Escape From Davao (47 page)

Leo

In the letter, the message was more of the same. Their duty as officers, wrote Boelens, was of paramount importance. Personal loyalties and relationships must be set aside for the good of the nation.

“His duty was to stay and complete the airstrip,” Grashio said. “Mine was to go.” But for what reason, Grashio could not immediately understand.

Hath No Man

I kneel to thee and hail thee as my Lord.

From such a God as thee I ask not life …

I ask but strength to ride the wave of fate …

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8–THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1943

Washington, District of Columbia

The arrival of autumn brought cooler temperatures, but America’s emotional furnace needed little stoking.

In early October, the government released the translation of a diary found on a dead Japanese soldier in New Guinea that poetical y described the beheading of an Al ied airman. Addressing an inflamed nation, the
New York Times
editorialized that the diary exposed “the real nature of our Asiatic enemy,” one of

“primitive blood lust and brutal butchery.”

Writing a secret memorandum for Secretary of War Henry Stimson on October 8, General George Marshal sensed the change in the barometer of public opinion. The pressure in Washington was increasing with the release of each atrocity story. Believing that it was only a matter of when, not if, the public heard the Dyess story, Marshal forecast a tempest. He wanted Stimson to be prepared for the worst, but also to prepare to harness and manage the public fury.

The problem is exceedingly complex and of course requires the most careful handling both in relation to our actions at the present time and as to future developments. The storm of bitterness which wil arise, once the public is aware of the brutalities and savagery displayed by the Japanese towards our prisoners, should be directed along careful y thought out lines rather than left to dissipate itself in a lurid press and unpredictable reactions…. I don’t want to burden you unnecessarily in this matter, but you have had it somewhat in hand and it pertains to the highest governmental policy.

That policy greeted Sam Grashio when he reached Hamilton Field in mid-October. “Here, as in Australia, I was reminded repeatedly that my past was a military secret, that I was not to discuss life in prison camps with anyone,” Grashio remembered. “At the moment I thought this merely sil y. Within a few days, the gag was to be exceedingly irksome.”

Grashio proceeded to Washington, stopping briefly in Chicago at the request of Don Maxwel to sign a waiver that would ensure the
Tribune
’s monopoly on the Dyess story. For his signature, Grashio was

“rewarded with the princely sum of $100.” In Washington, Grashio found the exchange even less lucrative. The functionaries at the Pentagon and State Department were “patronizing” and unsympathetic:

“To me, they seemed unreasonable, even inhuman; preoccupied with Europe when American soldiers were starving, rotting and dying in squalid prison camps; far too concerned about the reactions of the Japanese and too little about the fate of Americans abroad and the anxieties of their loved ones at home.” Grashio could not comprehend the foot-dragging in an otherwise bustling capital. “In my opinion,”

he said in his official statement, “at this time there is approximately 25% of the original Americans taken in the Philippines stil alive and in another six months to a year, if something is not done to improve their diet and medical care, very few wil be living to tel their experiences.”

Shortly after his Washington trip, Grashio experienced his own breakdown. As with Dyess, his was a long time coming. In prison camp, the prisoners’ energies had been devoted to survival. After escaping, they needed to stay one step ahead of the Japanese; there was no time to look back. Thrust back into home life, Grashio grew chronical y nervous and restless. His moods became “dark and petulant.” When he wasn’t suffering from insomnia, he endured nightmares, frightening visions of the prison camps and the Japanese.

Grashio was soon admitted into Spokane’s Fort Wright hospital for six weeks of “rest, recuperation and repairs.” While doctors fought his malaria and a dentist reconstructed a mouthful of teeth that had been decimated by malnutrition, he searched for the source of his debilitating depression. It did not take long: it was
them
—Bert Bank, Motts Tonel i, and the others stil in Dapecol. “Now I found myself muzzled,”

he would say, “seemingly unable to do anything for those left behind, and at the same time ignorant of what had happened to them.”

His inability to respond to the “avalanche of questions, cal s and letters,” the information requests from relatives of POWs, plunged him deeper into despair. “It was maddeningly frustrating to be unable to divulge what I knew, especial y when some of the beseechers were aware that I was holding back on them and when I was convinced that there was no sufficient reason to hold back.” Al that the escapees had been through seemed for naught. It was the cruelest of ironies. “The whole purpose of our escape,”

he said, “seemed thwarted, mocked every day.”

