“We’re going home,” he would say to his fellow ensigns, over and over. “We just keep our heads down, and we’re all going home.” Reflexively, Barton drew from this incorruptible reserve to nudge Charles to his way of thinking. Cabanatuan wasn’t nearly as bad as when they left it in 1942, he pointed out. And, anyway, it wouldn’t be long now. If he had anything to do with it, Ozark fried pie—Charles’s avowed favorite—would be the 1944 Thanksgiving feature at Lilac Hedges. “Its first-ever appearance north of the Mason-Dixon Line, if its last!” Charles surrendered one foul mood after another with a playful swing at the best friend he’d ever had; Barton would raise his hands in mock defense and, as always, throw back his head and laugh.
Barton’s optimism aside, Cabanatuan had improved markedly during their absence, if only by prison camp squalor standards. Its cruel former commandant, Lieutenant Colonel “Blood” Mori, had been replaced, an enormous relief to the returnees. While many more had died since their October 1942 departure for Mindanao—nearly three thousand men were interred in acres of shallow graves around the camp—prisoner work teams had made life-saving improvements. They’d built a septic system and irrigation ditches, and obtained permission from the Japanese to douse the latrines with chemicals to reduce contagion. The death toll from infectious disease, particularly dysentery, had dropped dramatically with these changes.
Vegetable gardens also now dotted the compound on every inch of tillable soil, their yields coaxed from tiny seeds pocketed on farming details and variously boasting eggplant, okra, corn, radishes, beans, carrots, peppers, and papaya. That the quantities were small mattered little to famished men desperate to supplement a rice-and-salt diet. In fact, another ritual had been established in the ensigns’ absence: quanning. “Quan” could be a noun or a verb—even an event—but at its core, it was the repreparation of the miserly rice issue with the day’s random harvest, which consisted of any other edibles the men could get their hands on. Garden pickings were prized, but so were ingestible grasses, meat from cats, snakes, and rats, and the occasional purloined egg or chicken.
One thing that had not changed at Cabanatuan was the wary, short-tempered contingent of guards, even with the departure of Commandant Mori. Allied war gains had not improved their disposition, nor had word of the multiple prisoner escapes from Davao, from which these men had just arrived. In fact, the returning draft was initially sequestered, but eventually moved into the main camp. That was a happy day for the ensigns: reuniting with friends not seen in almost two years.
Among such comrades were Barton’s former barrack mates Ensigns Andrew Long and George Petritz, and new navy acquaintances too, including fellow Supply Corps officers Chuck Wilkins and Bob Granston. The gaggle of young naval officers found strength in their swelled ranks and for the next several months “stuck together in all things.”
In the evenings, they quanned, sang, joked, played cards, and told and retold stories of home and family. The men also indulged in a curiously popular pastime: intense recipe-swapping sessions. While it might seem unusual for perpetually famished men, discussing recipes subliminally conferred the comforts of home-cooked food as well as the promise of someday returning to such pleasures. One evening over tiny servings of okra-dotted rice, the men hilariously debated Charles Armour’s Brunswick stew (“sounds awful no matter how much of that shit you put in there”). On such nights, the rise and fall of laughter in the ensigns’ barracks was comparable to any revelry floating out of a good New York bar.
The Davao returnees had been back at Cabanatuan about three months when the most restorative moment of their imprisonment occurred. Some would recall it as the most exhilarating moment of their lives. The date was September 21, 1944.
At 0900, the ensigns were already south of camp breaking a sweat in the rice fields. Only clanging caribou tack, trilling birds, and the occasional shrill order broke the Luzon countryside’s pastoral quiet. Then, like a stand of alerted deer, one after another of the prisoners looked up from their labors and toward the mountain-rippled horizon. They stood stock-still, hearing something.
The faint hum became a low rumble which grew more insistent by the minute. Planes? The prisoners were familiar with the sound of Japanese planes, but these engines had a different timbre—more finely tuned, yet bolder. Also, the rising growl was coming from the north instead of the west where Japanese airfields were located. Then, suddenly, what started as a hum burst into a roaring crescendo.
