Escape From Davao (9 page)

The Duck, though, had delivered little good news in the past two days. Fol owing Moore’s mission on April 6, the plane had blown a cylinder. Boelens’s crew was now attempting an emergency transplant with parts from another sunken amphibian.

The ear-splitting explosions seemed to amplify with each turn of a socket wrench, each bolt and screw tightened. Enveloped by the tumult, the mechanics continued to work as the concussions rattled their tools and their confidence. The battle for Bataan was hurtling inexorably to its terminus. Most certainly, the “pickens,” as Boelens and Dyess used to say, were not good.

Leo Boelens, the youngest of eleven children born to an immigrant Belgian farmer, possessed an energy and ingenuity acquired in part from his environment. Historical y, the inhabitants of northern Wyoming’s Big Horn basin—from Native Americans and frontier trappers to contemporary farmers and ranchers—were good with their hands. Centuries of evidence ranged from tribal petroglyphs pecked on sandstone wal s to symmetrical rows of irrigated crops to the tanks and smokestacks of the Standard Oil refinery puncturing the big Western sky.

At five foot seven and a half, 155 pounds, Boelens was an average-sized farm boy. He would never forget his agricultural roots—he humbly referred to himself in correspondence as “a farmer, L.A.B.”—but Leo Arthur Boelens’s hands were not meant to til the Wyoming soil. He dropped out of the University of Wyoming and joined the Army Air Corps in late 1940. Nine months of dissecting engines and learning airplane design, construction, and maintenance in the Air Corps Technical School’s aeronautical engineering program at Chanute Field near Rantoul, Il inois, awakened a latent talent. “I’m sold on this branch,” he wrote his kin.

Boelens was commissioned in September 1941 and returned home just before shipping out. As a car waited to take him to Bil ings, Montana, and the transport that would fly him to San Francisco, shutters clicked, freezing the farewel in time, locking a smiling, broad-shouldered Boelens in his uniform, in his youth, in the permanence of black and

white.

No sooner had Boelens ducked into the car than an uncomfortable feeling swept over his older sister, Christina Snyder, who had raised him fol owing the death of their mother in 1928. They shared a unique familial bond and at that moment she was overwhelmed with a sudden premonition. As the car carrying Leo Boelens motored toward Bil ings, an emotional Snyder turned to the rest of her family.

“We wil never see him again,” she announced.

Boelens and his crew were just finishing repairs on the Duck when Ed Dyess’s Ford sedan arrived.

Dyess, fresh from supervising the evacuation of Bataan Field, was leading a convoy of men to Mariveles Field. There was a rumor that B-17s would be arriving there to evacuate pilots, but Dyess had stopped to inform Lt. Roland Barnick, the pilot assigned to fly the Duck, that he was to wait until the last possible minute for a special passenger from Corregidor, Col. Carlos Romulo, MacArthur’s press officer and the man behind the Voice of Freedom radio broadcasts. The orders, Dyess said, came straight from MacArthur himself.

Dyess then continued his own personal mission—the evacuation of al flight personnel from the peninsula other than himself—in complete disregard of an official mandate from his superiors. Dyess had earlier objected to his inclusion on a list of pilots cleared for evacuation. “We haven’t surrendered yet; I can’t leave my men,” he protested. Unwil ing to leave, but unable to disobey a direct order, Dyess was now stal ing for time for his pilots. He sent Lt. I. B. “Jack” Donalson out on
Kibosh;
four other pilots on two old P-35s flown up from Mindanao. And, at midnight, Dyess issued one final, surprising order: that Leo Boelens take his seat on the Duck. When Boelens mentioned Dyess’s wel -known departure order, Dyess balked. Boelens “was to go and
that
was an order.”

Not long after Dyess’s convoy resumed its trek to Mariveles, a relieved Carlos Romulo arrived at Cabcaben. He had spent hours fighting through the “mad stampede” of vehicles and defeated soldiers.

