Escape From Davao (56 page)

Historical hindsight shows that Mel nik’s mission faced almost insurmountable odds. While a raid on Dapecol or any other local POW compound would have been easy to execute due to the guerril as’

numerical advantage over any guard detail, the main problem was arranging the transportation of hundreds of sickly, emaciated POWs to an extraction point. It is also highly unlikely that the guerril as in the Davao sector, however numerous and spirited, could have held off the large, wel -equipped Imperial Army garrison that would undoubtedly have been dispatched from Davao City to recover the prisoners.

Stil , in view of what happened to the men aboard the
Shinyo Maru
, Marshal thought the attempt should have been made: “I often wondered if it would have been worthwhile, but that’s just supposition. Could we have pul ed it off and what would we have done with them after we got them out of there?” Childress would be loath to credit Fertig for much during the war, but he would insist that the decision—whoever made it—to scrub the Dapecol rescue mission was the correct one. Of course, as Marshal would counter, “but then we’l never know, wil we?”

Marshal and Spielman would henceforth devote their time into building what was perhaps the most successful guerril a province on the island, a model outfit complete with an extensive intel igence network, a strong civil government and school system, and a hard-hitting army that kept the Japanese bottled up.

Ironical y, it was by toeing the line and fulfil ing their mission for GHQ that the two former POWs were final y able to get some revenge. In fact, they’d get more.

A few months after the
Shinyo Maru
sinking, with MacArthur’s forces rapidly approaching, Marshal ’s coast watchers had noticed that the local Japanese forces—commanded by Marshal ’s Japanese pen pal—were preparing to bug out. “The Japs had about 14 or 15 smal inter-island boats and they were going to move al these troops in Surigao someplace else,” he remembered. The report was relayed to GHQ and Marshal received a strange reply. “I got a message saying, ‘in the morning, get up on your hil top.’ That is al it said.”

As ordered, Marshal , Spielman, and some others ascended his hil top observation post at approximately 0800. Marshal ’s ears soon perked up; he heard what sounded like a giant swarm of bees approaching: the humming of the engines of several dozen American fighter planes, probably F4U

Corsairs, which had been dispatched from a Navy carrier task force. The guerril as watched as the planes roared in over the water with their machine guns blazing. The Japanese flotil a did not have a chance. “[The planes] came in and when they left there wasn’t a stick big enough to float,” said Marshal .

To conclude the one-sided battle, Filipinos on the shore grabbed their bolos and paddled out in barotos to finish off the survivors. The ensuing scene was wild, bloody mayhem, the result of nearly three years of pent-up humiliation. Marshal could not have stopped it had he tried. “[The Filipinos] hated the Japs,” he said. “I think we al did at the time.”

Marshal ’s fire would fade after the war but would never be ful y extinguished. Like most of the escapees, he refused to drive Japanese cars, a decision attributable to both his memories of his treatment as a POW and his lifelong attachment to Chrysler. When Marshal came home, he returned to a promised brand-new black Chrysler sedan, the first of its kind in Pueblo. He also found a check from
Life
and three years’ back pay waiting for him. Marshal would marry, raise three sons, and work in the meat and real estate industries. He stayed in the Army Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1963, and was instrumental in helping to craft POW SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—training as recently as 1996. Marshal passed away in 2006.

Spielman did not rush home upon his separation from the Army in 1946. He worked as the manager of a lumber company in Surigao before returning to Texas with his wife and young family in 1948. Receiving a degree from the University of Texas, he settled in Austin and embarked on a career in education as a teacher at the Texas School for the Deaf. Like Marshal , Spielman stayed in the Army Reserve, retiring a colonel. He died in 2008.

For Melvyn McCoy and Steve Mel nik, the war came ful circle in February 1945 at the most appropriate location: Corregidor.

Returning to the Philippines with MacArthur’s forces in October 1944, Mel nik found himself in Subic Bay on Valentine’s Day 1945 answering questions on Corregidor’s topography and tunnels posed by the leaders of the assault teams that had been assigned to retake the Rock.

