Escape From Davao (8 page)

He thoughtlessly cruised over Japanese lines at 1,000 feet, “the stupidest thing of my flying career,” he later admitted. Flak sent the plane quivering into a turbulent fit of exploding shel s and tracer streams. “It was like flying down Broadway,” said Dyess. He survived. Climbing from the cockpit back at Bataan Field, he pressed into the excited crowd gathering in wonderment around
Kibosh
’s sievelike fuselage. “We got one that time,” exclaimed a shaken Dyess. They got more than one. As the excited reports of the observers crackled in and the damage estimates climbed, Captain Ind raced outside the operations shack to relay the news. The defenders of the Philippines final y had a reason to celebrate. Bataan Field erupted in joy.

“It was stuff much too strong to be taken with calm and reserve,” he explained. “The lid blew off our long jammed-down feelings. Restraint went to the winds, and the jungle resounded to our whoops.”

Nine pilots contributed to the success of the raid—including Lt. Sam Grashio, who, after a locked release handle prevented him from dropping his bombs, skil ful y landed with the bombs dangling from his wings, thus saving his P-40 for another mission. But Dyess’s individual exploits were staggering. His score included one 12,000-ton transport destroyed, one 5,000- or 6,000-ton vessel burned, at least two 100-ton motor launches, and a handful of smal er barges and lighters sunk. It was impossible to estimate the ful extent of the dockside damages, but the cumulative Japanese losses were so severe that Radio Tokyo reported that fifty-four American four-engined bombers and swarms of fighter planes were responsible. One can only imagine what George and his pilots could have done with such a force.

This soon-to-be-famous raid on Subic Bay would cement Dyess’s legend—one that had been created by his leadership of a landing party of twenty airmen on the beach at Agloloma Bay to root out unsurrendered Japanese and finish the Battle of the Points in February—among al troops and commands in the Philippines. The price of the victory, however, was steep. Only Dyess’s P-40,
Kibosh
, remained operational. Crellin’s death and the wrecked planes left George without an air force, but he ral ied his men with a quart of whiskey. “At least the death of our little air force was one of unmitigated glory,” Ind would write. It was later discovered that George had not been speaking to Sutherland, or to a representative of USAFFE that morning, but a messenger from 5th Interceptor Command headquarters relaying intel igence. The whole conversation, said Ind, had been a quirk, “one of those impossible coincidences which led to a series of impossible coincidences.”

George wasted little time assigning Dyess a new mission: he wanted the pilots to invite the nurses from nearby Field Hospital No. 2 to a party. “If this war is going to be fought by our boys and girls, Ed,” he said,

“they might as wel have what little good times they can.”

That evening, a silvery tropical moon bathed the jungle in a soft, blue light. Nervous pilots in wrinkled uniforms squired a dozen nurses wearing dresses and rationed cosmetics through the entrance to their clubhouse

—a bamboo shack on stilts decorated with Japanese helmets and swords—under a set of mounted carabao antlers and a placard that read: “THE DYSENTERY CROSS, Awarded to the Quartermaster by THE MEN OF BATAAN FIELD.”

It must have been some sight. “Had forgotten what a white woman looked like,” wrote Lieutenant Burns.

Aided by some libations—medicinal alcohol mixed with lemon powder and juice—and boogie-woogie played by Cpl. Robert L. Greenman, an accomplished concert pianist banging on an upright rescued from the ruins of a bombed-out barrio, the pilots loosened up. With each dance, they temporarily escaped the war in a catharsis of candy, alcohol, and conversation.

As Greenman pounded the keys and the accompaniment of female voices and laughs filtered into the Bataan night, mechanics and repair specialists in a revetment on the other side of the field slapped patches of sheet metal onto
Kibosh
’s bul et-riddled fuselage. Cut from glistening slabs that had been treated with a violet-hued, anticorrosive paint, the patches contrasted noticeably with the plane’s olive drab skin. By Dyess’s accounting, there were perhaps seventy of them. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a laugh, “my airplane has the measles!”

Surveying the scene, UPI’s Frank Hewlett got an idea. He tore a piece of paper from his notepad, and grimy, cal used hands passed it around the revetment to a chorus of laughter. Written as a faux telegram from the defenders of the Philippines to the White House, Hewlett’s terse words found their way onto a bul etin board and, eventual y, into campaign lore:

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

PLEASE SEND US ANOTHER P-40. OURS IS FULL OF HOLES.

