As Good As Dead Read online

  Other pioneers in the Palawan guerrilla network were influential businessman Thomas F. Loudon and his extended family. A resident of the island for nearly four decades, Loudon was well-known throughout the area. During the early 1900s, he had owned and managed the Delawan Bay Company in the settlement of Balabac, where he lived with his family on company property where his corporation operated a store. Tragedy befell the Loudon family on July 18, 1913, when a large group of Moros attacked the family home with lances and barongs, Moro fighting knives.17 Loudon managed to escape to find help, but upon his return, he found his home ransacked and his wife and infant daughter murdered, along with six others. By 1918, he had relocated his business to Bugsuk Island, where his family resided at the beginning of the hostilities with Japan in World War II.18

  Two of Loudon’s daughters had been away in Manila when their mother and sibling were murdered in 1913. The oldest, Mary Loudon, went to the United States for school during the 1920s. There, she met another Filipino native named Nazario Benito Mayor—born in 1901 on Robalon Island off Palawan—who was studying at the University of Kansas. Mary and Nazario were married in 1928 after returning to her father’s home on Bugsuk Island, where the Mayors began raising a large family while Nazario worked with his father-in-law in the lumber business. Thomas Loudon happened to be in Manila on business when the Japanese invaded, and he was soon captured. The Japanese suspected him of aiding the new guerrilla movement on the islands, and Loudon would be held under arrest away from his family for the next three years.

  Nazario Mayor evaded capture in Manila and made his way back to his family at Bugsuk Island by boat. He had good reason to hate the Japanese for holding his father-in-law prisoner and for the general abuse being rained upon the Filipino people. Nazario thus became involved with the Palawan guerrilla movement early in 1942, leaving Mary with their children. Robert, their oldest son, born in Puerto Princesa in 1930, became the man of the house at age twelve, left to help provide for his siblings.

  Mayor’s company operated in the Brooke’s Point district. Other regional units, inspired by the direction of Dr. Mendoza, were in operation throughout Palawan by the time the first six Americans escaped from the Puerto Princesa camp in August 1942. Those in Mendoza’s unit had moved between several villages during the early months of the war, but eventually established themselves at Tinitian, where he set up his permanent headquarters.19

  The Loudon, Mendoza, and Mayor families sacrificed plenty as the war played out in the Philippines. Their names, in time, would be ones that some Americans held on Palawan would never forget.

  6

  “WE GOT THE THIRD AND FOURTH DEGREE”

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF Charlie Watkins and Joe Little was finally realized shortly after airfield construction work ceased at 1600. Once again, Captain Kishimoto flew into a rage. For the second time in less than three weeks, his reputation was tarnished by POWs escaping under his charge. From the original roster of 346 Camp 10-A prisoners, the number had already dwindled to 338. Eight Americans were simply gone, vanished into the jungles of Palawan.

  Kishimoto again held the remaining prisoners in the compound for three days, their rations cut by two-thirds. Now the daily allotment of food was a half small loaf of bread with a half cup of beans for breakfast, and a half ration of rice and a half cup of soup for supper. Over those three days, the prisoners were vaccinated for smallpox as rumors swirled as to what had become of Watkins and Little. Sometime later, after the men were allowed to return to their construction work, a Filipino crept close enough to the airfield site to whisper to some Americans that their two comrades were being led through the jungle with the assistance of a Filipino guide.1

  For the time being, the Americans could only offer prayers that Watkins and Little would continue to avoid recapture. On August 30, Kishimoto assembled his prisoners and lectured them on the disloyal tendencies they were displaying to his guards. “I’m left with three ways of treating you men,” the commandant barked. “We can continue to let you work as you are. Or you can work with chains on your legs. Or you can stay in your barracks and grow thin.”

  At length, Kishimoto announced that work would soon recommence under new restrictions: All Americans would form into ten-man groups, each monitored by a Japanese guard. Any man who escaped would bring severe consequences to those he left behind. Never mind that most men were too weak from malnutrition to give serious thought to taking flight.2

  The following day, the POWs returned to the airfield. September passed as a seemingly endless string of days under a scorching sun, hundreds of bone-thin men laboring with picks, shovels, and axes to clear coconut, mahogany, and kamagong trees that towered above the wicked undergrowth. The Americans were given more inoculations to prevent tropical ailments, but within two weeks, many had fallen seriously ill with various infections.

