The Pacific (31 page)

On Saturday, the twenty-seventh, the rain came down in sheets. Shifty told his team of drovers to rest in the shack since no work could be done. Lieutenant Hosume, the captain of the guard and a man who loved to smack his prisoners around, made an inspection. The prisoners were supposed to be working. He lined the team up and slapped them. He then opened their bags, which were to contain only each man's noon ration of rice. Shofner knew one man had some equipment and he himself had "a bottle containing the entire quinine supply for our escape" in his musette bag.
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Hosume looked in the bag. He saw the bottle of pills. However, he was looking for forbidden foods, such as fruits or vegetables. With a one- track mind, the guard they called "the Crown Prince of Swat" punched Shofner again and continued on. Shifty said he had just "established a new world's record for holding the breath." Lieutenant Hosume did find a work party carrying stolen food. He ordered all hands to work in the rice fields the next day, Sunday, as punishment.

The punishment forced a delay in their departure. It would not have mattered had it not been for the stashes of equipment hidden near the edges of the fields. The team worked a full week expecting any moment to be discovered. "We were plenty scared."
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THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE VOLUNTEERED HAD SATISFIED CADET SLEDGE FOR a time, and he made steady progress in school. In late March, though, he heard from a friend who had studied chemistry in the V-12 program and had earned an officer's commission. The friend was now an officer in a technical branch, working in a laboratory. The prospect of being a chemist for the Marine Corps made Sledge sick. "With my love and interest in firearms etc.," he wrote his mother, "I'll be doggone if I'm going to be stuck away in some lab and never see any action." He declared he would sooner flunk out and go in as a buck private.

Sledge was too close to his parents, especially his mother, to make his weekly letter to her solely an ultimatum. The Sledge family was a tight- knit family. He took a moment to look forward to seeing them during the Easter break, when they could enjoy the azaleas blooming and hear the wood thrushes sing. He mentioned a letter from his older brother Edward, Eugene noted, reporting the news of a promotion. Perhaps acknowledging the news of Edward's success set him off. Eugene had "looked forward too long to being in a real outfit," to go very far with pleasant conversation. He wanted his father to get his course of study in V-12 changed to something other than chemistry. "I know father will think me a fool, but I don't care." He hated science and declared that he was not any good at it. "For once in my life, I hope you and Pop realize I made my decision by thinking and that you will . . . try and help me instead of forcing me into something I dislike."

IT HAD ALL BEGUN A MONTH EARLIER, WHEN DEACON HAD INSISTED SID GO ON A blind date. "Why?" he asked. Deacon said he had met this girl and gone around to her house to speak to her mother about a date. The mother had agreed to it provided her daughter Dorothy was accompanied by her younger sister, Shirley. The two sisters went together. "You have got to come with me," Deacon had pleaded. "She's pretty . . . I've seen her." Sid at last agreed to go. The two friends went downtown and met Dorothy and her younger sister, Shirley, who stepped forward with a smile. She reminded Sid of the actress Elizabeth Taylor.

They set off for dinner at a nice restaurant and then to see a movie. Everywhere they went, Sid could feel the jealous eyes of other marines staring at him. One old Aussie shouted, "Give 'er a go, Yank, she's o'r aight'een!" The foursome capped the evening with a visit to the amusement park at St. Kilda. The two couples took the train out to a small house in Glenferrie, where Dorothy and Shirley lived with their mother, "Tuppie," and grandmother, "Nana." Tuppie found a moment to read Sidney Phillips and John Tatum "the Articles of War," regarding her daughters' chastity. Shirley Osborne was sixteen.

None of her rules dimmed their enthusiasm for the girls or for the Osborne family. While both Sid and Deacon went out with other friends and had other adventures, a few nights a week they took the train out to the little house in Glenferrie. Even with both girls working, times were tight in the Osborne home. Shirley's father had served in World War I. The mustard gas he had inhaled in the trenches had eventually killed him. The Osborne family, it turned out, knew all too well the horrors of war, but they did not darken the conversations with it. Deacon and Sid liked to bring over groceries and make a big dinner. One night they took the family to see a movie,
Gone With the Wind
. Tuppie and Nana seemed confused, so Sid tried his best to explain the plot to them. "I could tell I wasn't getting anywhere. They didn't understand what I was talking about."

