As Good As Dead Page 6
Each workday consisted of at least ten hours of slave labor, chopping trees and clearing brush for the new “road” bed. The only day off was Sunday, or when the occasional serious rainstorm swept the island. The Americans had arrived at Puerto Princesa during its rainy season, which ran from June through September, when monthly rainfall often averaged more than fifteen inches.
McDole, Smitty, and Henderson soon found new friends in privates first class Evan Bunn and Clarence Clough, fellow marines assigned to their work group who slept near them in the barracks. McDole and his buddies decided that Clough and Bunn were trustworthy enough to invite into their survival group.25
Bunn, an amateur boxer, and Clough had become best friends upon joining the same Marine platoon in 1940. The former machine-gun crew, captured on Corregidor, did time in the Cabanatuan camp before volunteering for the Palawan detail. Both men were happy to be part of their new clique. The five would sit on the veranda outside their barracks in the evening to share stories of home. Clough talked about family life back in rural Wisconsin and learned of girlfriends his buddies had dated. Most of their talk ended up revolving around food.26
Together, they believed they could survive Palawan by relying upon their shared pilfering. The men returned to their camp compound each evening, exhausted after long hours of toiling in the sun and high humidity. They were making progress on the jungle undergrowth, but few still believed they were clearing the way for a road. Soon they came to realize they were actually preparing for a new airfield for the use of the Japanese air force.
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BRUCE ELLIOTT HAD not relinquished his desire to escape. Less than two weeks earlier, the sailor had decided not to jump ship on the island of Culion to join the leper colony. Two days into the jungle airfield construction project, he made up his mind to escape from Palawan. The barbed wire fencing that would encircle the camp had not yet been completed, and Elliott had learned how to scale a stone wall that partially surrounded the compound by leaning a wooden plank against it. He had seen some Filipino detainees who were forced to do labor around the camp scurry up a twelve-foot pole and climb over the wall to spend time with their families during the night.27
One evening soon after arriving at the constabulary, Elliott scaled the wall during a heavy rainstorm, entered the local Catholic church, located the priest, and told him that he was escaping. The priest gave Elliott a small map of the Philippines, a compass, and an alarm clock. Elliott climbed back into the barracks and began talking up his getaway plans with other prisoners. Lieutenant Janson dismissed the idea, telling Elliott there was no way they could make it. At first, seven men agreed to do it, but when the time came, only five joined in the escape.
At 2230 on August 10, Bruce Elliott went over the compound wall in the company of two other Navy prisoners and three marines: Seaman First Class Robert Morris “Bobby” Hodges from the USS Genesee; Seaman First Class Robert William Kellam, a coxswain from the 16th Naval District; Private First Class George Dorrell Davis from M Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment; Private Buddy Henderson, a Texan from the 4th Marine Regiment; and Corporal Sidney Thomas Wright from Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. Wright, a lanky six-foot former machine-gun operator with a heavy Texas drawl, had been among the first to join Elliott’s escape team.28
Cloud cover and a scant guard detail afforded the men the chance to bound onto a small trail leading down the sixty-foot cliffs on the south side of their camp to the beach below. They scrambled more than a mile along the narrow, rocky beach until they found an abandoned Filipino banca, a long, slender outrigger-type canoe. The men grabbed some lumber to use as paddles and pushed out into Puerto Princesa Bay, heading south in the general direction of Australia. Their twelve-foot boat had a large sail and a tattered stabilizing rig beyond its side, but the hull leaked like a sieve, requiring constant bailing. Wright and Elliott took turns with others covering the hole with their feet while using coconut shells as buckets as they paddled and sailed all night. Just outside of Puerto Princesa Bay, they turned into a swamp before dawn, hiding themselves and their banca beneath foliage.29
The next morning, the six men nervously watched as a Japanese patrol boat searched along the coast. It finally returned to port, but they waited until dark to resume their rowing. The escape party spent the next three days rowing their banca along the coast within sight of shore. By dawn of August 14, they had reached the settlement of Brooke’s Point, about sixty miles south of Camp 10-A. As they staggered up onto the beach, Wright noticed a cluster of Filipino natives closing in. They quickly showed their friendly intentions, and one of them, Ben Aroose, led the escapees nine miles uphill to the house of Thomas H. “Harry” Edwards, an American who lived in splendid, sultanlike style.
