As Good As Dead
Page 29
Friends Mac and Smitty enjoying time together after retirement.
COURTESY OF KATHY MCDOLE PARKINS
Smitty attended several reunions of Philippine POWs, and he particularly enjoyed the time he spent with Mac McDole. He was proud to return to the Philippines in April 1965 along with Roy Henderson and other former POWs to visit with the Filipino people who had helped them survive. Like McDole and Nielsen, Smitty made himself available to historians and others interested in the Palawan Massacre. He lived out his final years in East Texas, maintaining a few head of cattle on his farm until he passed away on April 14, 1994.
Willie Balchus returned to live in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where he talked little about Palawan, content to put his ordeal behind him. He married Helen M. Wisniewski, and had a son and daughter, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Balchus loved fishing and being outdoors in Pennsylvania and California. During his career, he drove trucks at the coal mines in Pennsylvania, and later operated heavy construction equipment until his retirement. He died on December 11, 2013, in Yuba City, California, at age ninety-two. He had been living with his son, Joe Balchus, for the previous eight years.
Willie was the last of the eleven Palawan Massacre survivors to pass away, and he had lived his last years just thirty-five miles away from Mo Deal’s family without knowing it.
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THE AMERICANS IMPRISONED in Puerto Princesa Camp 10-A during World War II never forgot the Filipino people who came to their aid.
For some of the Palaweños, their efforts in the guerrilla movement came at great personal cost. Triny Mendoza—known to the prisoners as “Red Hankie”—did not learn of the murder of her husband, Higinio, until February 1945, shortly after the American invasion of Palawan. Only then did a captured Japanese soldier confess that the guerrilla leader had been executed a year prior.
In 1947, Esperanza Clark Marcelo, Triny Mendoza’s sister, spotted a woven crocheted belt with a University of Iowa buckle being worn by a man working for a family relative. Esperanza had given the buckle to Dr. Mendoza as a gift before World War II. When questioned, the man, named Timod, related the story of how he and several others had witnessed the execution in January 1944 near Canigaran Beach. Afterward, Timod had retrieved the belt the Japanese left as a marker and kept it.16
In August 1947, Timod helped lead a search effort to find the grave of Dr. Mendoza. He was assisted by Triny’s cousin, several workers, and three of Governor Mendoza’s sons—John, Higinio Jr., and David Mendoza. After two days of intensive scouring, they found the remains, exhumed his body, and buried it again on the family coconut plantation. Higinio Mendoza was laid to rest near the graves of his father-in-law, John T. Clark, and a brother-in-law, Alfred Palanca Clark, who died during World War II.
Several years later, Governor Alfredo M. Abueg Sr. proposed to Triny Mendoza that her late husband be transferred to a more prominent site. After allowing his remains to lie in state for one day at the provincial capital, the people buried former governor Mendoza once again on July 27, 1950—alongside Rizal Avenue in a place now known as Mendoza Park.17
Following the liberation of the Philippines, his widow remarried, to an American serviceman, and became Trinidad Hartman. She was on hand at the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, held in Manila in April 1977. Former prisoner Hubert Hough and his wife took time to visit Palawan that month. Hough had married Verla Pauline Scott on October 7, 1945, retired from the Navy as a lieutenant in 1949, and then worked for Iowa Power and later in heavy construction until his retirement. Hough was able to visit the old prisoner camp and to reunite with Mrs. Hartman and other Filipino friends.18
Years later, Mac McDole was blessed with a similar happy reunion. Mary Anne Mayor, the youngest daughter of Captain Nazario Mayor, had helped tend to the young marine and his fellow survivors of the Palawan Massacre in late December 1944 and early 1945. Mary Anne later married Dr. Valentino Ancheta, moved to America in 1960, and settled in Algoma, Wisconsin, where she worked as a nurse. She had not seen or heard from any of the Palawan escapees since the war had ended.
On December 15, 1988, Mary Anne came across a newspaper article about a Washington, DC, memorial service for the men massacred in the Puerto Princesa camp. Reading that Glenn McDole was living in Des Moines, she soon located his home number. She left a message on the family’s answering machine, but the device ran out of tape. Mac heard only enough to learn that the caller was a woman named Mary Anne who lived in Wisconsin, so he put out a public appeal for Mary Anne to contact him, and she soon reached him on the phone again.
