Massacre at Palawan - 64 Years Ago

[vaughne]

Massacre at Palawan, by Cpl. Rufus W. Smith 11 August 1945.
Last September the barbed wire of Puerta Princesa prison camp at Palawan held 150 prisoners of war, the remnants of a "volunteer" labor battalion brought there from Luzon shortly after the surrender at Corregidor, to build a Japanese airfield. The original group of some 300 had volunteered because they thought anything would be better than the squalor, disease, and death of Cabanatuan prison camp on Luzon. Yet, two months later, 141 of the 150 were to be slain in the worst mass atrocity of the Pacific war. In a Marine Corps office at San Francisco, twenty-six year old Marine Corporal Rufus W. Smith of Hughes Springs, Texas,
talked slowly and carefully: "We had been at Puerta Princesa prison camp for a little over twenty-eight months when the Japanese decided to kill us." Arriving at the camp, Smith continued, the Americans were herded inside the barbed wire, bedded down like ill-kept farm
animals, and booted awake by Japanese guards at four thirty the next morning. Breakfast was one large spoonful of rice-Cambodian rice, wormy and full of rocks, which the Japanese serve in prison camps because they don't like it themselves. During the next
two years the men were to eat it three times a day, with now and then a dab of a Philippine vegetable--also wormy--resembling potatoes. Even this planned ration was a starvation diet
designed to keep them too weak to make trouble or to get very far if they escaped. But the Japanese reduced it even further by thieving from the supply. The Americans at Puerta Princesa, being a labor battalion
were not to be killed unnecessarily. But the Japanese were specialized in beating them with pick handles--"just for nothing," Smith said," They'd just come up jabbering and
swinging with their clubs." At various times in those next twenty-eight months, prisoners tried to escape. Two Americans who were caught
were tied up and thrown into the brig, where the Japanese took turns beating them. Any Japanese who cared to could beat them, night or day. Every morning the other Americans
had to pass the cage where they were lying. On July 4, 1944, the two were finally shot. Japanese prison officials always pointedly observe our national holidays. Most of the Americans who did escape managed it by breaking an arm or a leg, usually by a blow with a shovel. But if the Japanese decided it was done intentionally, they might leave the man where he fell, or throw him into a cage and leave him until he died. Some of the prisoners got away with it, and were treated and shipped back to Manila. Usually, however, someone was lying in the special cage with an unset fracture, looking out with the eyes of an animal that has spent many days in a steel trap. Every prisoner worked if he possibly could, because if he couldn't get to his feet in the morning, his ration was cut at once by 30 per cent--a ball of rice about the size of an orange. One morning last September the Japanese loaded all but 150 of the men on a ship bound back to the prison camp at Luzon. Later the Japanese told the remaining prisoners that the ship had been torpedoed and all the men lost. Who could contradict them? Then, about noon last October 19, a lone B-24 raided Puerta Princesa, Palawan's capitol, sank two ships in the harbor, and strafed the town and the new airfield. With their hearts rattling against their ribs, the men looked silently at one another, and smiled when the guards weren't looking. Things were going to be all right. After that first one, raids came almost daily. And the treatment of the men by their Japanese guards went from bad to unendurable. Then they were ordered to build air-raid shelters. First they dug three roofed trenches, each long enough to hold about fifty men and each with a small entrance at each end. Smaller shelters were dug for the cooks, officers, and drivers. Some of the men were allowed to build individual shelters; among them was Marine Sergeant Douglas. W. Bogue of Los Angeles, California, one of the nine who eventually escaped. All these shelters were inside the prison compound on a high bluff that jutted out into turbulent shark-filled Puerta Princesa Bay. Outside the double row of barbed wire a coral cliff slanted fifty feet down to the water. And when torrential rains washed Page 2 – away part of the trenches, repairs exposed tunnels that ran under the wire and out to the face of the cliff. Several men quietly prepared escape hatches as they worked, concealing their exits on the cliff with coral boulders or a thin shoring of earth. Then, on December 13, a Japanese patrol plane over the Sulu Sea sighted our invasion convoy that landed later on Mindoro Island. The Japanese thought it was headed for Palawan. "The Japanese guards aroused us that night with theirchattering," Smith went on, "but they finally quieted down. At four thirty we hiked off to the airfield to work as usual." About noon the guards suddenly marched them back to camp.
