Escape From Davao (43 page)

Spurred by thoughts of a good meal and solid sleep, they reached a barrio at sunset only to discover a squad of Japanese troops bathing in the schoolyard. Dyess yel ed an alarm and they immediately buckwheated as the startled Japanese fumbled for their clothes and weapons.

The Americans and Filipinos clambered up a muddy trail leading to the mountains and, flush with adrenaline, did not stop for a moment’s rest. Unable to shine a flashlight or torch, they groped along in the darkness, miserably hungry, for four or five hours until the terrain leveled off. Out of breath, they filtered into a clearing where they found a smal cornfield, “always an indication that a house was near,” Parsons would say. Wandering along the rows, they snapped ears from the stalks and gnawed the raw corn from the cobs.

They spotted a bamboo structure at the edge of the clearing. Inside, in a space no more than fifteen feet square, were crammed some thirty men, women, and children, plus an assortment of dogs, cats, and other animals—the entire population of the town from which they had just fled. As they learned from the friendly Filipinos who shared some cooked chicken, a patrol of fifty Japanese soldiers had entered the town and the townspeople also had just barely escaped.

While the others shoehorned into the hut for the evening, Parsons and Smith attempted to sleep in the chicken coop after first shooing out the occupants. Evidently, the evicted fowl resented the foul treatment and returned during the night to take their revenge; when Parsons and Smith awoke at 0400, they found several chickens and roosters perched on top of them, as wel as an entire night’s worth of droppings. It was a harbinger of events to come.

One of the residents of the town, claiming to know a shortcut to the next barrio, offered his services as a guide. True to form, the group promptly got lost. It would take several hours of stumbling around and down the mountain before Charley Smith, holding the group’s compass, assumed control of navigation and returned them to the trail. The column proceeded along the path, whistling cheerful y, until Parsons and Smith cal ed an abrupt halt. The others caught up and congregated over a parcel of soft mud freshly dotted with footprints, shal ow imprints made by split-toed shoes—
those
kind of footprints.

The Japanese, it seemed, had divided their patrol, with half going around the mountain and the other half coming over it in an effort to flush out their prey. In fact, the latter group “had actual y passed us as we were scrambling around taking our shortcut,” claimed Parsons. The escapees’ luck in getting lost had likely saved them from being trapped between two enemy patrols and some unwanted fireworks on this Fourth of July. But they were hardly in the clear.

They were now in effect tailing the Japanese who were chasing them.

“There was only one trail and nothing to do but march on, taking what precautions against ambush we could,” said Parsons. Two guerril as removed their uniforms, so as to look like locals, and scampered off to scout ahead. It was an agonizingly irrational situation: despite having found the path, they could not speed their advance for fear of overtaking their “pursuers.”

Marching on edge, they found it difficult to maintain the snail’s pace for more than several hours. By 1500, they began to spot cigarette butts on the trail at their feet—some stil burning. Not long after, at the top of a rise, they were startled by an old Moro woman. Through her gestures, they understood that the Japanese had questioned her about the presence of Americans on the trail. She decided to wait and issue a warning. “There was no rhyme or reason for her warning us,” stated Parsons, “except friendship for everyone but the Japanese.”

Peering down at the Japanese resting in a grove, they weighed their options. Watching the enemy soldiers lounging, eating, and drinking coconut milk—they themselves had not eaten since early morning

—was more than they could bear. Smith wanted to attack the patrol, but cooler heads prevailed; even if each of their bul ets found its mark, they stil would not have enough ammunition to dispose of even half the patrol. Al they could do was chew on palm leaves to calm their nerves and stomachs—and cross their fingers. At the edge of the grove, the trail forked in two directions. If the Japanese took the left trail, they were safe since their route lay straight ahead. But if the Japanese continued on their current path, they would have to continue playing their game of reverse cat-and-mouse.