The story of a young woman who had helped eleven Americans survive a brutal massacre quickly caught the media’s attention. A reunion between the Anchetas and the McDoles was arranged to take place on January 9, 1989, in the New York City studio of ABC’s Good Morning America. Before millions of viewers, Mac and Mary Anne told the story of the Palawan Massacre to the nation.
Mac McDole enjoying a reunion with the Mayors in Mary Anne’s home in Algoma, Wisconsin. (Seated, left to right): Val Ancheta, Mary Anne Ancheta, Captain Nazario Mayor, McDole, Betty McDole, and Robert Mayor. (Standing, left to right): Kathy McDole, friend Heather Sanderson, and Glenda McDole.
COURTESY OF KATHY MCDOLE PARKINS
Immediately after the show, the two telephoned her eighty-eight-year-old father, Nazario Mayor, in Manila to share the exciting news. The next few years would bring more meetings between the families, with Nazario later moving from Palawan to live with his daughter in Wisconsin, and her oldest brother, Robert Mayor, later settling in the Chicago area. Nazario Mayor passed away in 1993 at the age of ninety-three while visiting his sister in Manila.
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TODAY, THE PALAWAN Massacre is remembered in the Philippines and America thanks to the efforts of several individuals.
Palawan POW Don Schloat, greatly abused for attempting to escape from Puerto Princesa, was returned to Bilibid Prison. He spent the rest of the war there, racked with scurvy, beriberi, dysentery, and pellagra, until his liberation in 1945. Schloat later became a commercial artist who took it upon himself to make sure that the massacre victims were remembered. In 1989, he completed a series of seventy-seven paintings that depicted the slaughter in abstract and impressionistic forms. His artwork was exhibited in San Diego, and most of the paintings were put on permanent display later in Santa Fe.19
Schloat returned to visit Palawan a number of times and became the driving force behind a memorial at the site of the killings. The municipal government of Puerto Princesa City erected a permanent monument in the Plaza Cuartel city park—just beside the Immaculate Conception Cathedral—in September 1999. Schloat funded the architect who drew up the design. The Palawan Massacre Monument had a small plaque displaying the names of the few survivors (Schloat’s name included by mistake), but his new bronze statue now sits atop the memorial. It depicts a thin male figure writhing in pain as flames rise from his feet. Efforts are currently under way to construct an updated memorial for the Palawan Massacre in the Puerto Princesa park that is home to the original statue.
Visitors to Puerto Princesa can also tour the Palawan Special Battalion WWII Memorial Museum, opened in December 2011 to honor the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines. It was created through the labors of Higinio C. “Buddy” Mendoza, son of guerrilla leader Dr. Mendoza. The museum, housing memorabilia collected by Mendoza, chronicles the fates of the Palawan Massacre men in addition to paying tribute to the members of the “Palawan Fighting One Thousand” guerrilla unit of World War II.
The remains of 123 of the 139 POWs massacred at the Puerto Princesa camp were removed from Palawan to be buried on February 14, 1952, in a common grave in Section 85 at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery near St. Louis, Missouri. The remains of sixteen other victims could not be located. A new marker was dedicated on October 4, 2003, in the St. Louis cemetery, with Palawan POW camp veterans present, in
cluding Glenn McDole, Gene Nielsen, Dan Crowley, and Joe “Frenchy” Dupont.
Nielsen and McDole discussed their former camp and the massacre before a crowd of about a hundred people that included veterans, friends, and relatives. The two survivors placed a wreath at the site to dedicate the new plaque before the list of the Palawan victims was read aloud.
The following year, 2004, an account of McDole’s wartime experiences, Last Man Out by Bob Wilbanks, was published. His story and that of the Palawan Massacre were also told on Oliver North’s War Stories TV documentary series. He passed away on September 3, 2009, in Alleman, Iowa. Only a week after McDole’s death, First Lieutenant Carl Mango—the Army doctor who had saved his life on Palawan—was finally honored with a posthumous Silver Star Medal. Mac McDole had donated much of his time in later years to talking about Palawan in hopes that the men who died there would not be forgotten.
