of information to an anxious mother or wife. But there were moments that made it al worthwhile. Once, in Seattle, a line of information seekers stretched from the entrance of Grashio’s hotel down the block. He had not had much luck on this day until the parents of John Arthur Davis, an enlisted man in the 21

Pursuit, presented him with a picture of their son. “I want you to wait here,” Grashio told them. “I want to talk to you after everyone has gone through.” Later, Grashio told the Davis family that he had seen their son being beaten with an ax handle and dragged into a burial shack at one of the Luzon POW camps.

But, Grashio recal ed, the next day Davis crawled out alive and was stil alive as far as he knew. The news buoyed Davis’s parents until the day their son returned home.

The best news of the war, however, was not Grashio’s to deliver. That honor went to Bert Bank, who was reunited with Grashio in San Francisco in early 1945. Bank, along with 500 others, had been liberated from Cabanatuan by Army Rangers in a daring January raid. The two friends caught each other up on everything that had happened since the escapees had disappeared into the jungle that Sunday morning nearly two years earlier. Grashio was relieved to learn that none of the Dapecol prisoners had been executed by Major Maeda. “That news lifted a cloud that had hung over me,” Grashio would write.

At war’s end, Grashio would find himself back at Hamilton Field, welcoming home prisoners of war from the Pacific Theater. He retired from the Air Force in 1965, reaching the rank of colonel, and then served as the assistant to the president of Gonzaga University until 1977. In the 1980s, Grashio would meet and befriend the man who almost shot him out of the sky on the first day of the war, Japanese fighter legend Saburo Sakai. Grashio passed away in 1999.

In early 1944, the Marines discovered that evading their fame was a chal enge that rivaled evading the Japanese on Mindanao. Each was given two-month’s leave, but the time was largely spent speaking at bond ral ies, dodging reporters, and answering the letters and cal s from prisoners’ relatives that invariably found them at their residences. Mike Dobervich and Jack Hawkins agonized over lengthy, sugarcoated replies to these relatives, but Austin Shofner remained his usual, blunt self. “If I knew about it, I said, ‘yes, your son was kil ed.’ … I told it straight,” he would say. “Nobody ever suggested I play ring around the rosie.”

One task that Shofner relished was reconnecting with University of Tennessee footbal coach Robert Neyland. Shofner told Neyland that it was the coach’s training and maxims that had enabled him to return home alive. He reportedly caused the tough old coach’s eyes to wel up when he told him, “You always taught us to play for the breaks, and when one comes your way, score. That’s what I did.”

Jack Hawkins found his new fame flattering, yet ultimately a nuisance. Hawkins had married his fiancée, Rhea, in Annapolis just after Christmas 1943 and was inundated with so many media and information requests that the newlyweds were forced to flee Fort Worth for Detroit in hopes of enjoying some semblance of a honeymoon. But it was not until the couple relocated to Quantico, where Hawkins was reunited with Dobervich and Shofner at the USMC staff and command officers school, that they were able to enjoy a somewhat normal life. Even then, the reprieve, not to mention the Marines’ reunion, was abridged.

Upon graduation, Hawkins received a most peculiar assignment: Hol ywood. He was assigned to be a military adviser to Col. Frank Capra. Hawkins spent several weeks working on what he cal ed “the film business,” as wel as hobnobbing with some of Hol ywood’s biggest stars. Capra invited Hawkins to cocktail parties and even included him in late night bul sessions during which time Capra and his col eagues kicked around scripts. None of those stories, of course, could compare with what Hawkins had just lived through. He recal ed Capra and the other “Hol ywood-types” being riveted by his account of the Dapecol escape. “A movie should be made out of this,” Capra told Hawkins.

After hearing Hawkins tel the story over lunch at the Brown Derby, Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century–Fox studios, agreed. Zanuck drew up a contract: Hawkins would receive a $10,000 option payment and then $75,000 when the ful manuscript was approved by military censors. Hawkins returned to Quantico and spent many a late night formulating his story. Despite his efforts, the War Department refused to clear the 377-page work, ostensibly for fear of compromising guerril a operations on Mindanao.