Mel nik’s war ended a few weeks later. Plagued by malaria, he packed his travel orders, his razor, and a toothbrush into the same musette bag that he had carried out of Dapecol and headed off to Pier One to board the Navy oiler that would take him home. Mel nik’s postwar résumé included General Staff and command assignments in the United States and Europe. The erstwhile enlisted man retired with the rank of brigadier general in 1963. He died in 1994.

Though Melvyn McCoy would often joke in early 1944 that the only sea duty he had had during the war was the twelve-day journey to Mindanao aboard the
Erie Maru
, he stressed that he had a “score to settle” with the Japanese. “When the Philippines are invaded, I expect to be there,” he told the
Indianapolis Times
. Like MacArthur, McCoy made good on his promise: he was the executive officer on one of the cruisers in Manila Bay providing fire support for the invasion of Corregidor. McCoy and Mel nik reunited on the Rock several days after the island was secured and posed for a celebratory picture, photographic proof that they had come, both literal y and figuratively, a long way together from the muddy rice fields of Mactan.

McCoy would also participate in the last major land battle of the war, Okinawa. One of his most memorable contributions to the fight was hosting a hungry Marine visitor aboard his cruiser—Shifty Shofner. McCoy would command two ships in the postwar period, the oiler
Severn
and the destroyer tender
Markab
. He retired from the Navy in 1951 with the rank of rear admiral and continued to live the itinerant lifestyle characteristic of a sailor. Late in his life, McCoy would frequently relive his famous escape by temporarily breaking out of an assisted living facility in El Paso—he was always tracked down at his favorite watering hole a few blocks away. He died in 1988, his body cremated and his ashes scattered to sea.

Okinawa would be Jack Hawkins’s last shot at combat. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he was assigned the role of assistant operations officer in the 1st Marine Division. “I got my revenge on the Japs that way.

Not with a gun in my hand, but with operations orders, writing them every day. I can remember when we would confer with everybody before writing the order of the day and it always started out, ‘The First Marine Division attacks.’ Every one that way. Every day.”

After Okinawa, Hawkins was assigned to an industrial incentive tour. He would spend the war’s final months much like Sam Grashio, giving pep talks to factory workers and bond buyers whose efforts were needed to keep America’s assembly lines rol ing as the invasion of Japan loomed. Hawkins had the routine down pat. He was caught off guard, though, just before taking the stage in a crowded theater in Baltimore on August 15, 1945. Japan, he was just told, had surrendered; the war was over. Hawkins would have to discard his prepared script and make his final speech off-the-cuff. He announced the surrender news and thanked his audience for its hard work and help in winning the conflict. As the audience streamed out to join in the massive public celebration unfolding across a triumphant nation, Hawkins must have felt much like Ed Dyess had, standing alone in the Texas night in November 1943

with everything and nothing to say.

The war might have been over, but history, as wel as fate, was not finished with Hawkins. In the Korean War, he commanded the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines at the Inchon landing, the capture of Seoul, and operations in North Korea. His next assignment—as a military adviser to the CIA—placed him in the middle of tactical planning for the il -fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Upon learning that the site of the invasion had been changed and that there was no solid commitment for air cover for the paramilitary landing forces, Hawkins informed Richard Bissel , CIA deputy planning director, that Fidel Castro’s fighter aircraft (if not destroyed), would sink the invasion fleet and the operation would end in disaster. Bissel did not relay to President John F. Kennedy Hawkins’s recommendation. Instead, he urged Kennedy to go ahead even as the president further cut by half the already inadequate air operations plan. The result was exactly as Hawkins predicted. Involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco may have cost Hawkins a general’s star, since the president and secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, used Hawkins as a scapegoat. Hawkins retired from the Marine Corps in 1965. The last surviving Dapecol escapee, Hawkins, ninety-three, lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Although he had been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, Ed Dyess instead received the Soldier’s Medal for committing a heroic act not involving an armed enemy. On December 1, 1956, Abilene (Texas) Air Force Base was official y renamed Dyess Air Force Base in his honor. “ If Ed was watching in the Great Beyond he probably would have laughed,” Sam Grashio would write, “for it was a bomber base while he was a fighter pilot.”