They are remembered, American heroes all.
As Bataan fell, thousands of Americans retreated to Corregidor Island, nicknamed the Rock, where they held out against the Japanese until surrendering on May 6, 1942. For many Palawan prisoners, their POW experience began here.
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The men left behind on Bataan—some 70,000 Filipino and American troops—were subjected by the Japanese to a brutal march to captivity. Thousands died along the way.
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New arrivals at Puerto Princesa’s Camp 10-A first encountered the imposing twin towers of the facility’s entrance.
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Japanese barracks within the compound.
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The headquarters building in the Irawan colony used by Master Sergeant Taichi Deguchi at the time of the massacre.
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Camp 10-A as seen from above. The large four-building structure in the center is the POW barracks. In the upper-right corner are the Japanese barracks. The white structure in the upper-left corner is the house in which Captain Kojima lived. The air-raid shelters would be dug to the left of the POW barracks, near the edge of the cliff.
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From August 1942 to December 1944, the American prisoners at Puerto Princesa endured extreme heat and unrelenting sun to carve this airstrip in the Palawan jungle.
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Army Lieutenant Carl Louis Mango, a doctor before the war, helped save many lives at Puerto Princesa.
COURTESY OF ALBERT MANGO
1. Marine Corporal Glenn “Mac” McDole
COURTESY OF KATHY MCDOLE PARKINS
2. Marine Corporal Rufus “Smitty” Smith
COURTESY OF NITA SMITH ALEXANDER
3. Marine Sergeant Doug Bogue
COURTESY OF KATHY MCDOLE PARKINS
4. Army Private First Class Ernie Koblos
COURTESY OF JACK AND FELICE KOBLOS
5. Navy Radioman Joe Barta
COURTESY OF LINDA JO YALE
1. Army Corporal Elmo “Mo” Deal
COURTESY OF SHARON SPEARS
2. Army Corporal William “Willie” Balchus
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3. Army Private First Class Eugene Nielsen
COURTESY OF LORNA MURRAY
4. Army Corporal Edwin Petry
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5. Army Private First Class Alberto “Beto” Pacheco
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1. Navy Yeoman Bruce Elliott—who attempted to swim from Bataan to Corregidor, only to end up as a prisoner of the Japanese—led the first successful escape from Palawan Island in August 1942.
COURTESY OF JENNIFER MEIXNER
2. Marine Corporal Sidney Wright joined Elliott’s escape. Several months later, when he learned a Filipino collaborating with the Japanese had murdered a fellow escapee, he hunted down the turncoat and killed him.
COURTESY OF DAVID WRIGHT
3. Navy Yeoman First Class Hubert Hough, unable to perform airfield construction after a vicious beating at the hands of a Japanese guard, was tasked with keeping clerical records for the POW camp.
COURTESY OF LYNHON STOUT AND MINHON RIDENOUR, DAUGHTERS OF HUBERT HOUGH
4. Marine Corporal George Burlage was nicknamed “the Arm Breaker” for his willingness to bash a comrade’s dominant limb with a pick handle to get the man excused from airfield duty. For his service, he charged extra food or cigarettes.
COURTESY OF GEORGIANNE BURLAGE
1. Captain Fred Bruni, as the senior Army officer at the camp, was in the precarious position of maintaining discipline among the prisoners while placating their Japanese captors.
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2. Ensign Bob Russell, the senior Navy officer, often clashed with Bruni and engaged in a fistfight with Doc Mango.
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3. Marine Private First Class Don Martyn attempted to swim across Puerto Princesa Bay on the night of December 14, 1944. He never reached the other side.
COURTESY OF LYNHON STOUT
4. Marine Private First Class Roy Henderson made a survival pact with a clique of fellow prisoners. When he contracted malaria, his friends smuggled pilfered fruit to help keep him alive.