  The absence of the eight escapees stifled the mood in camp as much as the intense heat and the dust. Tensions between the prisoners and their guards reached new heights as the Japanese became even more abusive, lashing out at their captives for the slightest transgression. Mac McDole found it difficult to maintain his short temper—his aggressive nature forbade him from being passive to abuse. On one occasion, he was chopping down a coconut tree when a guard barked orders to him in Japanese. Mac, having no idea what was being said, simply muttered, “Okay.”3 The guard’s heavy club struck him squarely in the mouth. Furious, he stumbled back to his feet with a loose tooth and a mouthful of blood, and received a lecture from Smitty about maintaining his calm.

  But calm just wasn’t a part of Mac’s character. He had grown up a child of the Great Depression, an era in which boys learned from an early age that life was tough even under the best of circumstances. His father was a sign painter by trade, forced to shuffle his family from Nebraska to Texas to California to Colorado, and then back to Nebraska, chasing a paycheck. The McDoles eventually settled for good in Iowa, where Glenn became a star athlete on both his high school football and basketball teams. Standing five foot ten and weighing in at 185 pounds when he enlisted in the Corps, Mac was eager to become an Iowa Highway Safety Patrol officer once he completed his service with the Marines.4

  Mac knew he could not strike back at the Japanese, but he could at least rebel in other ways. He became lazy, picking up half shovels of dirt and aimlessly scattering them around. Smitty warned him during one listless routine that an angry guard was approaching, but Mac just smiled and kept up his slow pace. The guard smashed both their heads with his club, their skulls spared serious injury only by the pith helmets they wore. Despite the blow, McDole enjoyed seeing the guard so riled up, and it was far from the last time he and Smitty would be beaten for his lackluster efforts.

  Determined to maintain progress on the airstrip, Captain Kishimoto called for additional American prisoners to replace those who had escaped or fallen ill. The first new group of one hundred prisoners arrived on October 6, 1942, nine weeks after the original POWs had arrived. The total American population at Camp 10-A now stood at 438, but injury, illness, and death would ensure that the roster would never surpass this figure.

  The new arrivals included ninety-eight enlisted men and two officers, Captain Fred Tobias Bruni of the U.S. Army and Lieutenant (junior grade) Francis Xavier Golden. Heavyset, with oval-framed glasses that sat on his rounded face, Bruni was a reservist from Wisconsin who had previously been in command of the Headquarters Company of the 192nd Tank Battalion. Frank Golden, a thirty-six-year-old from Richmond, Virginia, had previously worked for the U.S. Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue before going into the Navy. Captain Bruni, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, had been a GM assembly plant foreman in his previous civilian life. Ensign Bob Russell doubted Bruni’s rough, crude style would mix well with the restrained nature of Captain Ted Pulos, the senior American officer at Puerto Princesa.5

  Private First Class Ernie Koblos, a new arrival on Palawan, had spent the previous four months suffering in t
he overcrowded Cabanatuan prison camp on Luzon. The twenty-four-year-old from Chicago had been enamored with the islands upon first arriving in January 1940. “I sure like it here in the Philippines,” he wrote to his father. “I want to make it my home.”6 Finding that his monthly pay of twenty-one dollars did not go far, he soon volunteered for higher-paying service aboard the Army mine planter SS Harrison, working in the engine room as a second oiler. Eventually he returned to artillery duty at Fort Mills, until the Japanese invasion ruined his stint in paradise.