At least Hawkins could keep his $10,000 option, which he dutiful y divided among the escapees. The escape was proving to be a lucrative venture. In addition to receiving equal instal ments from
Life
amounting to $5,000 per man, there were payments from book deals negotiated by Dyess, McCoy, and Mel nik. The
Chicago Tribune
series later became
The Dyess Story,
and the
Life
article
Ten Escape
from Tojo
in book form. Both became bestsel ers. McCoy reportedly sold the movie rights to
Ten Escape
from Tojo
to Republic Pictures and Dyess’s estate settled on an agreement with another studio, but no motion picture on the Dapecol escape was ever made.

While getting rich had certainly never been a goal, getting revenge on their captors had been. Among the Marines, Dobervich and Shofner would have the earliest opportunity. Fighting with the 1st Marine Division, both participated in the Battle of Peleliu in September 1944, which had the highest casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific war. Shofner, now a lieutenant colonel, would win his second Purple Heart leading an assault battalion ashore. When the battle entered its closing stages, the Marines were charged with flushing obstinate Japanese from caves and fortifications. “I would say a lie if I said I didn’t enjoy this,” Dobervich told a war correspondent. “I am not a cruel man. I would treat them kindly if they surrendered to me. But I am glad they want to fight it out.”

After stints aboard the carrier
Philippine Sea
and the battleship
New Jersey
, Dobervich would command the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion during the Korean War. Retiring from the Marine Corps in 1954, Beaver Dobervich kept busy by running a food processing business, working at the Fargo, North Dakota, YMCA, and teaching Sunday school until his death in 1997.

Shofner retired as a brigadier general in 1959 and returned to Shelbyvil e, Tennessee, where he raised five sons and managed finance and insurance businesses. Just as Shofner kept the escape party from fracturing in the swamp, he did his best to keep the group together in the decades fol owing the escape by cal ing many of the participants on the April 4 anniversary of their breakout. Shofner’s passing in 1999

was noted in a
New York Times
obituary.

• • •

“When we escaped, wel , our story was real y just beginning,” Paul Marshal believed. Marshal and Bob Spielman, newly minted guerril a officers, wasted little time using the Surigao-based 114th Infantry Regiment as a vehicle for revenge. “We went around and gathered up anybody that had the same feeling about the Japanese that we did,” said Spielman. In between assaults and ambushes—which he planned aboard his mobile command post, a launch cal ed the
So What
—Marshal also continued to wage his paper war, trading incendiary notes and leaflets with the local Japanese commander who repeatedly requested his surrender.

“Bob Spielman basical y took over combat operations when [the 114th] got so big,” said Marshal . “I had a lot to do. [Clyde Childress] wrote and told me to get my ass off my boat and quit chasing Japs and start running my operation.” That operation was intel igence gathering, the guerril as’ primary mission as assigned by GHQ. Spielman admitted that his and Marshal ’s early actions were “not significant militarily.

It did great things for my ego, but MacArthur wanted information.” So, at the time, Childress’s pleas fel on deaf ears. “Like al the other orders we got that we didn’t like, we didn’t pay any attention to it,” he added.

And then they heard from Steve Mel nik. Mel nik had been running the Philippine Section of G-2 for GHQ, an assignment that tasked him with coordinating espionage nets and gathering information on Japanese troop strengths and dispositions everywhere from Aparri to Zamboanga. In late 1943 and early 1944, however, Mel nik would spend an excessive amount of time on a pet project that had taken on a life of its own: the breakout of POWs from Dapecol.

The plan was structured around Capt. Harold Rosenquist, a MIS-X (Military Intel igence Service, X-section) officer in his late twenties who had been trained in the latest escape and evasion techniques.

Rosenquist would be inserted into the Philippines on what was essential y a fact-finding mission, to make contact with both the guerril as and the POWs in order to ascertain the best way to liberate the camp. It natural y fel to Marshal and Spielman to provide the latest intel igence. Though he would not be able to steal any chickens from the poultry farm, Spielman would get close enough to map the penal colony and Japanese defensive positions, as wel as leave cigarettes and chocolate bars carrying the message “I Shal Return” for the POWs.

