Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War - Softcover

Lukacs, John D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451234103 ISBN 13: 9780451234100

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011

Synopsis

One of the greatest Pacific war stories never told. 

On April 4, 1943, ten American prisoners of war and two Filipino convicts—nicknamed the “Davao Dozen”—executed a daring escape from one of Japan's most notorious prison camps. Called the "greatest story of the war in the Pacific" by the War Department in 1944, the full account has never been told—until now. A product of years of in-depth research, John D. Lukacs's gripping description of the escape brings this remarkable tale to life. In this remarkable contribution to the realm of WWII POW narrative, Lukacs describes the dramatic escape for a new generation to admire the resourcefulness and patriotism of the men who fought in the Pacific.

“Like the event it covers, Escape from Davao is unique. You are holding in your hands the story of the only successful American group escape from a Japanese camp.”—James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers

About this title

About the Author

John D. Lukacs is a writer and historian whose byline has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, and on ESPN.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1
Ten Pesos

... Soldierman, sailorman and pioneer
Get yourself a girl and a bottle too,
Blind yourself, hide yourself, the storm is near.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6–MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1941
Nichols Field, Luzon, Philippine Islands

It was late morning on Saturday, December 6, when they began filing into the post theater at Nichols Field, an American procession of sunglasses, swagger, Vitalis, and lit cigarettes with the brass insignia of Army Air Forces pilots, winged propellers, pinned to their collars.

An assortment of accents, body types, and backgrounds, the fifty-odd pilots of the 17th and 21st Pursuit Squadrons assembled in uniform fashion: clean khaki, college rings, and lieutenant’s bars, with overseas and crush caps perched rakishly on their heads. They carried photographs of their wives and sweethearts in their wallets, but each shared the same, seductive mistress: a love of flying. That love, as well as an appetite for adventure and a sense of duty, had brought them from all corners of the United States to this USAAF base in the Philippines. The 1939 Hollywood blockbusterGone With the Wind was currently playing in the theater, but the lights did not dim on this warm, peaceful Philippine morning. These pilots were not here to see Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.

With crossed arms, Col. Harold H. “Pursuit” George waited for stragglers to take seats. George, the forty-nine-year-old chief of staff of the Far East Air Force’s 5th Interceptor Command, was a short, bespectacled, and brilliant officer with a magnetic personality. A decorated pilot in the Great War, he had piercing black eyes. Through the lazy gray haze of curling cigarette smoke, George made a sweeping reconnaissance of the room. Chatter ceased. Zippo lighters snapped shut with a clink. Pursuit George, as was his way, got to the point.

“Men, you are not a suicide squadron yet, but you’re damned close to it,” he said. “There will be war with Japan in a very few days. It may come in a matter of hours.”

George paused. The monotonous drone of airplane motors on testing blocks filled the dewy tropical air. Leather soles nervously scraped the floor.

“The Japs have a minimum of 3,000 planes they can send down on us from Formosa and from aircraft carriers. They know the way already. When they come again, they will be tossing something.”

There was church silence. None of the pilots, most of whom were rookies in their early twenties, had seen aerial combat. But George’s bombshell had not caught 1st Lt. Ed Dyess by surprise. Dyess, the twenty-five-year-old commanding officer of the 21st Pursuit, had watched the winds of war whip the wind sock at San Francisco’s Hamilton Field and for months had worked and prayed that his raw outfit would be ready. The odds, however, had been stacked against him long before he had descended the gangplank from the President Coolidge to Pier 7 in Manila back on November 20, 1941.

According to Japan’s militarists, the rising sun of Amaterasu, the ancient goddess of creation, was waking the Yamato race to its destiny. The annexations of Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria, followed by an invasion of China in 1937, signaled Japan’s desire to resurrect the holy mission of Jimmu Tenno—Japan’s first emperor circa 660 b.c.—called hakko ichiu, meaning to forcefully bring “the eight corners of the world under one roof.”

By the summer of 1941, the United States could no longer ignore the gathering Pacific storm. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commenced a diplomatic chess game with Japan, halting exports of American oil, iron, and rubber, freezing Japanese assets in the United States, and closing the Panama Canal to Nippon’s merchant vessels. Roosevelt then looked to America’s most distant ward and its most powerful overseas base, the Philippine Islands, which had been ceded to the United States by Spain after the Spanish-American War. He recalled to active duty sixty-one-year-old Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the former chief of staff, who since 1935 had lived in Manila while serving as military adviser to President Manuel Quezon’s nascent commonwealth government. MacArthur was given command of all forces in the islands, designated USAFFE—United States Army Forces, Far East—but before he could build a Pacific bulwark, he first had to reinvigorate a slumbering command and repair decades of neglect.

