As Good As Dead Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN L. MOORE

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  Battle Surface!:

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  Last Stand of the Texas Cherokees:

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  War of the Wolf:

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  Savage Frontier:

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  Spadefish:

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  Savage Frontier:

  RANGERS, RIFLEMEN, AND INDIAN WARS IN TEXAS VOLUME II: 1838–1839

  Eighteen Minutes:

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  Savage Frontier:

  RANGERS, RIFLEMEN, AND INDIAN WARS IN TEXAS VOLUME 1: 1835–1837

  Taming Texas:

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM T. SADLER’S LONE STAR SERVICE

  The Buzzard Brigade:

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  (with William J. Shinneman and Robert W. Gruebel)

  CALIBER

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Stephen L. Moore

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  CALIBER and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Maps by David Lindroth

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moore, Stephen L., author.

  Title: As good as dead: the daring escape of American POWs from a Japanese Death Camp/Stephen L. Moore.

  Description: New York: CALIBER, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016029721 (print) | LCCN 2016029942 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399583551 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399583575 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Prisoner-of-war escapes—Philippines—Palawan Island—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. | Prisoners of war— Japan—Biography. | Prisoners of war—United States—Biography. | Palawan Island (Philippines)—History, Military—20th century.

  Classification: LCC D805.P6 M64 2016 (print) | LCC D805.P6 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/7252095994—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029721

  First Edition: November 2016

  Jacket art: Image of wildfire by David McNew/Staff/Getty Images News; image of storm clouds by Dave and Les Jacobs/Blend Images/Getty Images; image of barbed wire by Hidetoshi Tanaka/EyeEm/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Title page image of barbed wire by Hidetoshi Tanaka/EyeEm/Getty Images

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Other Books by Stephen L. Moore

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: BATAAN

  1:THE DEATH MARCH

  2:PRISONERS OF THE ROCK

  3:PASSAGE TO PALAWAN

  PART TWO: PALAWAN

  4:CAMP 10-A

  5:PALAWAN’S “FIGHTING ONE THOUSAND”

  6:“WE GOT THE THIRD AND FOURTH DEGREE”

  7:ESCAPE AND EVASION

  8:CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  9:CODE NAME “RED HANKIE”

  10:SUB SURVIVORS AND COASTWATCHERS

  11:THE WEASEL AND THE BUZZARD

  12:“ANNIHILATE THEM ALL”

  13:THE GAUNTLET

  PART THREE: ESCAPE

  14:HUNTED

  15:FIGHTS AND FLIGHT

  16:SWIMMERS AND SURVIVORS

  17:MAC’S ODYSSEY

  18:ELEVEN AGAINST THE ELEMENTS

  19:EXODUS FROM BROOKE’S POINT

  20:THE LONG ROAD HOME

  21:TRIALS AND TRIBUTES

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A: Victims of the Palawan Massacre, December 14, 1944

  Appendix B: Survivors of the Palawan Massacre, December 14, 1944

  Appendix C: American POWs of Palawan Camp 10-A Held between August 1, 1942 and September 14, 1944

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  DOUG BOGUE WISHED he could make himself invisible.

  Crouching behind large rocks on the beach of Palawan Island, the Marine sergeant watched as Japanese soldiers shot and bayoneted American POWs who were fleeing for their lives along the shore. Sixty feet above, atop the steep bluff overlooking the rocky coastline, black smoke rose into the blue sky, a vivid reminder of the unspeakable horrors he had just escaped, scraping through the barbed wire fencing and tumbling down the cliff toward the Sulu Sea below.

  Bogue’s body was a mass of injuries. His hands and torso had been slashed as he plunged through the razor wire. His right leg throbbed from a rifle bullet embedded in his thigh, and his bare feet were lacerated and bloody from running along the rough coral beach. As he hid behind the boulders, nearly naked, trying to catch his breath and wondering what to do, two POWs ran past him in an attempt to swim to freedom. Both men were cut down by Japanese riflemen.

  It was December 14, 1944. For twenty-eight months, Bogue had slaved as a prisoner of war for the Imperial Japanese Army, working to build the second-largest airfield in the region—one being used to attack Allied forces in the Philippines. He had endured unbearable heat and humidity, illness, physical abuse and torture, and near starvation, and his once-powerful frame had been reduced to skin and bones. That dismal life now seemed merciful in comparison.

  All around him, Bogue could hear the screams of other Americans being slaughtered as they tried to escape. If he ran for it, he knew he might be shot down like the rest. If he stayed put … Either way, the odds were stacked against him. He had to do something, and quickly.

  One thought raced through his mind: They’re going to hunt us down and kill every last one of us.

  PART ONE

  BATAAN

  1

  THE DEATH MARCH

  IT WAS A time when even the most optimistic of souls had little left to believe in. American servicemen, who just a year earlier had relished duty in the Philippines for its enviable life, now questioned their purpose. They were men abandoned
by their own government, left to hold out against a fate already cast, and now, late in the afternoon of April 8, 1942, their five-day fight for freedom and survival was nearing its futile end.

  Still, Beto Pacheco was not about to surrender. Handsome, athletic, and quick to flash a toothy smile in better times, the private first class now looked like a bum: His once-sharp uniform had been reduced to rags, his shoes were nearly worn through, and even his underwear was in shreds. Weeks of exposure to the brutal tropical sun had burned his skin, but Pacheco’s Spanish and Mexican ancestry had at least provided him more natural protection than some of his fair-complected companions.

  The air smelled of death, dirt, smoke, and gunpowder. The once-lush green jungles were denuded of vegetation, swept bare by endless weeks of pounding artillery and aerial bombardments from the Imperial Japanese Army. Explosions sent shock waves through the earth around Pacheco as he and his comrades continued firing back with their few antiaircraft guns that were still marginally operational. Silver-winged Japanese warplanes flashed past, unleashing violent bomb blasts and chattering rounds of machine-gun bullets that shredded the nearby jungle surrounding the last two American airfields on the Bataan Peninsula.

  For Pacheco, the last stand at Bataan was a true test of his devout Catholic faith. At one point, as a strong force flung him from his foxhole, he felt as if the hand of God had saved him. A brilliant red-orange blast left him no time to determine whether a nearby artillery round had propelled him. When the acrid black smoke parted, two of his comrades lay dead in the hole from which he had been thrown.

  Even surrounded by the din of battle, he could feel the gnawing hunger in his gut. Army rations had been gone for weeks. The American and Filipino troops had exhausted their meager supplies of rice and canned goods, and by now they had even hunted the native wildlife in the vicinity to extinction. Pacheco had learned to eat anything—from the insides of palm trees to iguanas, snakes, crickets, and even worms. He was a slight man, standing five foot nine and weighing only 160 pounds when the war started. His weight had dropped quickly, and by this point he would have killed for a bite of wild boar meat, or even a freshly picked mango. But food was not an option.

  Beto Pacheco’s U.S. Army regiment, the 200th Coast Artillery, was hanging on by threads along with its sister unit, the 515th Coast Artillery Regiment—the last remnants of resistance facing the Japanese on the tip of a peninsula of Luzon Island in the Philippines. The men were firing back at the surging Japanese forces threatening to overrun the Cabcaben and Bataan airfields. Dirty, dehydrated, and exhausted, Pacheco was nonetheless determined to fight beside his comrades to the very end. And now Army brass was spreading the news that the end had come.

  At 0300 on April 9, Captain Albert Fields returned from the I Corps headquarters and told his executive officer, “It’s all over.” Runners reached Pacheco’s artillery unit before dawn with orders that the 200th and 515th were to rendezvous on the road west of Cabcaben by 2200. But first, they were to destroy their antiaircraft guns and range equipment, leaving them just their rifles. We’re being reduced to infantrymen! Pacheco thought with disgust.1

  The disheartened men dutifully sabotaged their weapons and marched out with rifles, canteens, bayonets, and a belt of ammunition each. Men much older than Pacheco trudged along with tears streaming down their dusty, blood-caked faces as they carried out the dreaded orders. The young soldier brushed aside his wavy dark hair—untrimmed for long enough to hang over his sweaty brow—adjusted his gear, and moved forward. He was armed with only a rusting 1903 model .306-caliber Springfield bolt-action rifle, but he still had his pride.

  Somehow, some way, he intended to carry on the fight. He was not about to willingly surrender himself to the Japanese.

  *

  PACHECO’S 200TH COAST Artillery unit had been the first to fire on the Japanese warplanes that swept over Manila on December 8, 1941. Seven hours earlier—December 7 Hawaii time—Japanese carrier aircraft had unleashed a devastating surprise assault on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. With the capture of the Philippines critical to Japan’s effort to control the Southwest Pacific, their planes attacked within hours the main aviation bases on Manila and the headquarters of the United States Asiatic Fleet at Cavite. In only a single day Japan gained air superiority over the Philippines and forced the surviving ships of the U.S. fleet to withdraw from Cavite.