Rosenquist was to depart in February, but internal discord in GHQ held up the mission. “Colonel Whitney’s influence too strong,” Rosenquist would write in his diary. Regrettably, Rosenquist did not set foot on Mindanao until June 1. He made his way to Kapungagan, where he met with the escapees’ old friend Claro Laureta, now a major. Rosenquist gave Laureta a cigarette lighter from Mel nik, as wel as President Quezon’s pardons for Ben de la Cruz and Victor Jumarong. With building anticipation, Mel nik traced Rosenquist’s progress through garbled radio messages. Rosenquist easily infiltrated Dapecol—but that was because the camp was deserted. “Walked around Penal Colony,” read the deflating communiqué. “Found no, repeat no PWs. Happy convicts say PWs evacuated ten days ago, probably to Manila.”

As Mel nik, Marshal , and Spielman learned, approximately 1,250 American prisoners had been blindfolded, tethered to each other, and marched out of Dapecol on June 6, 1944. Arriving at the Lasang Pier, these men were packed aboard the merchant vessel
Yashu Maru
, which would take them to Cebu City. The prisoners would then board the
Singoto Maru
for the remainder of their journey to Manila, where they would then be redistributed to Bilibid Prison, Cabanatuan, and other prison camps scattered throughout Japan’s shrinking empire. But not al of the Dapecol POWs left Mindanao.

In March, nearly 700-odd prisoners had been selected for a work detail to build an airfield near Lasang. After finishing their labors in August, this last shipment of Dapecol POWs was herded aboard a familiar vessel, the
Erie Maru
, for the short haul to Zamboanga, where they would board the hel ship that was supposed to take them to Manila: the
Shinyo Maru
. “Seems that more POW have left Davao area

… guess I won’t get the chance to do what I real y came here for,” lamented Rosenquist in his diary. He would not be the only one with regrets.

None of the final Dapecol POWs would ever reach Manila. In fact, fewer than 100 would survive the final voyage of the
Shinyo Maru
. It was to be an al too common occurrence in the war’s latter stages: according to author Gregory Michno, more than 126,000 Al ied POWs were transported in 156 voyages on 134 Japanese vessels that also carried supplies or arms. Since the Japanese steadfastly refused to mark these vessels as POW transports, some 21,000 POWs were kil ed or injured on the ships as a result of attacks from American planes or submarines.

The commander of the submarine
Paddle
had no idea that the merchant ship he sighted in the enemy convoy zigzagging north along the western coast of Mindanao on the afternoon of September 7, 1944, was carrying American prisoners of war. Seconds after the
Paddle
fired a spread of torpedoes at the slow-moving
Shinyo Maru
, the fish slammed into the hul of the antiquated freighter, rocking the ship with a series of explosions. Water poured into the holds and panicked POWs clambered up to the decks, only to be beaten back by rifle butts. It would take less than ten minutes for the 2,600-ton vessel to break apart and sink, and in that time, only a handful of Americans would make it abovedecks and jump overboard. Though most of POWs would experience horrible deaths trapped inside the flooded holds, many of those who made it into the water would suffer equal y worse fates. As launches arrived to pluck Japanese survivors from the water, the handful of weak Americans struggling to stay afloat were fired upon, beaten with oars, and drowned. By the time darkness fel , only eighty-two washed up on the shore alive. Guerril as would spirit away the survivors and nurse them back to health before another American submarine, the
Narwhal
, was dispatched to retrieve them.

The failure to reach the Lasang-Dapecol prisoners in time, and the subsequent
Shinyo Maru
tragedy, would remain a point of contention among the Mindanao guerril as for years. “I thought it [a prison break]

could [work] and Bob thought it could,” Marshal would say. “But the powers-that-be didn’t want anything to do with it.” Marshal believed that Wendel Fertig’s refusal to cooperate with Rosenquist limited the latter’s ability to coordinate and execute the mission. That certainly was likely. Clyde Childress explained that Rosenquist’s attitude toward Fertig and the guerril as was general y cold and condescending, thus creating an adverserial relationship. Fertig probably believed that such an operation was logistical y impossible, and that it might have led to a massive Japanese counterinsurgency that could have destroyed the guerril a movement on Mindanao.