COURTESY OF ETTA HENDERSON HOOKER
1. The “torture trees,” where prisoners were lashed and beaten mercilessly by Japanese guards.
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2. Master Sergeant Taichi Deguchi was the acting commander of the brutal Kempei Tai military police unit at Puerto Princesa in mid-1944.
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3. First Lieutenant Yoshikazu Sato, known to the POWs as the Buzzard, was second in command of Camp 10-A in December 1944 and led the massacre at Puerto Princesa.
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4. Lieutenant Toru Ogawa was in charge of the vehicle repair shop and airfield repair. During the massacre, he commanded a gun barge whose crew shot Americans attempting to swim across the bay.
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Prisoners fleeing the massacre plunged down this steep bluff at the edge of camp to the narrow, rocky beach below.
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A view from the water’s edge below the camp. Note the small cavern entrance, one of the spots where escapees hid, below the little canvas tent.
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Another view of the bluff and rocky beach below the camp. Many prisoners attempting to escape the massacre made easy targets as they fled along the beach or into the sea.
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Overlooking the bluff below the Shelter C exit from which McDole, Smitty, Daniels, and others escaped to the rocky coastline below.
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The view from the bluff, looking across Puerto Princesa Bay.
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After swimming throughout the night, Joe Barta landed here on the other side of the bay. The banca at the water’s edge is the style of outrigger boat used by six American escapees as they sailed along the Palawan coastline.
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The Americans who escaped Camp 10-A looked like walking skeletons after more than two years of malnutrition and slave labor. These five prisoners are seen after their liberation from the Santa Tomás camp on Luzon, a rescue accelerated by testimony from the Palawan massacre survivors.
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Pedro Paje at his desk in the Iwahig Penal Colony. Though some prisoners suspected him of being a Japanese collaborator, Paje covertly served as the organizer of the Palawan Underground Forces, a guerrilla unit, during the war.
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Some American massacre survivors stumbled upon these Filipino dwellings within the Iwahig Penal Colony, where they found willing support.
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Lieutenant Celerino Poyatos helped guide nine Palawan survivors to safety.
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Jose Miranda rescued Ed Petry and Beto Pacheco.
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Above: Miranda points out the hut where Petry, Pacheco, and Gene Nie
lsen hid after swimming from Puerto Princesa.
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Above left: Thomas Loudon spent three years as a prisoner of the Japanese until his rescue, along with six massacre survivors, from the island in January 1945.
COURTESY OF MARY ANNE (MAYOR) ANCHETA
Colonel Nazario Mayor commanded the guerrilla division in the Puerto Princesa region. Following the massacre, his family graciously welcomed survivors into their home. (Front row, left to right): Thomas, Lorraine, Mary (holding Lorraine), Nazario, Cornelia, and Mary Anne. (Back row): Frank, Robert, and Nellie.
COURTESY OF MARY ANNE (MAYOR) ANCHETA
Dr. Higinio Acosta Mendoza, captain of Company A of the Palawan Special Battalion. Mendoza was executed by the Japanese on January 24, 1944, for taking part in guerrilla activities.
COURTESY OF HIGINIO “BUDDY” MENDOZA AND BART DUFF
Trinidad “Triny” Clark Mendoza. After the murder of her husband, Mrs. Mendoza gave assistance to the American POWs at Camp 10-A and was known by the code name Red Hankie.
COURTESY OF LYNHON STOUT AND MINHON RIDENOUR, DAUGHTERS OF HUBERT HOUGH
A soldier examines the trench from which McDole, Smitty, Pop Daniels, and others escaped. Note at the edge of the cliff the barbed wire fence through which some men struggled as they attempted to escape toward the beach below.
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Soldiers excavate the charred remains of Americans burned to death by the Japanese.
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Bones of murdered prisoners still lay in an excavated air-raid trench, March 1945.
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Japanese guards from Camp 10-A stand trial for war crimes in 1948.
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Edwin Petry was among the Palawan survivors who gave testimony at the trials in Japan.
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Survivors Joe Barta, Mac McDole, and Doug Bogue indicate Palawan on a map to an intelligence officer after their return to the United States in 1945.
COURTESY OF KATHY MCDOLE PARKINS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS