Rescue at Los Baños : the most daring prison camp raid of World War II

328 Pages·2015·4.83 MB·English

by  Henderson

Dedication
For Laura Jason—friend, lover, muse
Epigraph
I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to
rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook airborne
operation for all ages and all armies.
GENERAL COLIN POWELL, U.S. ARMY
CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
FEBRUARY 25, 1993
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
1: The Fall of Manila
2: Prisoners of the Japanese
3: Los Baños Internment Camp
4: Sky Soldiers
5: “You’ll Be Eating Dirt”
6: Return to the Philippines
7: Freedom Week
8: Under the Cover of Darkness
9: The Killings
10: “Do It Right, Joe”
11: The Escapes
12: The Los Baños Force
13: “Rescue Must Come Soon!”
14: “The World Will Be Watching”
15: The Raid
16: Rescue
17: “God Was with Us”
Epilogue: The Fate of Sadaaki Konishi
Dramatis Personae
Sources
Appendix: The Camp Roster
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Bruce Henderson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
The Fall of Manila
B
ENJAMIN FRANKLIN EDWARDS, A MECHANIC WITH PAN American Airways for
less than a year, arrived in Manila aboard the airline’s famed “China Clipper” on
October 2, 1941. The big Martin M-130 flying boat was known by Pan Am
employees as “Sweet Sixteen” (NR 14716) and had been the first seaplane
delivered to the airline and the first to fly scheduled air service across the
Pacific. It touched down on Manila Bay and taxied to the ramp at Pan Am’s
Cavite base eight miles southwest of the Philippine capital known worldwide as
the Pearl of the Orient for its picturesque seaside location, tropical beauty, and
golden sunsets from the shoreline of its enchanting bay.
For Edwards, soon to turn twenty-three, single as a jaybird and with a good-
paying job in an industry that offered international travel and adventure, the
flight from Honolulu, where he had worked on seaplanes for six months after
training at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, for his new assignment had
been a wide-eyed thrill the entire way. The crossing had taken four days, with
overnight stops at Midway, Wake, and Guam, island outposts few Americans
had heard of, but names that would soon appear in newspaper headlines in the
coming months.
While assisting the cabin steward on the flight, Edwards had met a number
of well-to-do Manila residents who encouraged him to look them up. He
occasionally spelled the flight engineer, keeping a watchful eye on the array of
gauges for the flight systems. He even got to sit in the cockpit when one of the
pilots went to stretch his legs. This was heady stuff for a Midwestern farm boy
who had come of age during the Depression, dropped out of high school and left
home to escape an abusive stepfather, and lived with various relatives,
sometimes arriving at their door with only a paper bag filled with his worldly
possessions. Growing up, the boy, who was named after American patriot and
founding father Benjamin Franklin, learned how to fight and survive, but along
the way he picked up a zest for life rather than a chip on his shoulder.
Edwards was a trim, handsome man just shy of six feet, with a shock of dark
hair, a swarthy complexion, chiseled jaw, and neatly trimmed mustache. He
reminded people of dashing leading man Errol Flynn, which didn’t hurt when it
came to his being invited into the social circle of expatriate Americans living
and working in Manila. For two glorious months, he spent weekdays working on
the big seaplanes as they came and went on their long transpacific flights, and
most nights and weekends being wined and dined and meeting young women.
“Really, I’m having a swell time,” he wrote to his sister in California. Then one
early December day, things changed forever for Ben and the rest of the world.
Edwards came to work as usual on Monday morning, December 8. The
international dateline in the middle of the Pacific Ocean put the Philippines a
day ahead of Hawaii and the continental United States, where it was Sunday,
December 7, 1941.
The guard at the Pan Am gate, an older American and a veteran of World
War I, hollered to Edwards: “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“We’re at war with Japan!”
Edwards joked that the guard shouldn’t drink on the job, but the unsmiling
man countered with enough details about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to
be convincing. Rushing inside, Edwards heard the latest radio bulletins, none of
which were good. Pearl Harbor was ablaze with burning and sinking U.S.
warships.
Edwards had heard a lot of talk in Hawaii about a possible war with Japan,
although he never believed it would happen. But there had been a very realistic
air-raid drill at Pearl shortly before he left that made him wonder if rumors of
war weren’t so farfetched after all. Still, he had not been overly worried about
coming to the Philippines, which by treaty was under U.S. protection. Everyone
believed Japan was a paper tiger and had no chance against America’s military
might. If war came, conventional wisdom was that the United States would win
quickly.
Ben Edwards in California, 1945.
Courtesy Ann (Edwards) MacDonnell.