As bad as it was, Grashio admitted that “Dyess came much closer than I to being destroyed by the consequent frustration.” Dyess had absorbed one bitter disappointment after another. Not only had he been forced to ignore the families of his men and essential y been removed from public circulation for several weeks at Ashford, his request to return to combat duty in the Pacific had also been denied.

Months later, Marajen Dyess attempted to explain what her husband was going through. “I saw it in his eyes—that suffering—when I first greeted him,” she said. “I was the only one he could tel . He had to tel someone. He was breaking inside. Hundreds of people with relatives who are Jap prisoners cal ed or wrote him daily and he couldn’t tel a single one about the dreadful happenings in the Philippines. It hurt him so.”

Dyess, however, was temporarily placated with another promotion, as wel as General Arnold’s promise of a fighter command in Europe. And Grashio’s orders were changed so that he could join Dyess as a squadron commander. Even more important, Dyess had been granted one more special permission: he was going home to Texas.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1943

Albany, Texas

Ed Dyess no sooner rose from his seat than the overflow crowd at the Albany High School stadium jumped to its feet and erupted in thunderous applause. He had not even opened his mouth.

“Hel o folks,” he said, leaning toward the microphone sheepishly. Then, waving the audience down, he pleaded, “Everybody sit down.”

Dyess had sat through the invocation and introductions waiting nervously for his turn at the rostrum.

The stadium floodlights shone down upon the highly decorated, twenty-seven-year-old new lieutenant colonel on this Friday night with greater intensity than at any time during his playing days. But butterflies were not the problem.

“I feel like I have a ten-gal on hat caught in my throat,” he opened. “You know, I real y am embarrassed up here…. I don’t know of any other time when I have felt like this—except I remember one morning I was standing in a cow pasture with a parachute on while the Japs were bombing Pearl Harbor. I feel now like I felt then, except I don’t have a parachute now…. If you have ever gotten up to make a speech and can’t say anything—you know the jam I’m in now.”

Dyess had been permitted to stop in Texas before reporting to his new assignment with the 4th Air Force in California. It would be the briefest of homecomings—six days—and an uncomfortable one at that, given the entourage of officers and bodyguards that accompanied him to Albany. Whether he was in the parlor room having a conversation with an old friend or outside tossing around a footbal with some Cub Scouts, the escorts were omnipresent. In the latter years of her life, his mother, Hal ie, would remain convinced that the telephones in the Dyess home had been bugged at this time. Throughout Dyess’s brief stay, hundreds of cal s, letters, and telegrams—many were from wel -wishers, but most were from worried parents, wives, and loved ones of people declared missing on Bataan—streamed into his parents’ residence. He had no choice but to answer each the same: “I can’t say a thing.” He could not even tel his parents about what he had seen and experienced, or how he had escaped. Invitations to speak in nearby Cisco and Abilene had to be turned down. Dyess was probably fortunate in that regard.

The giant crowd jammed in and around the stadium on this night—by most accounts, the entire population of Albany, approximately 2,000—was starving for information about the adventures of their native son. Dyess tried his best to nourish them with his charm and sense of humor. One friend, he told the audience, had suggested that Dyess just count to 100 to fulfil his speaking obligation.

“But I see Miss Jackson, my old math teacher, out there,” cracked Dyess, “and she knows I can’t count that high.”

Dyess then turned to a subject that he could talk about indefinitely: food.

“One thing I know for sure—it is wonderful to be here. I didn’t know that when I sent a telegram asking that a steak be saved for me that I would get al of the food I am getting now.”

The gag order had forced the pool of reporters covering the homecoming to file stories on what Dyess was putting into his mouth, rather than what was not coming out. Judge and Mrs. Dyess had dutiful y saved up their ration points in order to provide their son with a steak for nearly every meal, leading to headlines such as the one appearing in this day’s edition of the
Dallas Morning News:
“One-Man Scourge of Japanese Turns Talents on Texas Steak.”