The relentless climate—MacArthur called it an “unchanging cocoon of tropical heat”—had gradually suffused the U.S. Army’s Philippine Department in a universal lethargy. There was a five-hour workday, from 0700 to noon. As the mercury rose, men retreated to their billets and barracks, tuned their radios to Stations KZRH, “the Voice of the Orient,” for news and KZRM for big band hits, and took siestas while the blades of electric fans moiled the languorous air. An exchange rate of two Philippine pesos per U.S. dollar ensured that Filipino houseboys kept their bunks neat and their shoes shined, that lavanderas kept their custom-made uniforms and sharkskin suits pressed, and that they could send a few dollars home. Though the islands were rumored to contain a collection of aging and incompetent officers and enlisted eight balls, most were energetic young officers and soldiers using the assignment as either a career springboard or a means to escape the Great Depression.

Poker, baseball, and air-conditioned double features were pastimes for enlisted men; officers golfed or rode their ponies across the Manila Polo Club. At night men from Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg, the sprawling 150,000-acre U.S. Army complex seventy miles north of Manila in the foothills of the Zambales Mountains, slugged ice-cold bottles of San Miguel beer at the Star Bar while airmen at Nichols Field haunted joints like the Chicago Bar in nearby ParaÑaque. The real action, however, was found in Manila, a lively hive of culture and commerce abuzz with music from the nightclubs lining Rizal Avenue and the Escolta and aglow with the romantic incandescence of the neon signs advertising the Alhambra Cigar Company and La Insular Cigarettes. Soldiers caught furtive glances from raven-haired Filipinas, drank Tanduay rum, and danced at the Santa Ana Cabaret while sailors drank at the Silver Dollar and staggered out into the sultry night air redolent of jasmine, sewage, and burning incense. Officers mingled with Manila’s social elite in the Jai Alai Building’s Sky Room and debated the football fortunes of West Point and Annapolis at the Army-Navy Club. Any way one looked at it, from an officer’s privileged view or from the vantage point of those in the enlisted ranks, the Philippines seemed a serviceman’s Shangri-la.

But the combat prowess of U.S. troops was unknown. MacArthur also suffered a severe numerical disadvantage: he could oppose Japan’s military might with only the 22,000 troops comprising the U.S. Army’s Philippine Division: the all-American 31st Infantry and two regiments of Philippine Scouts, crack Filipino soldiers serving under U.S. officers. Ten Philippine Army reserve divisions would soon be available, but these troops, noted one observer, knew how to do little else but salute and line up for chow.

The American and Filipino soldiers thus far mustered drilled with brimmed model M1917A1 “doughboy” steel helmets and coconut fiber pith helmets and old Springfield 1903 and Enfield rifles. Glaringly, there were no tanks or armored vehicles in the Philippines. Two years after the bloody slaughter of Polish lancers by German tanks, anachronistic cavalry troops still galloped across the immaculate grounds of Fort Stotsenburg. Hangars throughout the archipelago housed mostly observation planes, obsolete bombers, and pursuit planes. The Asiatic Fleet was still anchored in the past at Cavite, near where Commodore George Dewey’s squadron had sunk the Spanish fleet in 1898, a skeleton force of cruisers, old flush-deck destroyers, submarines, tankers, and PT boats, “a little stick which the United States carried while talking loudly in the Far East,” remarked an Associated Press correspondent.

Inside USAFFE headquarters at No. 1 CallÉ Victoria in Intramuros, the old Spanish fortress city at the mouth of the Pasig River, MacArthur went to work. He deemed War Plan Orange—a contingency plan developed in the 1920s that called for American forces to withdraw to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified islands of Manila Bay and wait for the Navy to dispatch the Japanese fleet—“defeatist.” Instead he argued for an aggressive defense of the Philippines. Such a plan, taking into account the sheer size of the Philippines—the archipelago was composed of 7,107 islands and nearly 100,000 square miles of shoreline segmented into the three main island groups: Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao—was impractical. Envisioning the Philippines—and himself—as the nexus of America’s military presence in the Pacific, the egotistical commander requested an expansion of his mission in late 1941.

The War Department, viewing the Philippines as, in the words of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a “strategic opportunity of utmost importance,” would accommodate MacArthur. Stimson and Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall had convinced FDR that with enough time, the islands could become an impregnable stronghold—America’s Singapore. The advent of Rainbow 5, the War Department’s newest plan for a global, multi-theater conflict, illustrated Washington’s commitment. The AAF agreed to ferry thirty-five new B-17 Flying Fortresses, one-third of its existing bomber strength, to the islands, and promised ninety-five more B-17s and B-24 Liberators and 195 brand-new Curtiss P-40B and P-40E Warhawk pursuit planes, as well as fifty-t...

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0451234103
• ISBN 13: 9780451234100
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 456