The next two days were a blur for Edwards. The Pan Am facilities were
sandwiched between the Cavite Navy Yard and Sangley Point Naval Base, both
prime military targets. The last scheduled Pan Am seaplane had passed through
days earlier, headed for Hong Kong, where it had been destroyed in the bay by
Japanese planes only hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. Pan Am had urgently
recalled all its aircraft to the United States. None would be stopping at Manila,
so orders came to dispose of the large supply of fifty-five-gallon drums of
aviation gasoline by rolling them into the bay during an outgoing tide.
Alarmingly, the incoming tide brought them back, but they were quickly
salvaged by Filipinos who anticipated a shortage of fuel for their fishing boats.
The Pan Am employees were now standing round-the-clock watches for
Japanese aircraft at the facility, so the company decided they should be armed.
Ben, who like many farm boys knew his way around guns from hunting
jackrabbits, was handed an old Enfield rifle like the one Sergeant York, another
experienced jackrabbit hunter, had used to sharp-shoot his way to the Medal of
Honor in the First World War.
On December 10, Edwards was on duty in the office around noontime when
the teletype started clacking. It was an urgent message from San Fernando, 140
miles north of Manila. More than fifty twin-engine Japanese bombers were
headed down the coast. Ben called the commanding officer at Sangley Point and
asked: “Do you think they’re coming for us?” It didn’t take long before they had
their answer.
Ben was standing on an outside deck looking skyward when he heard the
planes and saw the first bombs fall into the waters off Sangley Point. He ran for
the makeshift shelter they had built with sandbags beneath a grove of coconut
palms several days earlier. Several other airline employees were there already.
They didn’t have a roof, which meant they had a front-row view of the silver
planes with red-meatball insignias crisscrossing the sky unmolested. Antiaircraft
fire boomed in the distance, but it was ineffective, exploding nowhere near the
attacking aircraft. For an hour, bombs fell and secondary explosions lit off.
When the attack stopped, Edwards left the shelter. Stunned, he watched a
long procession of the wounded and dying being ferried past the front gate to the
nearby naval hospital.
Before long, the street was red with blood.
DOROTHY STILL NEVER PLANNED TO BECOME A NURSE. THE LOS Angeles native
grew up wanting to be a dress designer and dreamed of working at Warner Bros.
or one of the other Hollywood studios. But in 1932, with the country in the
Depression, her mother, who considered nursing a noble profession for young
women, took Dorothy, then eighteen, to L.A. County General Hospital to sign
her up for the nursing program. After graduating, Dorothy worked at local
hospitals before joining the Navy Nursing Corps in 1937. Her first assignment
was at San Diego’s Balboa Naval Hospital, and in 1939, she transferred to
Manila.
Now thirty years old, the freckled blonde with a dimpled, girl-next-door
smile had grown fond of Manila. She liked her work at the hospital, and the
concentration of military bases in the area created lots of social opportunities for
young nurses. They joined bridge clubs, played golf, went sightseeing around
Luzon, and were frequent guests at military dinners and dances where the men
wore dress uniforms and the women attired themselves in formal gowns. At their
quarters, the nurses had Filipina servants who did the cooking, cleaning, and
washing, giving the nurses more free time. Life in Manila before the war was
exotic, rewarding, and fun. But now it was time for her to go home. Dorothy’s
orders had come through a couple of weeks earlier for her to leave the
Philippines in January 1942.
U.S. Navy nurse Dorothy Still. Courtesy U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.
On December 10, 1941, before the Japanese attack began, Dorothy was
having lunch with several other nurses at their two-story quarters with
wraparound screened verandas. The 150-bed Cañacao Naval Hospital, where
they all worked, was only a few blocks away. With the war barely forty-eight
hours old, they were discussing radio reports that had little new information to
offer. The nurses had been speculating about how swiftly the U.S. fleet would
avenge Pearl Harbor. Then suddenly, when the air-raid sirens went off, they
hurried outside and ducked underneath the building where a section of its
exposed foundation was enclosed by sandbags.
The nurses huddled in the dark with hands cupped over their ears as wave
after wave of Japanese planes released their bombs. Every bit as frightening as
the explosions were the staccato bursts of machine-gun fire from low-flying
aircraft. When the all clear sounded, the nurses rushed to the hospital, where
they were immediately ordered to discharge ambulatory patients to make room
for what they knew would be an onslaught of casualties.
Dorothy was shocked by what she saw on Ward C. She’d been through
numerous triage drills, but nothing had prepared her for the horrific casualties
that poured in, servicemen as well as civilians of all ages. They were putting two
or three patients to each bed, and when they ran out, the injured were placed on