Luck, as it had been so many times in the past, was with them once again. The Japanese moved out and chose the left fork. Once the patrol was safely out of sight, they picked their way down to the path and continued on for several hours, stopping only at an abandoned homestead at dusk to prepare an impromptu meal from a chicken that Dyess had chased down. They were forced to continue on wel into the night to make up for lost time. Parsons knew that if they did not make the rendezvous, it was doubtful that they could arrange another due to the increased enemy activity in the Mindanao area.

Nature, not the Japanese, would be their primary adversary on the third day of their trek. They traversed arduous mountain trails thick with mud that often reached to their knees. Streams consistently barred their path, forcing them to build rafts or else clumsily wade across. While Parsons traveled barefoot most of the time, the others were always stopping to empty their shoes of gravel. Parsons seemed to move with ease along the jungle trails, almost as if he had been there before. Perhaps he had. The ambitious Tennessean had left home for the Philippines in the 1920s and, within a few short years, had been everywhere from Luzon to Zamboanga while working for the American administrative government and honing his commercial talents.

The succession of water barriers and sudden downpours left them continuously waterlogged at the same time that their endless perspiration left them dehydrated. McCoy had the only canteen in the group and it was almost always empty; the laborious process of purifying water with halazone tablets took too long to meet the demands of their thirst so they invariably dropped to their knees to gulp water from streams.

Their tremendous expenditure of energy left them ravenously hungry, too, but they found it difficult to make any concessions, even when they happened upon a barn containing a large amount of livestock. A handful of goats “made such a human bleating” recal ed Parsons, that they could not bring themselves to kil the animals. Happily, the situation was resolved when the scouts located a group of locals who offered to kil a pig for them. The detail returned with a feast of barbecued pork and a dish of ground, steamed corn that tasted like hominy grits. “The finest meal of our lives,” Parsons recal ed. “It just was like sitting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City with thirty waiters bringing on course after course.”

The fol owing morning, both their ranks and their spirits swel ed with the arrival of a handful of guerril as who had recently buckwheated from Aurora—they were now capable of defending themselves should they encounter any more enemy patrols. “At this point, we felt that the situation was wel in hand and were in fact hopeful of making our rendezvous on schedule,” Parsons would write, “when we ran across the worst river we had yet encountered.”

It was the Dinas, located midway between the barrio of Balongating and their next destination, Libunganan. While the rest of the group began raft construction, Parsons and Dyess went off in search of a guerril a encampment rumored to be nearby. Parsons hoped to find a radio that they could use to warn the submarine of a possible delay. They inflated their trousers and then tied them around their necks before kicking their way across the river. Their advance work, however, was for naught; they would hike in a circle for nearly two hours, returning to their starting point just as the others, exhausted and scared stiff, landed ashore. The rafters had lashed a vine to a tree on the opposite bank, but the towline had snapped, sending the raft careening downstream with the powerful 8-knot current. Only a bit of topographical luck, the fortuitous appearance of a sharp bend, had enabled them to beach the runaway raft.

Parsons had noticed that the former escapees were showing signs of strain, so it was with some apprehension that he al owed McCoy to march ahead with a guide. Parsons and the others failed to reach the guerril a camp at nightfal and worse, lost contact with McCoy altogether. The next morning, they were relieved to find that McCoy had preceded them to Libunganan. “He gave a very hazy explanation of his actions … and we realized that he was badly in need of medical care—further necessity for making our rendezvous on time,” Parsons wrote.

Captain Medina, commanding officer of the 115th Regiment, welcomed the travelers with open arms, as wel as some interesting entertainment. The Americans had arrived in time to witness the trial of a captured spy. The accused’s testimony was col ected in due form and affidavit and the man ultimately confessed to supplying the Japanese with information. Guerril a justice was swift, meted out with a Moro
barong
, or long sword, which Dyess asked for and received as a souvenir from the sergeant who performed the execution.