  Herded now into the barracks at Puerto Princesa, he was offered neither bedding nor a change of clothes. No soap was issued to him, and there would be no regular baths. His shoes long since confiscated, he would be forced to work barefoot. In the months ahead, he would sleep on the wooden floor in the same tattered rags he had arrived in.7

  Still, his desire to exit the hell of Cabanatuan had been intense, a desire shared by Private First Class Gene Nielsen. Nielsen had seen enough death there that the decision to volunteer for other duty was a simple one. In this new Puerto Princesa camp, he was assigned to a ten-man work team, toiling at removing jungle undergrowth one day and bringing down coconut trees the next. The tools were crude and clumsy, the conditions threatening at all times, and he quickly learned which guards were the meanest. If a man was caught resting, a Japanese soldier would swing a wooden club into his kidneys, slam the backs of his legs, or cuff his skull with enough force to drop him to the dirt.8

  Nielsen had learned survival at an early age. His father passed away when he was twelve, leaving his family to struggle through the hungry years of the Great Depression. Like many young men, he turned to the Civilian Conservation Corps for a paycheck, serving on projects in Utah before joining the Army in January 1941. He chose the Philippines as his assignment, but his hopes of fulfilling his military service amid sea breezes and swaying palms ended at the bloody last stand on Corregidor, where he served as a range setter on Crockett Battery until his capture.

  From seasoned Palawan prisoners, he learned that smuggling fruit back into camp was forbidden. He found it easy enough to grab a coconut or banana by asking a guard for a break to go defecate in the jungle, away from the runway work. Still, he could not resist the urge to tuck a few bananas under his shirt one evening to take back to his barracks. Alert guards spotted the unusual bulge and made Nielsen stand with his arms raised over his head while a pair of Japanese soldiers thrashed him with wooden pick handles. He struggled to keep his footing as crushing blows rained down on his buttocks, legs, and lower back. Told he would receive fifty licks, he made it through several dozen before his legs finally buckled. To his chagrin, the guards were not satisfied. They screamed and kicked at him until he struggled back to his feet for the beating to continue.9

  Nielsen reported to sick bay the next morning with black welts covering his lower body. Doc Mango advised him not to show his injuries to anyone. Not wanting to be seen as sympathetic in the eyes of the Japanese by letting a man stay in with only minor injuries, Mango gave Nielsen only one day off before he sent the bruised and bloodied soldier back to the work zone.

  Nielsen’s punishment may have seemed minor next to that of Army Private Richard McClellan. Caught smuggling fruit as he returned to camp, he was slapped around by a guard. He assumed the “forbidden fruit” incident was over, but at roll call the next morning, Kishimoto approached the ranking American officer, Captain Pulos, demanding to know McClellan’s name. The Japanese insisted on the execution of Private McClellan, but Pulos intervened on his behalf. Instead, the American was tied to a flagpole, his feet lashed to the base and his hands secured behind his back with rope. After he had endured twelve hours on the pole without food or water under the blistering hot sun, McClellan’s feet were so swollen that they took two days to return to normal.10

  Abuse and injuries piled up during October. One Japanese corporal nicknamed “Mushmouth”—a man of small stature with an ugly scar on his temple—delighted in beating prisoners for no reason at all. Mushmouth took his aggressions out late one afternoon with a two-by-four on three Americans who were digging out a tree stump. Sergeant Gerald Skripsky crumpled from a blow to his forehead that left a permanent scar above his right eye. Private First Class Joseph Viterna suffered a broken arm, and Mushmouth rendered Navy prisoner Francis Parrish unconscious with a blow to the head.11

  By late October, Doc Mango and Captain Hickman had several dozen men on their sick bay list, deemed too ill to work. Many suffered from malaria, convulsing with teeth-chattering chills or sweating profusely from spiking fevers. The dysentery victims hunched over the fly-infested straddle ditches as their bowels expelled any food they ate long before their bodies could process any life-sustaining nutrients. Mango fashioned a sling for Staff Sergeant Raymond Mullins, whose arm had been broken by a Japanese guard he was arguing with about whether American forces in the Pacific were defeated. Mullins struggled to shovel with only one arm the next day, but he refused to back down when the same guard tried provoking him again about America’s impending downfall.12

  On October 26, the Japanese shipped twenty-one of the sickest enlisted men back to Manila on a transport ship while Sergeant Mullins, broken arm and all, stayed with the remaining 417 Americans on Palawan. One of the men returned to Bilibid Prison had fallen under suspicion of his fellow prisoners for being too friendly with some of the guards. They nicknamed him “Boots” because of the black pair he was suspiciously allowed to wear while most others worked barefoot.