Thanks to the efforts of Madge Miguela Martin, the remains of an American serviceman were found buried in a shelter near Balingbing, Lanao in early 1947. A makeshift dog tag—a 50 centavo coin on which the individual’s name and Army serial number had been engraved—found among the skeletal remnants identified them as those of Leo

Boelens. Boelens’s body was temporarily interred at the U.S. Armed Forces Cemetery Leyte No. 1

before being transferred to the Manila American Cemetery, where it remains today. His smal white cross can be found in plot F, row 2, grave 97.

The remaining Dapecol POWs had been shipped back to Luzon shortly before MacArthur’s landing on Leyte in the fal of 1944, with the majority continuing via hel ships to POW camps in China, Formosa, or Japan. After being rescued in Cabanatuan in January 1945, Bert Bank regained his eyesight. Bank eventual y operated two radio stations in his hometown of Tuscaloosa and was responsible for forming the University of Alabama footbal radio network. Bank would serve twelve years in the Alabama Senate and House of Representatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during which time he introduced legislation requiring that patriotism be taught in al state schools. Decades after their first encounter, Bank would marry Emma Minkowitz, the 1939 Miss Georgia, whom he had known while stationed in Savannah. Bank passed away in

2009.

Juan Acenas, the Filipino agricultural supervisor who literal y showed the escapees the way out of Dapecol, was promoted to superintendent after the war.

After attending the July 4, 1946, ceremonies marking Philippine independence, Steve Mel nik visited Candido “Pop” Abrina, the man whose guile and guts contributed to the success of the escape. Mel nik was pleased to discover that the raconteur was stil tel ing tal tales. “Pop,” Mel nik told Abrina, “when I asked you to help us escape, I told you our reports would make history. They did: they shocked the whole world with the news of Japanese atrocities. And they made the words Corregidor, Bataan Death March familiar to every household in America. Your country and mine owe you a great debt.” Abrina died in 1956.

Perhaps the most capable guerril a leader on Mindanao, Clyde Childress, retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and worked as a sales representative in the heavy equipment industry.

He passed away in 2007.

Casiano de Juan, Big Boy, reportedly received a battlefield promotion to lieutenant at the end of the war. Little is known of his postwar life.

For the remainder of the war, Benigno de la Cruz served honorably in B Company, 6th Medical Battaltion, 110th Infantry Division on Mindanao. After the war, de la Cruz managed a pineapple farm and worked as a driver for the Joint United States Military Assistance Group in Manila before his death in 1980.

With the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, scores of Filipino World War II veterans were permitted to receive U.S. citizenship in the early 1990s. For Magdaleno Dueñas, it seemed the fulfil ment of a lifelong dream. Instead, it was a nightmare. Dueñas and more than a dozen other elderly veterans moved to the United States and were in effect held in captivity by an abusive landlord who fed them dog food and cashed their Social Security checks for himself. Fortunately for Dueñas, exactly fifty years after he helped a handful of American POWs evade their captors, a group of community activists freed him from his own imprisonment ordeal in 1993. Dueñas passed away in San Francisco at the age of ninety in 2005.

Wendel Fertig received the Distinguished Service Cross and was promoted by MacArthur after the war to colonel. Fertig’s leadership of the Mindanao guerril as would be more ful y appreciated by the U.S.

Army in the postwar period—Fertig was instrumental in the creation of the Special Warfare School, home of U.S. Special Forces training, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He died in 1975.

By al accounts, Victorio Jumarong served with the Mindanao guerril as until the end of the war. His subsequent life remains a mystery.