They rose early on the sixth day and took a southwesterly course. Parsons estimated that they traveled nine kilometers from Libunganan to the barrio of Sayog, which was located approximately ten kilometers from the municipality of Lapuyan. Beyond that, somewhere, was their ultimate destination, Margosatubig. It was nearly a guess. Shoulder-high cogongrass swal owed up the trail, making speculation a necessary part of navigation. They also had to deal with another wayward guide they sensed was leading them astray. Consultations with their compass and the guide revealed that the latter wanted to eat lunch at the home of a girlfriend who lived out of the way.

For most of the afternoon, they wandered from hil to hil and fought through fatigue and hunger to breathlessly summit miniature mountains, each time expecting to see the blue waters of Igat Bay, but instead they peered out over more green jungle. “We kept plugging along at any trail we could see, wondering if we had suffered al these hardships and come this long way only to fail when our mission was so nearly complete,” remembered Parsons.

And then, after another strength-sapping ascent at 1600 hours, Igat Bay suddenly appeared. By 1900

they were in Lapuyan, where Capt. Joe McCarthy, an American mestizo guerril a, was waiting with a launch that would transport them through a driving rainstorm to Margosatubig.

Parsons was pleased to learn that McCarthy had had the foresight to radio a warning to Australia that the extraction party might be delayed. Parsons sent an updated message confirming his arrival in Margosatubig, but since the communications station was a one-way operation, there was no way for him to know if that message, or McCarthy’s message, for that matter, had been received. They could only fol ow through with the mission and pray that the rendezvous would go off without a hitch.

They departed Margosatubig at dawn on the 9th of July, puttering first through the narrow channel separating Zamboanga from tiny Igat island and then striking out across the middle of Dumanquilas Bay for the vil age of Naga Naga. It was there that they found the
General Fertig.
The launch was armed with a machine gun salvaged from an aircraft wreck, but it was hardly a match for the Japanese destroyers that had been reported to be operating in the bay. They immediately set to work camouflaging the craft.

By the time they finished, banana leaves and palm fronds hung from guy wires and no fewer than a dozen potted palms, plus piles of fresh fruit, were arranged on the deck. Mel nik noted, with some amusement, the lone coconut palm tree that flew from the mast: “Only a slight ripple at the bow and the wake at the stern belied our appearance as an island.”

It was not until 1600, after stealthily slipping from cove to cove, that the
General Fertig
released into Dumanquilas Bay. Upon arriving at the rendezvous coordinates, Parsons ran an upside-down American flag up the mast, the agreed-upon recognition signal. But for the waiting, their work was done. (In U.S.

Navy tradition, an inverted ensign is recognized as a distress signal.) Without the rumble and hum of the boat’s diesel engines, they bobbed in unsettling silence for what seemed like hours. The glassy sea lapped audibly on the ship’s wooden hul . Their hearts pounded inside their chests. “Dyess and Mel nik were pale and tense,” recal ed McCoy. “I played solitaire to keep from going crazy.”

Ever so slowly, the minutes ticked by. One hour turned into two. The escapees could not help but let dark thoughts enter their minds: that a Japanese ship or seaplane would discover them; that they had missed the rendezvous; that the Navy had cal ed off the operation. Perhaps they were doomed to a life as fugitives perpetual y on the run.

“Think they’l find us?” Mel nik asked Charley Smith.

“Sure,” said an outwardly calm, confident Smith. “I’l bet they’re watching us through a periscope right now.”

Smith was described by Parsons, affectionately, as a “cold-blooded, unemotional sourpuss. I have never seen him smile, much less laugh. Just at sunset he grabbed me around the neck and let out what would almost be a scream.” Hearing a gurgling rumble off the bow, they turned to see a “great big black bulk rising out of the water,” recal ed McCoy.

“There it is!” shouted Smith.

The submarine launched from the water at a 45-degree angle before toppling onto the waves in a giant cloud of spray. It was merely a routine surfacing, but to each of the five Americans it was an overwhelming sight that none would ever forget. The event was especial y poignant for the former POWs.