Romulo’s excitement, however, dimmed when he caught a glimpse of the Duck by the flickering light of the fires now engulfing Bataan. “It was the funniest-looking plane I had ever seen,” he later wrote. “It looked like something reclaimed from a city dump.” Romulo watched anxiously as the crew spun the propel er. There was a loud popping sound, a shower of sparks. “The engine choked and snarled, snorted and started,” remembered Romulo. The revetment erupted into cheers—Boelens had done it again.

At 0118, gloomy clouds drew back to reveal a platinum moon. No sooner had the passengers boarded, a minor earthquake lasting approximately one minute rippled Bataan, the death-rattle of the peninsula.

The overloaded Duck waddled down the quaking strip, spluttered skyward and struggled for altitude, hovering precariously about seventy feet above Manila Bay in the glaring streaks of searchlights. As flak bracketed the ship, the crew lightened the load, tossing out parachutes, pistols, and life preservers. The plane final y slipped the searchlights’ grip and lumbered away from the embattled peninsula.

Thursday, April 9, 1942

Bataan, Philippine Islands

An aurora swirled in the night skies above Bataan, radiating around the smoke-shrouded peaks of the Mariveles Mountains. Intermittent flashes from phosphorus bombs and incendiary shel s bathed the jungle in blinding bursts of white light. The rumbling, subterranean tremors had scarcely subsided when American stockpiles of TNT and ammunition dumps were detonated, causing the peninsula to convulse.

Thousands of rounds of projectiles, from artil ery and mortar shel s to rifle bul ets, streaked across the sky in arcing rainbows. “Never did a 4th of July display equal it in noise, lights, colors or cost,” observed one officer.

Surrender orders had begun to trickle down from command posts to foxholes, and so across Bataan the implements of war were euthanized. Field pieces were double-loaded and fired, blowing the breech blocks and splaying the barrels. The engines of tanks, half-tracks, and trucks were sabotaged.

Codebooks, maps, and cash were buried. The Navy scuttled the sub tender
Canopus
, the largest vessel remaining in Philippine waters, and its shore instal ations. The bulging mushroom clouds and ghastly, ruby glow of burning fuel tanks were visible for miles.

Lt. Sam Grashio had never seen anything like it. As the convoy rumbled through the “Dantesque”

landscape toward Mariveles in the early morning hours, it seemed as though “the end of the world had come.” Surrender, though no one could actual y utter the word, was no longer a rumor, but a reality. Had he been a fool not to leave Bataan? Less than twenty-four hours ago, Dyess had ordered Grashio to fly a reconnaissance mission for the purpose of establishing safe routes of transit for evacuated VIPs. As he had drowsily strol ed to the revetment, a family of monkeys that had eluded the mess cooks skittered out and disappeared single file into the brush. Everybody, it seemed, was bugging out of Bataan. But the jungle omen was lost on Grashio.

Once airborne, he disconnected from the conflict. “The sky was clear and blue and the air was balmy,”

Grashio noted. “No bombs were fal ing, no artil ery shel s were bursting overhead…. Nobody, racked with awful cramps of dysentery was racing or crawling for a vacant space at a latrine.” Grashio spied several ships and recorded the data before glancing at his fuel gauge. With exactly one-half tank remaining, he could have returned to Bataan or continued south, to safety. Pul ed between an instinctive desire for self-preservation and his devotion to duty, Grashio thought about what Dyess would have done. The decision made itself.

Dyess had created a cult of personality during the last days on Bataan, but his actions were not contrived; he was simply trying to fil a giant void. When MacArthur left on March 11, by way of an executive order issued by FDR, he was rumored to have taken with him—in addition to his wife, son, and Chinese amah—valuables ranging from a cash-stuffed mattress to a refrigerator. Although MacArthur did not take any such items, he did take General Hal George. After a harrowing journey, MacArthur’s party arrived in Australia six days later. At a remote rail station, MacArthur would announce famously that Roosevelt “ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American

offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shal return.”

