The escape from the Davao Penal Colony

On Sunday 4 April 1943 ten American prisoners of war and two Filipino convicts slipped away from their guards at the Davao Penal Colony on the island of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines. After several days’ march through swamp and jungle they reached Filipino guerrillas, and some of them were later taken to Australia by submarine. American historians and veterans call it the only successful mass escape of Allied prisoners from Japanese captivity during the Pacific War. Its significance went far beyond the fate of twelve men: the escapers brought the first extensive eyewitness accounts of the Bataan Death March and of the prisoner-of-war camps on Luzon, and their publication in January 1944 shocked American public opinion.

Prisoners on Mindanao

The penal colony near the city of Davao had been founded by the Philippine authorities in 1932. It was a huge farm on which convicts sentenced for serious crimes grew rice, vegetables and fruit and worked at logging. The Japanese took Davao on 20 December 1941 and, once the fighting in the Philippines was over, set up a prisoner-of-war camp in the colony.

Most of its prisoners had already been through the worst experiences of the Philippine campaign. Among them were soldiers who, after the surrender on Bataan on 9 April 1942, had survived the death march and Camp O’Donnell and then the camp at Cabanatuan, as well as defenders of Corregidor, taken prisoner after its surrender on 6 May 1942. At the end of October 1942 the Japanese picked out at Cabanatuan about a thousand prisoners considered fit for work and shipped them on the Erie Maru to Mindanao, where they arrived on 7 November. Together with prisoners brought earlier, there were about two thousand Americans at Davao.

Conditions in the colony were better than at Cabanatuan, where prisoners were dying by the dozen every day, but life was still hard: starvation rations, back-breaking work in the paddy fields in the tropical heat, disease and beatings by the guards. In their camps in the Philippines the Japanese applied the principle of collective responsibility: if a prisoner escaped, his comrades in the same group faced punishment, up to and including execution by shooting. That is precisely why escapes from Japanese camps were so rare: anyone contemplating one had to reckon with his comrades paying the price.

Preparations

The escape was organised by Marine Lieutenant Jack Hawkins, with Navy Lieutenant Commander Melvyn McCoy and Coast Artillery Major Stephen Mellnik as its co-planners. The group also included Captain William Edwin Dyess of the Army Air Forces, a fighter squadron commander who had defended Bataan to the last days; his wingman, Lieutenant Samuel Grashio; Lieutenant Leo Boelens, an aircraft engineer; two more Marine officers, Captain Austin Shofner and Lieutenant Michael Dobervich; and two Coast Artillery sergeants, Paul Marshall and Robert Spielman. The guides were to be two Filipinos serving sentences for murder in the colony, Benigno de la Cruz and Victorio Jumarong, who knew the surrounding swamps and jungle.

For about two months the conspirators gathered food, medicines and equipment, smuggling them out of the camp and hiding them in the jungle. They took advantage of the fact that some of them worked in labour details outside the fence, guarded by relatively few men. For the day of the escape they chose a Sunday, when discipline in the camp was more relaxed.

Through the swamps to the guerrillas

On the morning of 4 April 1943 the twelve men slipped away from their work details and disappeared into the undergrowth. By the time the guards realised they were missing, the escapers were already at the edge of the vast swamps that surrounded the colony. For the following days they waded waist-deep through water and mud, forcing their way through dense thickets, plagued by leeches and mosquitoes, exhausted and unsure where they were going. Japanese patrols set off in pursuit but failed to find them. After roughly four days, on 7–8 April, the escapers came upon a Filipino guerrilla post at the settlement of Lungaog.

Guerrillas and local guides from the Ata hill people led them on northwards, across mountains and rivers, to units under Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Fertig. This American military engineer, who had refused to surrender to the Japanese in 1942, had built on Mindanao one of the largest guerrilla networks in the Philippines, which kept in radio contact with General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia.

The group did not stay together. Some of the escapers joined the guerrilla effort, while others waited for transport. In July 1943 the submarine USS Trout took McCoy, Mellnik and Dyess from Mindanao to Australia. In November that year the submarine USS Narwhal evacuated Shofner, Grashio, Hawkins and Dobervich. Boelens, Marshall and Spielman stayed with the guerrillas; Boelens was killed by the Japanese in January 1944. The Filipino guides also remained on the island.

Accounts of what happened to the prisoners left behind at Davao vary. According to testimony cited in American literature, the camp commandant threatened the remaining prisoners with death, and the guards beat the prisoners’ leadership, the barrack leaders and the men from neighbouring bunks; discipline in the colony was tightened considerably. Some sources write of executions in reprisal for the escape, but their extent has not been reliably established.

Accounts that could not be published

In Australia McCoy, Mellnik and Dyess were received by MacArthur and gave detailed statements to intelligence. They told of the march from Bataan, during which guards beat, robbed and killed exhausted prisoners, of the thousands who died at O’Donnell and Cabanatuan, and of hunger, disease and torture. In the summer and autumn of 1943 they repeated their accounts in Washington. Dyess, while being treated in a military hospital, worked on his memoirs with Charles Leavelle, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune.

For a long time the American authorities refused to allow their publication. They feared that revealing the atrocities would provoke reprisals against the thousands of prisoners still in Japanese hands and would hamper negotiations over Red Cross parcels and the exchange of interned civilians. The escapers were ordered to remain silent. Dyess did not live to see publication: on 22 December 1943 he was killed in California when an engine of his P-38 fighter caught fire after take-off and, unwilling to crash into buildings, he did not bail out.

The ban was lifted only months later. On 28 January 1944 the Army and Navy jointly released the Davao escapers’ accounts, and the Chicago Tribune began serialising Dyess’s memoirs, which were reprinted by more than a hundred newspapers across the country. On 7 February the weekly Life published McCoy and Mellnik’s account, “Death Was a Part of Our Life”. Only then did the American public learn what had befallen the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, although almost two years had passed since their surrender. It is in this sense that the Davao escapers were the first to reveal the truth about the death march to the world: the authorities had earlier had fragmentary information, but it was the escapers’ accounts, released in January 1944, that broke the silence.

The publication provoked a wave of anger in the United States. It coincided with the Fourth War Loan drive and, as historians point out, the date of its release was chosen to harness the outrage to mobilise the public. Some politicians and newspapers then demanded that the weight of the war effort be shifted from Europe to the Pacific.

Place in the war

The escape from Davao did not change the course of the war, but its effects were lasting. The escapers’ accounts became one of the main sources of knowledge about the Japanese treatment of prisoners, and after the war they were used in documenting Japanese war crimes. According to American sources, information about the Cabanatuan camp supplied by Shofner and others was used in planning the raid on Cabanatuan in January 1945, when American Rangers and Filipino guerrillas freed more than 500 prisoners.

The fate of the prisoners left at Davao was tragic. In 1944, as the Americans approached the Philippines, the Japanese moved them off Mindanao. Many died on the so-called hell ships used to carry prisoners to work in Japan, which American submarines sank without knowing who was aboard. When the Shinyo Maru went down in September 1944, just over 80 of some 750 prisoners survived, rescued by guerrillas from Mindanao.

Shofner returned to the Marine Corps and commanded battalions on Peleliu and Okinawa, while Mellnik wrote a memoir of his captivity after the war. Since 1957 an air base in Abilene, Texas, has borne Dyess’s name. The story of the “Davao Dozen”, little known for decades outside veterans’ circles, returned to collective memory in the 21st century, thanks in part to John D. Lukacs’s book Escape from Davao (2010).