The ensigns could only gasp as the guards ran for cover. Despite advances in aeronautic design since their incarceration, the ensigns knew American carrier planes when they saw them. The white stars inside a red-rimmed blue blaze under the wings confirmed the prisoners’ fondest hopes. “My God!” blurted Ken Wheeler. “They’re ours!”
Over the lush, green peaks of the Sierra Madre Mountains came a thundering series of carrier aircraft formations from Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet, including an air group from USS Enterprise. Eight-plane squadrons flew in proud Vs, each flanked by fighter escorts darting protectively in and out of the clouds above them. The versatile aircraft veered variously west toward the Japanese-held airfields and south toward Manila Bay. Minutes after the first flyover, the distant detonation of bombs at Clark Field could be heard.
The ensigns laughed and cried, waving ragged pieces of clothing over their heads and shouting out prayers of thanks. After nearly three years of isolation and brutality, the vaguest encouragement was held dear, but this! Pent-up emotions burst their locks as one of the formations passed right over the prisoners’ heads. One prisoner pointed skyward, boldly shouting in the direction of the guards peeping from their foxhole, “Ichibon American hikoki!” (American plane number one!). Ignoring the risks, the other prisoners picked up the chant, like long-shot underdogs belting out the school cheer. “Ichibon American! Ichibon! Ichibon!” (Number one American! Number one! Number one!).
They had barely recovered from the initial euphoria when another wave of planes roared over, like an encore to a wildly appreciative audience. Two pilots dropped down, tipped their wings, and their rear gunners fired in salute to the ecstatic assembly below. Four more planes amused themselves by buzzing the guard towers, driving their occupants down from the nests and up against the inner fence.
Camp administration abruptly called off all work details, but not before the grand finale: a dogfight between one of the American fighters and a Japanese Zero, in plain view of Cabanatuan. Trailing smoke, the US Hellcat dove at its opponent, getting hot on his tail before making good on every round he fired. The Zero’s wing blown off, it broke apart and twisted earthward, slamming into a distant hill. A steady plume of smoke rose from the crash site, entertaining the prisoners for hours afterward.
By this time, the guards had emerged from protective ditches and rounded up the field-workers. Bony and barely clothed, the men goose-stepped and sang “God Bless America” all the way back to the stockade. One prisoner recorded the experience in his diary:
“We sat down in the mud and cried . . . just pounding the water . . . We turned to each other with unseeing tear-filled eyes . . . It was the most beautiful sight . . . the first actual proof that our side was winning.”
“What a day!” another recalled, “It is impossible to describe the thrill and varied emotions we felt. Gladness, happiness, joy, pride, desire to laugh, cry and shout all at the same time.”
Camp administration was badly flustered by the flyovers. In apparent reprisal, the prisoners received no meal that evening—which did nothing to repress their elation. In every barrack, scenes of the day were replayed again and again, bringing alternating tears and incredulous laughter. Better still, damage reports trickled in via clandestine radio: a number of Japanese aircraft and runways at Clark Field had been laid to ruin, and as many as a dozen enemy ships had been sunk in Manila Harbor.
To the last man at Cabanatuan, hopes hit a new high that day. With American airpower in such force over Luzon, they were confident that lib
eration was near. In any case, they certainly wouldn’t be going to Japan now. Unopposed formations flew over the camp again the next day, bolstering that confidence all the more. But the sudden and aggressive show of American force over Luzon had the Japanese revising their own thinking.
The aerial displays had eliminated any lingering doubts that American landings in the Philippines were imminent. As a result, the Japanese decided to accelerate the shipping of their remaining war prisoners to Japan. Their rationales were multiple, but primary among them was that the thousands of American prisoners of war in the Philippines were symbols of their power in East Asia. To relinquish them to victorious American forces would constitute an unacceptable loss of face. Neither did the Imperial Army want liberated prisoners assisting the invading force, nor attesting to criminal mistreatment suffered at their hands. Worker-starved factories in Japan also needed more manpower for war production. For all these reasons, prisoner shipments to the home islands shifted from “as necessary” to “urgent” priority.
