On April 4th, 1943, almost a full year after the atrocities during the Bataan Death March, ten American POWs (eight army, navy, and marine officers, two enlisted army men) and two Filipino convicts escaped the Davao Penal Colony on Mindanao Island.
Major Kazuo Maeda, commandant of Davao Penal Colony (or “Dapecol” as it was abbreviated) wanted Davao to be a hard labour prison and was furious at the “walking corpses” given to him. The new POWs were given two things: food, and a promise that they would “work until [they are] actually hospitalized.” Dapecol itself was a veritable Alcatraz: it was surrounded by crocodile-filled swamps, the swamps were surrounded by indigenous headhunters and cannibals, and for this and other reasons, the camp had a reputation of being inescapable. The Japanese were also arrogant enough to believe that reputation.
Over the following months, several groups of prisoners – US army, US navy, and US marine – would test that reputation and independently plan their own means of escape until finally coming together to combine forces for a better plan and a better chance of freedom.
They had their plans, but they also knew that once they were outside the walls of Davao, they would need guides. Before becoming a POW camp, Davao already had a population of Filipino murderers and thieves, and 150 were left behind to teach the American POWs how to work the camp. They may have been hardened criminals, but the American POWs knew they still had one thing in common with the Filipino detainees: a fierce hatred of the Japanese. Still, they had to be wary of spreading word of their plan; many Filipino inmates listened to what the Americans were saying, and would be rewarded by the Japanese if they turned in any dissenters or would-be escapees. Ultimately, a trusted source suggested two men who could help the Americans in their escape.
Over the course of the 1942-43 winter, each man involved in the escape had a job they needed to do to help their larger overall goal. Two prisoners were tasked with what they called “Operation Chicken”, in which they would constantly sneak into the Japanese compound and raid the chicken coop for building up strength and supplying the later journey. Other jobs involved collecting medicine, canned food, knives and other supplies. The supplies were then stored in the bull cart one of the escapees drove as part of his regular camp work. Beyond that, planning continued, maps were studied, and contacts continued to be made.
They set their first escape date for March 28th, 1943. Prisoners were given Sundays off, so they knew an escape on a Sunday would give them a full 24 hours before the guards would be alerted. A surprise inspection postponed the escape until the next Sunday, however, and one of the would-be escapees was beaten terribly for the bananas he had stolen from the plantation for lunch – for his luck, however, the inspection failed to miss the bottle of medicine in his bag for combatting malaria later in their journey. Nevertheless, the broken rules meant all the prisoners were forced to work that Sunday, and escape would be impossible.
Come April 4th, the party bagged their gear and marched out towards the perimeter of the camp under the pretense that they had requested to build a storm shelter in the coffee field. The Japanese allowed these sorts of requests because, one, they were undermanned to do such work themselves and, two, they still firmly believed that escape was inconceivable. The group made their way past each checkpoint, firm in their rouse of going off to regular, normal construction work. The group was even able to bluff their way past a suspicious, half-awake guard by flattering the lowly private soldier with a full “eyes right” salute coming from eight American officers; the guard opened the barbed wire gate and let them pass, a “toothy grin” on his face from the perceived honour.
The two Filipinos met them from the Filipino side of the camp, and together the 12 men cautiously made their way through the swamps, crocodiles, and giant wasps around the penal colony. After three days of sleeping on lashed-together saplings, drinking water from hanging vines, and marching through the night, they successfully navigated the swamps and soon after even overheard a nearby battle between a Japanese search party and a band of Filipino guerillas. The following dawn, the escaping prisoners found the guerillas who then spirited them away from the Davao area and into the safety of the nearby villages.
The group, originally planning to sail to Australia, changed their plans with rumours that American submarines were making regular stops for Filipino guerillas in northern Mindanao. The escapees, now supplied and rested, spent months travelling to Mindanao – and they would have help. The twelve had become local celebrities of a sort, and every Filipino village they came through offered them food, shelter, and safety from the Japanese and the bounties they had put on the escapees’ heads. In a way, they were a symbol of hope for the island nation. With that in mind, several of the POWs chose to stay behind with the growing guerilla forces to continue the fight against the Japanese.
Three of the escapees, with help from the local resistance, contacted Allied forces in Australia. Later that July, the three were evacuated to Australia by the submarine USS Trout. The following August, they were evacuated back to the United States. After the war, all but one of the ten Americans would make it back home.
They were the single largest group of POWs to ever escape Japanese imprisonment during the entire war. And they were going to tell the world what was happening under Japanese occupation. One of the escapees, Lt. William Dyess, told the story of the Bataan Death March and other acts of brutality under Japanese captivity to Charles Leavelle of the Chicago Tribune. Together, they were going to educate the world about the mostly overlooked war in southeast Asia…
It was not to be. The U.S. Government blocked Dyess’ story from publication. They didn’t want to risk enraging the Japanese into retaliating against the remaining prisoners; they also didn’t want to risk the cancellation of supplies from the Red Cross to American POWs still in captivity. Unconfirmed speculation also suggests that the U.S. Government feared pressure from an enraged American public to do more in the Pacific theatre of the war If they heard about what was happening there, as many of the allied nations had adopted a “Europe First” policy to finishing the war. However it came to be, Dyess’ story would not reach the world until a month after his death in December, 1943 (from, of all things, a training accident).
Dyess’ story would be serialized by over 100 American newspapers and gripped the nation as “the biggest story of the war since Pearl Harbor.” His account would later be compiled into a book, Bataan Death March. Many, many years later, in 2010, another author would write a book: Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War by John D. Lukacs.
Lukacs’ title is mostly true. Let’s fix that; let’s not let this story be forgotten.
Top: dead soldiers of the Bataan Death March.
Bottom: five of the escapees (Mike Dobervich, Austin Shofner, Melvyn McCoy, Jack Hawkins and Sam Grashio) reunite in Quantico, VA, in early 1944.