I felt my way with weary stumbling feet,

Between the broken fragments of defeat

There was a home-made flag of dirty white.

Monday, April 6, 1942

Corregidor, Philippine Islands

Amid the twilit comfort of the cool tropic winds blowing in from the South China Sea, 1st Lts. Jack Hawkins and Mike Dobervich, USMC, sat in Hawkins’s command post, a dugout chiseled into a chalk cliff near Corregidor’s south shore, ful mess kits of chow in their laps. After a few bites, Hawkins decided to break the pregnant silence and pose the question to his best friend. And, for better or worse, put the rumors to rest.

“How are things going over there?”

Unlike most of the 4th Marines, Dobervich had been on Bataan since mid-January with the Marine detachment guarding the forward USAFFE headquarters. His appetite had bridged their friendship across the North Channel—this was his third visit to Hawkins’s mess in as many months. Mashing his rice and corned beef hash, he did not mince words with his reply.

“It looks kind of bad, Jack. The Nips are pushing hard.”

“How much longer do you think Bataan can hold out?”

“Not long. Seems to me the folks at home would get something out here to us. I don’t believe they realize what’s going on.”

“Guess not,” mused Hawkins, a twenty-five-year-old, straight-shooting Texan barely three years out of Annapolis now in command of a reinforced platoon of four dozen machine gunners. “Looks like we’re the lost sheep…. I wonder if al these boys here realize what they’re up against. I know mine do. I don’t try to kid ’em along.”

“I think most of them do, Jack,” said Dobervich. “I suppose a few believe in that bum headquarters dope about ‘Help is on the way,’ but not many.”

“These boys out here deserve plenty of credit, don’t they?” said Hawkins. “To go on scrapping when they’re up against a stacked deck like this.”

“You bet they do,” concurred Dobervich.

Having reached their consensus, they returned to their mess kits.

An Annapolis plebe deciding that he did not like ships or the sea—anything Navy, real y—during his first summer cruise is quite a revelation. Such was the dilemma of Jack Hawkins in July 1936. Fol owing the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Hawkins’s ship, the USS

Oklahoma
, was ordered to Bilbao, Spain, to pick up American citizens. The student crew was transferred to the
Wyoming
, and it would take only a few days of rol ing across the choppy Atlantic on the cramped older battleship for Hawkins to change his mind about the Navy. Nevertheless he was perhaps destined for a military career.

While growing up in the northeastern Texas farm town of Roxton, then nearby Paris and later Fort Worth—like his English ancestors who arrived in Virginia circa 1707 and drifted west, Hawkins’s family relocated several times—Hawkins had several role models to emulate, including his future brother-in-law, a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, and his Civil War veteran grandfathers. He was, after al , named for Andrew Jackson Hawkins, a relative who had served in the Louisiana Cavalry. He was also a descendant of one of Queen Elizabeth’s famed Seadogs, Admiral Sir John Hawkins, the commander of the
Victory
in the sixteenth-century defeat of the Spanish Armada. Regardless of that portion of his pedigree, Hawkins knew that he did not have the salty sea air and cannon smoke in his blood. He also knew that he could not leave Annapolis, his chance at an education and a future. There was only one answer: the Marine Corps. With just twenty-five slots for Marine placement per class, it would take four years of dedicated scholarship and subterfuge—to mask his poor eyesight he memorized the eye charts used in physical

inspections—but Hawkins earned a slot.

For Mike Dobervich, the decision was equal y simple: the military or the ore mines. In the early 1900s, many immigrants mined hematite and manganese from the northeastern Minnesota earth, sent for their families, and settled in the mining town melting pots of the Minnesota Iron Range. One of them, Obrad Dobervich, a Serb, settled in Ironton, where he and his wife Mara brought up eight children. Al six of the Dobervich boys boxed; al would fight in World War II. They also learned the value of an education—five, Michiel included, would attend North Dakota Agricultural Col ege in Fargo. Resourceful and hardworking

—Austin Shofner would christen him “Beaver”—Dobervich lived with the mayor of Fargo while earning a reputation as an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer, honors as a four-year ROTC officer, and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1939.

The “Minnesota Yankee” and the “Texas Rebel,” as Hawkins described them, would become best friends upon meeting at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1939. Standing at attention, they were a study in physical contrasts. Hawkins was six foot one and weighed 165 pounds, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion that amplified his boyish looks. A short shock of coffee-colored hair framed Dobervich’s ruggedly handsome face and flint-gray eyes, while his crooked nose and burly build betrayed his pugilist past. Gentle and generous to a fault, Dobervich did not fit the profile of the archetypical Marine officer. Hawkins also remembered a distinct language barrier: “He talked in the rapid staccato of the busy North, and I—wel , it always did take me al day to say anything. We weren’t much alike,” he concluded, “but we looked at things the same way.”

They would be roommates throughout basic school and their first overseas assignment in Shanghai.

The 4th Marine Regiment—located in Shanghai—since the late 1920s—had lately been charged with protecting American interests and buffering the city’s International Settlement from the encroaching Sino-Japanese War. The two junior officers would spend seventeen months in the wild, decadent city. By late 1941, the Japanese had encircled the city and since the prevailing, yet impractical war contingency plan cal ed for the understrength Marines to break for far-off Chungking and align with Nationalist forces, Col.

Samuel L. Howard successful y lobbied to evacuate the regiment in late November. Though Dobervich had contracted cerebral meningitis, he, Hawkins, and Shofner would travel together to the Philippines aboard the
President Madison
.

Now as they finished their meals, Hawkins sensed that Dobervich was not ful y recovered.

“Gee, that was good,” said Dobervich. “I’l have to come back over to see you again soon, if you’l promise to feed me like that.”

“Sure we’l feed you,” Hawkins said laughing. “When do you think you’l be back again?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe in a few weeks … maybe never.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

A few minutes later, a gunnysack fil ed with cans and cartons of cigarettes was placed in the truck that Dobervich had driven up from the North Dock. It was a generous gift, “but we gave gladly, knowing that the boys in Bataan were suffering more than we,” said Hawkins.

“Take care of yourself,” Hawkins cal ed over the growl of the truck’s engine.

“Okay. You do the same,” yel ed Dobervich. “So long.”

Hawkins watched Dobervich head down the dusty jungle al ey toward the North Dock and the gray unknown beyond. After lingering for a moment in ruminative silence, he pivoted and began the walk back to his dugout.

Wednesday, April 8, 1942

Bataan, Philippine Islands

Cabcaben Field, 2215 hours. The thunderclaps of a nearby 155 mil imeter gun muffled the sounds of mechanics and pilots ratcheting the grease-slathered, metal ic viscera of a single-engine Navy biplane known as a Grumman J2F Duck. The men had been working in around-the-clock shifts for the past forty-

eight hours. As the chief mechanic, 2nd Lt. Leo Boelens had scribbled in his diary, “we must stay—get duck out.”

It would not be Boelens’s first mechanical miracle. Since his reassignment from the 27th Material Squadron, the imaginative Boelens had not only kept the few remaining planes flying, he had also endeavored to create reinforcements, scavenging parts from cracked-up P-40Bs and P-40Es to build a hybrid Warhawk known to the pilots as the “P-40 Something.” Tonight, however, he would be working against more than a shortage of parts. During trips to requisition tools, the twenty-seven-year-old had encountered columns of troops straggling back from the front. “I predict the beginning of the end,” he jotted in his crude diary on April 7.

Sunk in January off Mariveles, the Duck had been refloated, repaired, and returned to service with Bataan’s “Bamboo Fleet,” a motley air force including the two surviving P-40s, a 1933 Bel anca Skyrocket, a Beechcraft Staggerwing, and a 1934 Waco bi-wing that the pilots flew to the Visayas and Mindanao on evacuation missions. On their return flights, the planes’ fuselages were crammed with everything from batteries and quinine pil s to cigarettes, cognac, candy—and the scarcest commodity of al , news from home. Capt. Joe Moore had discovered an RCA overseas wireless office on the unoccupied island of Cebu, 365 miles south, capable of communicating with California. If not for Moore, Sam Grashio would not have received the cablegram containing news that his wife had given birth to a baby girl.