In the days and weeks that followed the September air raids, bullish optimism at Cabanatuan began to fade. There were no more flyovers, and the guards insisted that the men would soon be leaving for Japan. Why? Why? They tortured themselves with endless speculation. Freedom, which had seemed so tantalizingly close, now seemed to be slipping away.
II.
What the prisoners could not have known was that Central Luzon’s guerrilla force—thousands strong and well armed—had been poised for months to break them out of Cabanatuan. One highly respected guerrilla leader, Major Robert Lapham, an unsurrendered American army officer from Davenport, Iowa, desperately wanted to liberate the camp where many of his friends were imprisoned. Lapham was a force majeure: one measure of his effectiveness at thwarting the enemy was the $1M bounty the Japanese had posted for his capture. His Luzon Guerrilla Armed Forces (LGAF), or “Lapham’s Raiders,” had expanded to more than thirteen thousand well-trained men; by 1944, LGAF controlled the entire northern half of Luzon’s great central plain, an area of thousands of square miles.
Lapham had kept Cabanatuan under continuous surveillance since 1942, and had helped smuggle in food, medicine, and even weapons in anticipation of one day freeing the prisoners. But his requests to raid the camp had been rejected repeatedly by Courtney Whitney at SWPA headquarters in Brisbane. “Too risky,” came the replies. Some suspected that Whitney kept Lapham’s proposals from General MacArthur, whom, they believed, would have supported the plan wholeheartedly.
Lapham felt a renewed urgency to raid Cabanatuan in the fall of 1944. The Japanese had gruesomely executed a group of Filipinos recently caught supplying aid to the prisoners through an elaborate underground network run by two American widows of men who had died at the camp. Margaret Utinsky and Claire Phillips had avoided detection through a variety of clever means for nearly three years, but their luck ran out that summer. They were captured and tortured within an inch of their lives. The Filipinos caught supporting their efforts were not so lucky.
Lapham was alarmed by the executions as well as obvious Japanese reinforcement of Luzon, but he was also encouraged by a report from the leader of the local guerrilla group that had been shadowing the camp. Captain Juan Pajota rode miles on horseback one night to inform Lapham that there were only about two thousand POWs now interned at Cabanatuan down from a high of some eight thousand after the fall of Corregidor.
To Lapham and Pajota, this presented their best opportunity to raid the camp and liberate those prisoners. The numbers were manageable, and the Japanese were preoccupied with preparations for the imminent American landings. The guerrilla leaders discussed “every imaginable aspect of the rescue operation” that night. A third Luzon guerrilla leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Anderson, concurred enthusiastically that the timing was ideal for a prison break.
So once again, in late September 1944, Major Lapham radioed Brisbane for permission to rescue the prisoners at Cabanatuan. Once freed, Lapham assured, the men would be cared for within a vast network of guerrilla-protected Filipino villages and enclaves. Then they would be rotated to Chick Parsons’s and the submarine Narwhal’s Luzon rendezvous point: secluded Dibut Bay, fifty miles to the east. On Narwhal’s last trip to Dibut Bay, it had not only surfaced, but docked, and openly unloaded supplies for the guerrillas. To Lapham, sending an empty Narwhal back to Australia was a crime. “If we wait much longer,” he argued, “we’ll be able to rescue what’s left in one caribou cart.”
But Courtney Whitney turned Lapham down yet again—this time with the slim assurance that prisoner liberation would be given priority once MacArthur’s troops arrived on Luzon. And in any case, Whitney said, there were no submarines to spare for this purpose.
MORALE AT CABANATUAN FELL to a new low with the sudden October arrival of fifty British and Dutch prisoners. Lee Stiles confided to his diary: “These men are in very bad shape.” US Marine lieutenant colonel Curtis Beecher, the camp’s senior officer, recorded his own impression. “They were a pitiful sight to behold.”
As the resident prisoners scrambled to find clothing and mess kits to share with the gaunt new arrivals—surviving laborers from the Thailand-Burma “Death Railway”—they heard their horrific tale.