Rather than blow all of his money having fun, Sid sent most of his back pay home once he received it. When a carton of cigarettes bought in the PX for fifty cents would buy a round of drinks for everyone in a pub, he didn't need much cash. Sid asked his father not to put his money in war bonds, but simply to start a savings account. Sid also asked his platoon commander, Lieutenant Benson, what had happened to the forms each man had filled out, listing the personal items he had lost when the old tub
George F. Elliott
sank. Benson replied that the government had "checked and found that the Rolex watch company had never made that many watches in all of their manufacturing history." The swindlers had been swindled, but life with the Australians was too grand to worry.

As Sid's How Company assembled for reveille one morning on the playing field, a marine came into view. He was not only out of uniform and late for roll call; the marine had a great pile of bedding riding on his shoulders. A few snorts of laughter could be heard in the ranks. As he ran past the company headed for their bunks in the stadium's stands, the men recognized Bob Leckie. Bob, also known as "Lucky," had slept in the park outside the stadium. The laughter grew into "roars of ridicule" as Sid and his buddies surmised that Lucky had not been sleeping in the park alone.
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Among the First Marines, "walks in the park" had become commonplace. Catcalls from the entire battalion about his flagrant violation serenaded him as Lucky ran to his bunk to get his uniform.

During another of the usual morning drills, this one on March 29, Sid started feeling queer. He went to see the medic, who took one look at him and put him on a truck with some others. The doctors at the hospital diagnosed him with jaundice. They prescribed lots of bed rest and fruit juice. A few days later, Deacon took Shirley to the hospital to visit, but they were turned away. Being refused the chance to visit Sidney did not bother Deacon too much. He had not been able to stop thinking about Shirley for some time. She called him "Wes," a version of his middle name, Wesley.

ON MARCH 30, JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE D- DAY NUMBER TWO, A YOUNG ARMY corpsman got a little too careless near the fence. He threw a canteen over the fence to a friend on the other side. One of the guards in the tower fired three shots; the first one killed the medic. The POWs gathered cautiously to find out what had happened. The victim had not been that close to the fence, but he had been close to the guard tower. The Japanese camp officials stated that the medic had been trying to escape. The POWs, whose lives were bordered by men in guard towers, wanted to know why the guards thought a man would try to escape in broad daylight with no food or equipment. The prisoners could only push their outrage so far, though.

On the night of Saturday, April 3, the team met. Casually, slowly, they endeavored to review key details without arousing suspicion. Hawkins and Dobervich were back on the plow squad, so it and the coffee-pickers detail were made up entirely of escapees. They knew the rendezvous point and reviewed the signal to be given to the Filipinos, Ben and Victor, who would be watching them from the church. One last great worry loomed: that their escape would provoke the Japanese into harming other prisoners. After more than a year of pain and suffering, the thought of inflicting harm on their friends came hard. They had done their best to separate their action from the others. Only team members served on the two work details. No one else knew anything about their plans. Most of all, though, was the goal. The team would escape not just for their survival, but to tell the world of the atrocity being committed by the Empire of Japan.

The pledge the team made to one another that night was bigger than any individual. Each member "made a vow if any one of us became ill . . . that would imperil the progress of the group as a whole, that they were to be abandoned. In other words, we had rules to win as a group and if someone had a problem, that was fate." They did not pledge "All for one and one for all," for good reason. Dobervich and others had survived the March of Death on Bataan. The memory of the three men who had been beaten beyond recognition just outside the gate of Cabanatuan haunted all of them. The strong would succeed. Shifty secreted a rusty razor blade on his person. He would slice open the veins in his wrists rather than be captured.