  McDole and Smitty had become curious when they saw Boots stuff a scribbled note into one of his prized boots. Days later, they confronted him at the airfield site when he trudged into the brush to relieve himself. Mac knocked him to the ground and held him while Smitty retrieved the slip of paper. On it was a message written in Japanese script. In the barracks that night, Mac and Smitty found a prisoner who could decipher the language well enough to determine the note was a declaration that Boots would give up his American citizenship if he could join the Japanese army. Guards had to break up a scuffle in the compound yard after Mac and Smitty confronted the traitor. When Captain Kishimoto learned of the note, he declared his disgust for anyone who turned his back on his own country, and he put Boots on the first outgoing ship to Bilibid.13

  The unspoken code among prisoners was that collaborating with the enemy was unacceptable. Communication with the Filipinos, though, was a different matter. Mac McDole encountered his first friendly guerrilla while on a jungle bathroom break and was badly startled when a voice called out, “Hey, Joe. Don’t look. I leave something for you!”14 The man was gone before McDole could spot him, but he found a piece of bread placed nearby on a coral rock. Other prisoners had similar initial encounters, and they learned in time that the local guerrilla company had been spying on them from the moment they first arrived. McDole and others who communicated with the underground network picked up scraps of information on the war’s progress: In June, the U.S. Navy had won a major victory against the Japanese during the Battle of Midway, and their enemy had been suffering in the Solomon Islands since the 1st Marine Division had landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

  The Americans had little understanding of how deeply the Palaweños despised the Japanese soldiers, but the thought of others sneaking about the jungle to deliver food and outside intelligence gave them reason to be optimistic. Gene Nielsen found little else to appreciate. The men were forced to work on Thanksgiving Day, and the food provided left little to be thankful for. Nielsen learned to stomach the moldy, mushy rice and ignore the ever-present worms, which were white with black heads about the size of a kernel of rice.

  Two meals stood out from the rest. The first was a creation of Nielsen’s group when they managed to scrounge discarded cabbage from the trash to add to their rice. Beto Pacheco felt little better than a slopped hog as he gathered scraps from the dirt, but he did so in order to add calories to his shrinking frame. Gene’s second-favorite meal came from the remnants of a carib
ou slaughtered by the Japanese. Prisoners were allowed to bust up the bones with sledgehammers on a chopping block. The bone fragments contained very little meat, but once they were boiled, and with salt added, the slight flavor they contained seemed to be a delicacy.15

  *

  MANY PRISONERS FORMED “survival groups” for mutual support, looking out for another member if he became ill and sharing contraband goods. Survival group members also covered for one another when someone slipped up with the guards.

  Smitty narrowly escaped severe punishment thanks to his group’s quick thinking. The tall, lean Texan, now sporting a long beard after months of neglect, had grown particularly jumpy, and his trouble started when some buddies learned that he could be badly startled if someone “goosed” his rear from behind. Another American somehow managed to convince a young Japanese guard to sneak behind Smitty and grab his rear end. The guard fell for the joke and seized Smitty’s hind end when he was looking away. The startled prisoner jumped high in the air, spun around, and instinctively swung a strong punch toward the jokester.16

  Before he realized what he had done, Smitty’s fist connected with the guard’s jaw and knocked him cold. Horrified, several prisoners grabbed Smitty, hauled him into the barracks, found camp barber John Warren, and told him that Smitty would probably be killed if they could not disguise him. Warren quickly dry-shaved his beard with his crude razor and prisoners smeared mud on his pale, white face to further mask his looks.

  As expected, the humiliated guard soon appeared with other soldiers to find the man who had punched him. Smitty’s new face helped him survive the search, but the guard was not through. He waited at the camp gate the next morning and every morning thereafter, looking for Smitty as columns of POWs were marched out to work. Fortunately, camp doctor Carl Mango put him on the sick list for an extended period, keeping him covered with sheets near other critically ill patients until some time had passed. Smitty was fortunate: The “goosing” joke could well have cost him his life. One prisoner, out of fear that everyone else would be punished, threatened to turn him in as the guilty party. These thoughts were quickly dispelled when Navy Chief Petty Officer Theodore McNally pulled a small knife from his mess kit, pressed it to the prisoner’s throat, and warned him that if Smitty was ever found out, he would personally kill the snitch.