In Singapore on July 4, 1,289 of them had been crammed in the hull of a Japan-bound merchant ship, the Hofuku Maru. Due to engine trouble, the ship had detoured to Manila, arriving on July 19. They remained in Hofuku Maru’s hull in Manila Harbor for eight weeks while the ship’s engines were dismantled and taken ashore for repair. Stuffed in a dark, crowded hold, they watched in terror for weeks on end as men all around them died of heat prostration, disease, hunger, and thirst.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. On September 21, when Hofuku Maru finally departed Manila Bay in a ten-ship convoy, it was bombed by the very carrier planes that had brought such jubilation flying over the prisoners at Cabanatuan that same day. More than a thousand Dutch and British prisoners died in the attack.
The dazed, oil-drenched survivors were taken to Bilibid for treatment. The seriously wounded remained at Bilibid, and the remaining fifty were sent to Cabanatuan. “British state that American bombers are too bloody accurate,” wrote Lee Stiles after hearing their stories. The existing prisoners now had something new to worry about.
On October 7, with these hellish images in mind, the hopes of the men at Cabanatuan were officially dashed with an announcement by camp administration: except for those unable to travel, they were all going back to Bilibid, now little more than a transfer station for shipment to Japan. Leave the mosquito nets behind, the guards taunted; they would not be needed in the frigid Japanese winter.
Lieutenant Colonel Beecher was ordered to make a list of “able-bodied” prisoners for shipment to Japan. With little to distinguish the weak from the genuinely ill, any man able to walk was put on the list. Armour, Cross, Ferguson, Granston, Long, Petritz, Wheeler, Wilkins, Wuest—all the ensigns. When a dozen trucks pulled up to remove them from Cabanatuan, Juan Pajota’s guerrilla scouts could only look on helplessly as more than 1,600 prisoners—including the travel-weary British and Dutch survivors—boarded the truck beds.
Unlike previous journeys, the men were not lashed together or blindfolded, allowing them to observe the frantic Japanese reinforcement of Luzon in anticipation of the American invasion. Truck convoys full of Japanese soldiers were observed all along the road, traveling in both directions. Numerous air transports also passed overhead, with troop-packed gliders in tow, a method of conveyance the long-isolated prisoners had never seen. Droves of Manileros clogged the route as well; family after family evacuating the city on foot, their personal belongings balanced on their heads and backs.
With bridges impassable thanks to the recent American bombings, the prisoner convoy had to take a lengthy detour and enter Manila from the northwest, extending the uncomfortable journey by several hours. When they passed through Bilibid’s forbidding gates after midnight, they were offered roomier sl
eeping quarters than before; another draft of 1,800 prisoners had just departed for Japan. The name of their ship was Arisan Maru.
III.
Just after midnight on October 20, 1944, an American naval force of 738 ships converged in the Philippine Sea and began filing through the channel leading to Leyte Gulf. The ships carried 160,000 troops, ammunition, equipment, and enough supplies to last months. General MacArthur had spent the evening alternately pacing the bridge of the cruiser, USS Nashville, and in her wardroom putting final touches on a speech he would soon broadcast through a prepositioned Signal Corps microphone on Leyte’s Red Beach.
Devastating preinvasion bombardment rained down death on Leyte the next morning. After watching the display and reminiscing about his young lieutenant days on Leyte as an army surveyor at Tacloban, MacArthur returned to his cabin for an early lunch. When the beachhead was declared secure, the general reappeared in a fresh khaki uniform, sunglasses, and signature corncob pipe. He then descended into an awaiting navy barge, followed by Courtney Whitney (soon to be promoted to general), General Sutherland, and the new Philippine president, Sergio Osmeña, successor to the late Manuel Quezon, who’d died of tuberculosis in August. A phalanx of eager photographers and correspondents followed.
The barge churned through Leyte’s busy waters—until it was stopped short by a sandbar. With autonomous authority under such circumstances, the transport’s beachmaster told his passengers that they must exit and wade the rest of the way in, interfering with MacArthur’s vision of stepping ashore—immaculate and dry—and striding to an awaiting bouquet of microphones.
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