Just before eight a.m. the next morning, the two working parties approached the gate. Shifty gave Ben and Victor the sign. The four-man bull-plowing detail and the six-man coffee-pickers detail checked out at the guard station. McCoy ordered "eyes left" for his formation and gave the guard a snappy salute. They proceeded on their assigned routes until they were out of sight. By eight thirty, the two groups had met at the rendezvous point, a large anthill near the jungle. Excitedly, they "uncovered the gasoline cans and removed our gear, rolled our packs and made ready to leave." Now, where were Ben and Victor? Minutes passed. The guards used roving patrols and lookouts in the sentry tower. On a Sunday morning, they were sure to be slow, but it was only a matter of time.

Half an hour passed. "If they sold us out, they could probably get $10,000 pesos each and become heroes in the Philippines under jap rule." Someone had had to say it, although the idea of a sellout did not adequately explain the delay. The discussion turned to leaving at once, without Ben and Victor. Shifty said, "No. We don't know where we are and where we are going. We have got to have somebody." Fear kicked into overdrive and every man felt the urge to do something. The team started thinking about a strategy to patrol the area around them so they did not get surprised. Another half hour elapsed and Shifty admitted, " The suspense of waiting, unarmed, within 300 yards of the jap barracks was much worse than any heavy artillery barrage."

Ben and Victor hurried over. They had been made to stand at attention while the guards had searched their barracks. The team swung their packs and the feeling of freedom came with a powerful rush. "We literally flew through the jungle for the first hour," Shofner noticed, but it did not last. The guides missed the trail to Longa-og and backtracked to find it. A heavy rain came down, making it harder to find the trail and harder for the enemy to find them. After another hour wasted, they decided to "make our way by compass, northeast. This course would either bring us into the Longa-og trail or to the Japanese railroad which ran almost to Longa- og." Ben and Victor led the way, hacking a path with their bolos. The team carried the Filipinos' gear.

Wading through the jungle, the swamp, several creeks, and a few deep rivers, the team continued until six p.m. Exhaustion could not be allowed to overcome them, though. They had to build sleeping platforms to keep themselves off the ground and out of reach of the deadly double- headed leeches swimming in the water swirling around their ankles. The Filipinos showed them how to cut some lengths of poles and vines and broad leaves and weave them into crude rattan beds. They ate a ration of food and tried to sleep. The driving rain woke them. The singing hordes of mosquitoes woke them. A few of the bunks broke and sent their occupants into the dark water.

Each man breakfasted on six ounces of corned beef before swinging their packs over their shoulders and setting off. Within a half mile, they had sunk hip- deep into the marsh. The mud had a surprising suction. The wild thickets through which they pushed offered no dry spot where one could sit and rest. Within a few hours, the exertion had drained McCoy and his friend Mellnik. Shofner shouldered both of their packs along with his; Shifty was, McCoy admitted, "a tower of strength."
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By three p.m., McCoy and Mellnik said they could not move another step. The Filipinos spied a large fallen tree, so they made camp on top of it. Again they fashioned beds and dared to light a fire in the wilderness to cook rice and make tea. Shofner watched the hot food and drink revive his team. A debate began about whether to turn back and look for the trail to Longa-og or to continue in the northeast direction. Mellnik wanted to go back, not to find the trail but to turn himself in to the guards. He saw it "as the only chance to survive."
¹¹
Shifty set him straight in no uncertain terms. With that settled, the group still needed to decide its direction. The enemy solved the problem. About 1730, Shofner and the others "heard rifle, machine gun and mortar fire, and also saw some large fires which we concluded were nipa huts burning. We knew this firing came from the japs searching party and presumed they were on the trail we have missed. We took a compass bearing on the fire, determined to go in this new direction in the morning. From the sound we estimated the japs were about 2 miles away."

The mosquito swarms grew fierce at dusk. The nets afforded enough protection to allow the tired men some rest. Well after dark an "eerie sound" awakened them, "the beating of the signal drums by the wild people." Bong-de-de-bong. Bong-de-de-bong. They had heard of the jungle telegraph used by natives, but it sounded more ominous when one was encased inside a swamp. They had heard something moving in the darkness occasionally. Someone asked the guides, "What are they saying?" Shofner interjected, " They're saying bong-de-de-bong, heads-are-available! Heads-are-available!" That brought a chuckle, which broke some of the tension. During the night, a few more beds gave way. "We were not very good woodsmen," Shifty noted.