Edwards, a schoolteacher and staunch Christian, had come to the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and was now the largest landowner in Brooke’s Point, the second-largest town on Palawan after Puerto Princesa. His wife, Rosario, was a Muslim from Mindanao, and together they had carved out a comfortable lifestyle once he retired from teaching. The Edwardses owned a sprawling coconut plantation between Brooke’s Point and the inland mountains, as well as a sawmill, a logging operation, and other businesses. Edwards had grown successful enough to send his oldest children off to college in the United States. Two of his daughters still lived with the family in the settlement of Macagua, located in the foothills eight miles up from the coast.30
Harry and Rosario Edwards, sympathetic to the plight of the escapees, welcomed them into their bamboo-and-thatched-roof evacuation home in the mountains. The men were in need of rest, and Bruce Elliott was fighting off a nasty bout of malaria by the time he reached Brooke’s Point. He was now bedridden, flat on his back. Edwards gave him yellow Atabrine tablets, bitter-tasting synthetic quinine pills, to quell the malaria, along with ample food and drink. After several months of hard living as POWs, the men had little problem staying with the local family for a few weeks.
An efficient underground guerrilla network operated by Filipino residents received word of their escape. Two civilian brothers, Paul and Alfred Cobb, who operated with the northern guerrillas of Palawan, sent word to the escapees that they should journey north to join their band of rebels. As August slipped into early September, the men prepared themselves for their next move. The locals assured them that the Japanese had so far not ventured this far south. Several of the men began collaborating with the local guerrillas, and even managed to obtain rifles for themselves.31
Elliott noted that Bob Kellam minded the idle time the least. He had quickly become smitten with one of Harry Edwards’s attractive daughters.
5
PALAWAN’S “FIGHTING ONE THOUSAND”
THE MORNING ROLL call on August 11 came up six Americans short.
The fact that Captain Kishimoto was so upset helped Ensign Bob Russell to better endure standing at attention all day in camp. The commandant ranted, telling them that “honorable” prisoners would never treat their honorable captors in such a way. George Burlage tried to suppress his pleasure at seeing Kishimoto both hurt by the actions of the escapees and so mad that his shouting at times became incoherent.1
Some prisoners heard later from their guards that Kishimoto wired Manila to ask his superiors what actions he should take. The answer was to restrict the POWs to camp and cut their rations by two-thirds, so for the next three days, each prisoner received only one mess kit of rice per day. Armed guards now patrolled both inside and outside of the barbed wire, both day and night. Airfield work ceased, and no one was allowed outside the wire for any reason. As his shriveling stomach churned, Mac McDole spent his time lying about the barracks, dreaming of the pancake breakfasts he and his sisters used to enjoy in civilian life.2
The guards remained on edge about the escape, as Yeoman First Class Hubert Dwight Hough found out the hard way on the afternoon of August 11. The twenty-two-year-old Iowa native was passing near the camp’s main gate when
he failed to notice a guard who expected him to salute. The Japanese soldier attacked with fury and knocked Hough completely out cold. The beating reopened an older wound on the yeoman’s head, and he was bleeding heavily as he was assisted to the sick bay within the prisoner barracks so Captain Harry Hickman, the senior Army doctor, could stitch him up. Hough was still out of commission the next day when a Japanese major from Manila paid a visit to the camp. The officer advised Hough not to work in the field while recovering from his wound, but asked him to assist in other ways.3
Hough had nearly four years in the Navy when he was taken prisoner at Corregidor. He was an experienced yeoman who knew his way around a typewriter, so the Japanese put him to work as their camp clerk to assist the interpreters, maintain muster rolls of American prisoners, and type out various documents. Hough found it easier to maintain his own secret records in the months ahead with less suspicion. For some time, he had been keeping an abbreviated personal diary in a tiny black leather Japanese journal booklet.
The visiting Japanese officer made it clear that the Americans were to work diligently on the new airfield project. “He told us that anybody that got sick and was not able to work would be sent back to Manila,” Hough noted in his diary. “And this airfield was going to be built over our dead bodies.”4
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AFTER THREE DAYS on restrictions, the Americans were lined up on the parade grounds. Captain Kishimoto expressed his ire with the disrespect his escape-minded prisoners were showing him. “I can put you in chains and take you back to the field, and you can work in chains,” he scolded. “Or I can order my men to shoot you right here and now, or I can forget about it.” The commandant concluded his tirade with the stern warning, “I’m going to give you one more chance.”5
Airfield work resumed that day—chopping gnarly roots, breaking up rocky soil, shouldering downed tree trunks, all under an unforgiving sky. Chief Machinist’s Mate Henry Henderson Jr., who had served on the submarine tender USS Otus before his capture, described the jungle-clearing work in his own forbidden diary. “As a result of this hard labor, our hands were bloody pulps from using the juji (pick ax) [sic] and the impi (shovel),” he wrote. “We worked almost naked in this boiling hot sun. We were so weak, it was almost impossible to work.”6
Puerto Princesa generally received less rain than other regions of the long island, and each day the heat grew intense. In mid-August, the prisoners received precautionary shots against typhoid and cholera, but little to prevent them from contracting malaria. Smitty learned to supplement his intake by stealing the abundant mangoes, papayas, bananas, and coconuts, but doing so carried a severe penalty if he was caught smuggling the fruit back into camp.
Some guards allowed the men to eat what they found at their work site. Everything was fair game, from fruit to island animals such as lizards, snakes, birds, and even monkeys. Some simply could not stomach the sight of a small primate, its skin similar to a human baby, roasting over a fire. Snakes proved to be a big concern, particularly the black cobras occasionally encountered while clearing mahogany trees among the large ant mounds. Marine Bill Kerr was surprised that no American POW was ever bitten by a deadly snake, as any killed by a prisoner had to be delivered to one particular Japanese guard who thrived on eating cobra hearts.7 On one occasion, Private First Class Heraclio Arispe awoke his barrack mates, screaming like a crazy man. A ten-foot python had slithered in through an opening and slid across Arispe. Several starving prisoners, not about to waste anything, found the python to be quite filling.8
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THE TEMPTATION TO escape was too strong for some men to resist. Bruce Elliott and his five comrades had disappeared eighteen days earlier, and although little was known of their fate, other prisoners contemplated making their own break. The next two men to do so were Seaman First Class Charles Oscar Watkins and Aviation Ordnanceman Third Class Jopaul “Joe” Little.
Months of scant rations had dropped his body weight to 120 pounds, but five-foot-eight Watkins still maintained a ready smile beneath his shaggy mass of curly black hair. At age twenty, he had witnessed more cruelty at Corregidor and Cabanatuan than others would see in a lifetime. He and Charlie Watkins, friends since serving together prewar in PBY Catalina flying boat squadron VP-102, plotted busting out of the Puerto Princesa camp after Elliott’s group did so with success. Their first attempt to slip out at night was foiled by alert guards, and they narrowly made it back to their beds.9
Watkins and Little then decided against escaping at night again since the Americans who failed to report them would be held accountable. Little noticed the Japanese counted the POWs at morning roll call, at chow time, and when they climbed off their trucks to begin work at the airfield. The best time to flee would be after the count at the noontime lunch break. After that, the POWs would not be counted again until work ended.10
On August 28, the right opportunity arose after lunch, when Little spotted three truckloads of guards leave the airfield to sell rice to the locals. As he and Little chopped jungle growth with machetes, Watkins moved ahead of the cutting crew to look for guards stationed on the perimeter of their work area. He found none. The two men slipped into the dense brush with only their machetes and the clothes on their backs. They moved swiftly through the jungle for hours, not stopping until 1730, when they knew the guards would conduct a prisoner count and find that two men were missing. They eased into a marshy swamp, crawled into a thickly wooded high spot, and remained hidden under a heavy rainstorm for the next ninety minutes. Then they set out hiking through the moonless night, stumbling through underbrush until the moon appeared to illuminate a nearby path.
Watkins and Little followed trails until they encountered a road around 0400 on August 29. Reasoning that they were far enough away from Puerto Princesa that they would not encounter Japanese soldiers, they walked along the road for several miles and at daybreak slipped back into the jungle. Just inside, the escapees stumbled across a Filipino evacuation camp. As one of the locals poked his head out of his hut, Little inquired, “Hey, Joe. How’s about some chow? We’re hungry.”11
The Filipino offered to take them to Major Pedro Manigque, the senior commander of all Palawan guerrilla outfits. Watkins and Little were soon introduced to Manigque, a former schoolteacher and a member of the Philippine Constabulary who had not surrendered to the Japanese. He led the Americans deeper into the jungle to a secluded place near a small creek and kept them hidden for the next eleven days, waiting until the search for them cooled down.
Manigque next led them to another local who was to help take them to the northern end of Palawan in a sailboat. They found that the man remained drunk for most of the day, and failed to procure the boat. He did, however, convince Little, who had hoped to move south, that they would be in greater danger there from the Moros, an aggressive tribe of Muslim natives.
Radio communication with other islands was primitive during 1942, and efforts to raise an American base for rescue met with no luck. They soon discovered an old motor launch, but were unable to obtain fuel for the engine or a generator to charge the burned-out battery. They finally acquired a small boat and paddled nearly twenty-five miles during the night until they reached the village of Tanabag, where they lived for a week with five Philippine Constabulary soldiers. The two American escapees were moved from village to village, staying about five weeks at Rizal near Brooke’s Point. Their diet consisted mainly of rice, although some of the soldiers were able to kill cattle and other meat—including monkeys on three occasions—with their rifles.12
Watkins and Little were soon introduced to brothers Paul and Alfred Cobb, the northern guerrilla leaders who had traveled down to assist them. The two Americans remained free and on the run into late 1942, moving into the northern reaches of the island at the same time that six other Camp 10-A escapees were also on the lam. Their fates were yet to be determined, but the strong resistance network in place on Palawan greatly increased their odds of survival.13
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FAMILIES BY THE names of Mendoza, Clark, Mayor, Loudon, and Edwards would assist both the prisoners who remained under Japanese captivity and those crafty few who had already busted out.
Dr. Higinio Acosta Mendoza was one of the earliest leaders of the island’s guerrilla network. Born in Puerto Princesa in 1898, Mendoza traveled to the United States during the 1920s for his schooling and attended the University of Iowa. He returned to the Philippines with the degree of Doctor of Medicine and ran a successful practice until 1931, when he was persuaded to run for governor of Palawan. After he was reelected in 1934, his governorship was marked by civic improvement projects such as extending roads, installing a water system in Puerto Princesa, planting trees along the roads, and establishing a botanical garden.14
Once the Japanese occupied Puerto Princesa, Mendoza moved his wife, Triny, and their four children to a safer area on a mountainside between the towns of Babuyan and Tanabag. As the war progressed, Mendoza wasted little time in establishing a guerrilla movement, with his headquarters located in the coastal town of Tinitian. His family holed up farther inland at a place called Jolo near a local river while his resistance movement grew as the people of Palawan tired of their own mistreatment by the occupying Japanese army.15
Law and order in the Philippine Islands had been maintained since 1901 by the Philippine Constabulary, a police force that replaced the former Spanish Guardia Civil. Following the Japanese invasion, regular PC soldiers helped form the nucleus of the guerrilla movement. Mendoza had first organized a guerrilla unit in Puerto Princesa on February 9, 1942—three months before the Japanese even invaded Palawan. Pro-Allied sentiment was strong, and it was later estimated that during the war as many as 1,154 Filipino guerrillas worked against the Japanese on the island. Those in the underground network would proudly refer to themselves as “Palawan’s Fighting One Thousand.”16