“I am going to have to get out of town before I give my dad a race,” Dyess, said, laughing and patting his midriff as the crowd roared. “In my lifetime, I have tried practical y everything there is to eat. In fact, in Shackelford County, I tried to eat a barbecued sparrow and a hawk. I have eaten a little monkey, horse, mule and carabao. Our cooking recipe for carabao was simple. Put two rocks in with the carabao. When the rocks melted, you knew the carabao was tender.”

On Bataan, Dyess added in al seriousness, U.S. troops ate everything but rats.

“Yel ow rats! If you don’t know what a yel ow rat looks like—wel , it is larger and rattier and yel ower than any rat you have ever seen. We had a lot of trouble with these rats and kil ed a good many of them.”

The implication was clear. It would be Dyess’s only reference to his combat experiences.

“I’l tel you where I’ve been,” continued Dyess, returning to humor in an effort to address some of the rumors that had prefaced his presence in Albany. “This is my story and I wil stay with it. My boat sailed from San Francisco two years ago—and I jumped the ship. Since then I’ve heard that I’ve been in Shangri-La—you’ve al heard of Shangri-La. But I haven’t been in Shangri-La. I’ve been incognito in a zoot suit.”

Dyess, whose eyes were beginning to turn glassy, did not need to glance down at his diamond-studded wristwatch, a gift from his parents for two missed Christmases and three birthdays, to know that it was time to wrap up his speech.

“But seriously, it is probably a pretty good thing that I can’t talk too much on a few subjects. This is the greatest tribute I wil ever get—past, present or future … I don’t think that this should be a tribute to me. I am back. I am here. Let’s make this a tribute to those boys who are not back but who are stil over there.”

Dyess paused momentarily as his amplified voice reverberated into the crowd. “This is the greatest honor I shal ever receive. When the folks at home are glad to see you home—you can’t beat that.”

Dyess could barely choke out the last words when hundreds from the crowd—men, women, and children, friends and strangers alike—surged from their seats and pressed the speaker’s stand to pump his hand, ask for autographs, embrace him, or, in the case of some, merely touch him.

“I want you al to know that I love every one of you.”

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1943

Nasipit, Agusan Province, Mindanao

It was almost 1600 hours and Austin Shofner was, as usual, in a betting mood. An hour earlier, Shofner, Mike Dobervich, Jack Hawkins, Wendel Fertig, and Ernest McClish had boarded the launch
Agusan
and puttered out from Nasipit to meet the submarine that had been dispatched to evacuate the three Marines, as wel as a number of civilians and children, from Mindanao. The sub was slightly overdue and Shofner sensed that the group needed a boost.

“Who wants to make a little bet?” he chal enged. “I’l say she surfaces at four-thirty. How about you, Beaver? Think you can outguess me?”

“Okay, Shof,” said Dobervich, ever indulgent. What do you want to bet this time—the usual?”

“Yep. One steak dinner, payable in Frisco.”

“Al right, you’re on. I say five o’clock. You say four-thirty. Whoever’s closest wins.”

“Beaver, you already owe me twelve steak dinners, you know.”

“Don’t worry, Shof. When we hit Frisco I’l buy you those twelve steaks—al at one time. And I hope you choke on ’em.”

The lighthearted banter did little to al eviate Hawkins’s gnawing fears.

“I could scarcely believe that the submarine would actual y appear,” he would say, “that this, at last, was to be the day of deliverance.”

Reaching this point had not been easy. The remaining escapees had spent the last four months buckwheating from headquarters to headquarters, town to town, hideout to hideout. Hawkins was lucky to be alive, let alone here for this moment. In June, soon after being sent to Tubay in the Lake Mainet area of Surigao to prepare a new camp, Hawkins had been stricken with blackwater fever, a virulent complication of malaria. The devastating attack immobilized him at a most inopportune time: almost simultaneously, the Japanese launched an assault on Tubay. Amid fal ing bombs, Filipinos carried a semiconscious Hawkins to the remote home of a man named George Tirador. For nearly a month, Tirador and his family nursed Hawkins back to health with around-the-clock care and some of the quinine that Ed Dyess had pilfered from the Dapecol dispensary prior to the escape.