  Tens of thousands of American military personnel were left stranded on the ground in and around Manila, the Philippine capital. Pacheco’s 200th Coast Artillery, the only American antiaircraft unit on Luzon, had been assigned to protect nearly three dozen B-17 bombers on Clark Field with their single battery of .50-caliber machine guns, twenty-one 37mm guns, and a dozen three-inch antiaircraft guns. Prior to that day, Pacheco’s unit had never actually fired a live round of ammunition in the islands.2 Yet since firing that first shot at the Japanese on December 8, Pacheco’s antiaircraft regiment had expended some forty thousand rounds in the months that followed. They had been credited with destroying eighty-six Japanese aircraft—a proud accomplishment, but not nearly enough to save the Philippines.

  The 200th Coast Artillery, formerly the 111th Cavalry of the New Mexico National Guard, had arrived in the Philippines in August 1941. The unit was composed of eighteen hundred artillery specialists, more than half of whom were New Mexicans from Spanish-speaking border and mountain communities that used little English. The New Mexico National Guard, the oldest continuously active militia in the United States, dating to 1598, had participated in the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the frontier Indian wars. New Mexico’s militiamen had charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, had ridden against Pancho Villa’s banditos south of the Rio Grande, and had served in France during World War I.3

  Now hundreds of these proud men were moving out, overwhelmed, while other antiaircraft batteries continued firing back at the approaching enemy. Its companies were widely scattered, hanging on to what little ground they could still hold. Pacheco, a battlewise veteran after four months of hell on Luzon, knew that the last stand of the 200th would be short-lived.

  He had heard others whisper the word surrender. The heavily reinforced Japanese forces sweeping down the Bataan Peninsula had pounded the dug-in Americans with blistering air and artillery fire for days. The Japanese had broken through Allied lines on April 7, and the following day, the senior U.S. commander on Bataan, Major General Edward P. King, had seen the futility of further resistance. He began offering plans for capitulation.

  As they hustled along, Pacheco tried to offer encouragement to some of the younger men in his Headquarters Battery. Several of his hometown companions from Deming, New Mexico—Angelo Sakelares, Lawrence “Buddy” Byrne, and Jim Huxtable—had been wearing high school graduation caps and gowns just months ago. By August 1941, these fresh-faced boys on the cusp of manhood had been selected for overseas duty in the Philippines by virtue of their reputation as the best antiaircraft regiment in the U.S. Armed Forces. Now they were starving, grimy, and haggard, clothed in tatters, and facing a defeat the likes of which no modern American unit had been forced to reckon with.4

  In early 1941, the 200th had trained at Fort Bliss, the Army’s second-largest installation, headquartered in El Paso, Texas. There, Pacheco had met sixteen-year-old Catalina “Katie” Valles, an attractive girl with green eyes and long dark brown hair. The two were soon an item, and even began dreaming of a future together—against the wishes of her father, because she was so young. Pacheco’s plans took a sudden detour with the selection of the 200th for overseas assignment. He promised Katie he would be gone only a year. When he returned, they could get married and start a life together.

  If his proud regiment was now truly surrendering to the Japanese, that future with Katie seemed an impossibility.

  *

  THE AMERICAN SURRENDER on the Bataan Peninsula had been months in the making.

  Pacheco’s artillery regiment had started
the war based at Fort Stotsenburg, which abutted Clark Field some seventy-five miles north of Manila. The destruction of the B-17s at Clark in December forced the 200th and 515th to withdraw to Bataan by the first days of 1942. There, the artillery regiments had set up their antiaircraft defenses in and around Manila to protect the airstrips at Cabcaben and Bataan, where only seven P-40s were still flying by the first of the year.

  By January 9, the strung-out artillery regiments were already living on reduced rations as the drubbing of Japanese artillery signaled the beginning of the Battle of Bataan. Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1907, had landed his troops of the Japanese 14th Army at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon and advanced toward Manila. His army found little resistance at first, as General Douglas MacArthur had ordered his own forces to withdraw from the capital city to the Bataan Peninsula. During the early months of the siege, MacArthur was fed false hope by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised hundreds of planes and thousands of troops. To await his reinforcements, the general took up headquarters more than two miles across the water from Bataan on Corregidor Island, known to most as “the Rock.”

  MacArthur was unaware that as early as late December 1941, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had already privately written off the remote outpost of Bataan—a decision they confided to Winston Churchill. In so doing, Washington had also forsaken the Philippines and all of its defenders.

  The four-month stand made by General King’s men had been doomed from the start. The American troops in Manila were unable to receive supplies and ammunition due to their own crippled Navy and the blockade that the Imperial Japanese Navy had placed on the Philippines. Now, on April 9, King, adorned in his last clean uniform, was prepared to surrender to General Homma some seventy-eight thousand American and Filipino soldiers under his command. By doing so, he hoped to avoid a slaughter.