But whereas MacArthur’s pledge was largely met with derision—the standing joke, at least among American troops on Bataan, was that upon leaving his foxhole for the latrine one soldier would dutiful y inform his comrade that he was going to the head and “shal return”—George’s commitment to return with planes “even if he had to go al the way to the States to get them” was taken at face value. But he was also a realist. “Tel the boys,” he told Dyess privately, “that if I’m not back pretty soon it wil not be because I don’t want to come back.” (George would not survive the first ful year of the war. The brigadier was kil ed in a freak accident when an American plane attempting to take off crashed into George’s parked C-40 transport on April 29, 1942, at an airport in Darwin, Australia.) Though outranked by several remaining officers, Dyess essential y became George’s successor. It was a daunting task. His pilots barely had enough strength to climb in and out of their cockpits, which, because of dysentery, often had to be cleaned of human waste after flights. Dyess exhausted himself by remaining conspicuously in command. And he expected no special treatment. In late March, the brass had decided to increase the rations of the pilots—and not the enlisted men—to build their strength. Dyess told his sergeants that he would not accept the food unless it was okay with the men. Though resentful of officer’s privilege, they assented because it wasn’t just any officer asking them—it was Dyess.

Dyess’s convoy motored into Mariveles at dawn and found no B-17s. Patching in to FEAF

headquarters at Little Baguio on the Mariveles radio net, Dyess discovered that a boat would take the pilots to Corregidor, from where a submarine would spirit them from the Philippines. But by the time they reached the chaotic dock area, it was too late. Their boat had been fil ed with nurses and the men had no choice but to wave to them, stoical y and gal antly, as if watching loved ones row away from a sinking ship in the last lifeboat. At that moment, Sam Grashio and the other pilots turned to look at their commanding officer, in hopes that he would do what he always did: come up with a solution to their problem.

• • •

As his two-jeep caravan, adorned with flapping white bedsheets, crept through the battle-scarred jungle and past the foxholes and bivouacs of his weary men, the charred metal skeletons of vehicles, the mountains of stacked arms, and weaponry, Maj. Gen. Edward Postel King, Jr., could not help but think how familiar it al seemed.

On April 3, Japanese guns had boomed a barrage of high-explosive shel s into the center of the skeletal Fil-American lines, and the shel s, coupled with incendiaries dropped by bombers, cut a flaming swath nearly two miles beyond the southern slopes of Mount Samat, the anchor of the main line of resistance. Through this gate, thousands of fresh troops—Imperial GHQ had reinforced Homma with air reinforcements from Malaya and also several detachments of men and artil ery from China—sluiced into Bataan. By April 7, Homma had cleaved the Fil-American forces. The entire Japanese 14th Army was racing toward Mariveles and there was nothing Ned King could do about it—not even surrender.

King, a former lawyer in his late fifties with a bushy, auburn mustache, had been USAFFE’s chief artil ery officer. After MacArthur’s exit, Gen. Jonathan M. “Skinny” Wainwright, a lean, leathery and unpretentious old cavalryman, was promoted to commander of USFIP—the newly designated United States Forces in the Philippines. King, in turn, inherited the troops on Bataan, now known as Luzon Force

—and a nosurrender mandate from FDR and MacArthur. Ignorant of the miserable state of the Al ied war effort, MacArthur intended to immediately return to the Philippines with reinforcements and wanted an army there when he did. Accordingly, though thousands of miles removed from the reality of the situation, earlier he had ordered a breakout operation to secure supplies from the Japanese base at Olongapo. To order weak men who could barely walk to disengage from a fight, march several dozen miles, and take a fortified supply depot was lunacy; King rightful y ignored the

order.

As the embers of April 8 crumbled into the ashes of morning, King’s agonizing dilemma remained. He could destroy his distintegrating command in a bloody last stand or else entreat with the enemy in the hope of saving his men, though at the likely cost of a disgraceful court-martial. King chose the latter option. That, after al , was what Lee had done. A descendant of Confederate officers, King was acutely aware of the significance of the date. Exactly seventy-seven years to the day earlier, on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his starving Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S.

Grant at the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. Lee’s words haunted King: “Then there is nothing left to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

King arrived at the town of Lamao and, at 1200 hours, sat down at a table to surrender the largest force in American military history. Seated across from him was Homma’s senior operations officer, Col.