The Americans kept looking questionably at one another and shrugging their shoulders. They had never quit work at noon before. Then the guards started beating on an old church bell they used for an air-raid alarm. The word
passed that hundreds of American planes were headed for Palawan. The Japanese guards herded the men into the air raid shelters. Sergeant Bogue took up the story. "We had been sitting in the shelters some thirty minutes," he said, "when two P-38s began circling overhead. Suddenly fifty or sixty Japanese soldiers with light machine guns, rifles, and buckets of gasoline ran into the compound." These Japanese soldiers ran directly to A company's shelter, where there were about forty Americans. They opened the narrow door, threw in several buckets of gasoline then tossed in lighted torches. "All of a sudden," said Marine Corporal Glen W. McDole of Des Moines, Iowa, "I heard a dull explosion, men screaming, and machine guns. We were in another hole with our heads down, waiting for the air raid, My buddy (Smith) yelled, "They're murdering the men in A Company pit!" I looked out and saw one man run out of A Company's pit in flames, he was burning like a newspaper. A Japanese machine gunner, stationed on the porch of the barracks, cut him in two." The Japanese ran now from shelter to shelter with their buckets of gasoline and their torches. As the crazed Americans came boiling up out of the burning shelters, flaming from head to foot like men made of pitch, other busy, little Japanese machine-gunned and bayoneted them. The horrible smell of burning flesh began drifting across the compound. Below, in the pits, the few men not actually burning fought to hold on to their reason and somehow to get out. Some did get out. Some crawled up into the spattered compound itself and clawed their way under the fence to reach and fall down the cliff face. Navy Chief Radio-man Fern J. Barta of San Diego, California, made it this way. So did Bogue. "When I came up out of my hole," said Bogue, "it was like coming up a ladder into hell. Burning Americans were rushing the Japanese and fighting them hand to hand, I saw one man, burning like a haystack, grab a rifle away from a Japanese and shoot him; another guard bayoneted him from behind." Maybe fifty or sixty men, maybe more got down the cliff face to the beach. Many desperate and insentient leaped and tumbled down the cliff, jumped into the bay and started swimming. They were shot to pieces by the Japanese machine gunners on the top of the cliff. The others hid in holes in the rocks, in the sewer outlet, anywhere. Smith jumped into a coral crevice next to him to wait for McDole, McDole had been right on his heels, but now he didn't show up. As Smith watched, a soldier in the crevice next to him suddenly jumped up and yelled. I'm going to get my part of this over with, he ran down to the beach dived into the water and started swimming. "He was only out about twenty yards," Smith said, "when a bullet hit him and he rolled over and shouted, they got me. Then he thumbed his nose to the Japanese on the cliff, and went under." Smith, still in control of himself, climbed unseen back up the hill and hid in the long grass almost touching the prison fence. He thought that would be the last place the Japanese would look. He hid under a ledge covered by long overhanging grass. He carefully covered himself with leaves and dirt. He estimates that this was about one o’clock in the afternoon. The whole thing had been going on only about thirty minutes. All of them could hear the Japanese using dynamite on the burned men who were still alive in the hilltop death trenches. When they had finished, the Japanese scrambled down the cliff with rifles and bayonets and began combing the rocks and beach, dragging the hidden Americans out of their holes and murdering them on the spot. For the men lying panting and desperate in those holes, the afternoon was endless and Page 3 - terrible. A man hiding five feet away from you, a six-foot American you'd been through three years of hell with, would be dragged out and bayoneted to death by a dozen little yelling Japanese, and you didn't dare move. As the endless search went on, a lot of men who might have made it cracked up. McDole and two others were hiding in a garbage dump, completely covered by the rotting fly-crusted stuff. As a Japanese patrol neared the dump, one of the men suddenly jumped up and ran for the bay. "The Japanese shot him," said McDole, "Then, when they got within five meters of us, the second man with me raised up and said, “All right, you Japanese bastards, “here I am and don't miss me. “They shot him, poured gasoline on him and burned hisbody.” "After the patrol went away, I made a small opening to get some air. Down the beach I saw six Japanese jabbing a bleeding mud-covered American with their bayonets. Another Japanese ran up with a bucket and a torch. The American begged to be shot and not burned. The Japanese poured gasoline on his hands and feet, and lighted it. Then the man collapsed." Smith, hidden in the tall grass up on the cliff, had a dozen narrow escapes. Twice searching Japanese grazed his ribs
as they jabbed bayonets into the grass. "Once I thought sure I was caught," said Smith, "A Japanese pulled the grass away from me and looked straight into my eyes. I felt his breath panting down on me and smelled that awful Japanese sweat they all stink of. Cold as death, I waited for the bayonet in my ribs. Three years of hell for this! I remember praying that he'd do it right the first time." Suddenly the Japanese dropped the grass over Smith and left, he hadn't seen him. Smith stayed covered until past dark, finally everything got quiet, and the Japanese guards no longer looked for the escapees. Smith sneaked to the beach and began the long swim across Puerta Princesa Bay. Bogue had been hiding in a hole in the rocks till the rising tide forced him out of it. Looking for a new hiding place, he found Fern Barta and three others in the camp's sewer outlet. About nine 0'clock that night these five started out to swim the bay. Almost immediately they were swept apart by the strong tide, and it was ten days before Bogue and Barta met. One of the five, a Marine private, was never seen again. It was sunrise when Barta dragged himself up on the far shore of the bay and crawled into the jungle. McDole, exhausted and sick, lay in the fly-blanketed garbage dump all night and all the next day. That night he tried to swim, but the water was so rough he couldn't make it. He crawled back to the garbage dump, and for another night and day in that mess of flies and rot, praying for strength. That night he tried it again, and again he was forced back. The following night he crawled down to the shore
for the third time, fell into the water, and started swimming; he would get across or drown. All night he swam and floated and swam again. He came very near dying. His mind had stopped. Like an engine stalled on dead center. His arms and legs were no longer even part of him; some strange tired motor kept them going till finally his hands were clawing suddenly and miraculously into sand. He was ashore. His head dropped into the sand. He tried hard to think whom he was and what he was supposed to be doing. Finally, he crawled to the edge of the jungle and hid there all day. That night he tried swimming across a little
inlet to a Filipino tuberculosis colony, but he was too far gone. He realized he couldn't swim anymore. And then in the wet heaving darkness, he bumped into the poles of a fish
trap. He crawled upon it and collapsed, somewhere between sleep and death. In the morning Filipino fishermen from the Iwahig penal colony found him there. They hurried him back to their camp. There he was joined
by Bogue, who had been found by Filipino prisoners from the camp after being lost for five days in the jungle. Rested and fed, Bogue and McDole were taken to the leader of the Palawan underground, who gave them horses and a guide and got them to a point where they were picked up by a Navy sea plane and flown to Leyte. At Aborlan, a town held by the guerrillas, a second party of horsemen caught up with them. One of the riders was Barta.
He had stumbled into Iwahig colony after spending ten days and nights in the jungle. Some other survivors, including Smith, were picked up later and flown to Moratai. Up on the cliff some of the Japanese guards were only ten feet away from Smith. Still, he had to try for a getaway when darkness came. Slowly he Page 4 – eased out of his hiding place and inched his way down the cliff, fearing each step that a coral landslide would bring a shower of jabbering yells and bullets. Luck was with him, Noiseless as a shadow, he moved steadily down to the shore and into the water. He had been in the water about an hour and a half when the little Japanese patrol boat combing the bay for possible survivors bore down on him. Its weak yellow light actually waved directly across him from not more than fifty yards away. But the boat turned and went on. "I started swimming again," said Smith in his slow tired drawl, "and had been out about two hours, I guess, when I heard a swirl in the water off to one side. I glanced around in time to see a six-foot shark headed for me. He came right on in and bit my right arm. Somehow--I don't know how--I reached around with my other arm and slung him loose. Then I kicked and splashed, and I must have scared him off; he didn't bother me after that." The Marine Corps public relations officer whispered to Smith; he rolled up his sleeve. There on his right forearm were the scars from the teeth of the shark that he'd "slung loose." After the Shark, Smith swam on for what seemed like years. He turned on his back for the hundredth time to rest, and made out trees on a mountain ahead of him. He turned over again and swam till his arms were strips of leather, which some
body kept splashing into the water ahead of him, and he knew he couldn't swim much longer. He decided to try to hit bottom. He held his nose and went down hard. The water was only up to his armpits. Gratefully he started to walk, and that's when he almost drowned. Because his legs wouldn't hold him, he fell and swallowed the muddy water and almost drowned. He finally got to his feet and made it to the beach. It was still night, and the terrible clouds of Philippine mosquitoes started swarming over him. If he lay there he'd be eaten alive. He crawled up to the edge of a
mangrove swamp and coated himself, face and all, with mud. That kept the mosquitoes off. He rested a while, and then plunged into the swamp. He was naked, except for the mud. The thick growth clutched his body with clammy hands. At each step his feet seemed
to sink deeper into the black ooze. He knew the alligators would get him before long. He climbed a tree and stayed there the rest of the night. Dawn was the most beautiful thing he
had ever seen. All that day Smith traveled through the jungle. When the growth became impenetrable he climbed up above it and swung along on the long vines from tree to tree. Occasionally he'd grip a brier vine; the hard spines cut like barbed wire. "They
cut me up pretty bad," he said. But he went on, and he made it. Late that afternoon he
found the wonderful compassionate Philippine guerrillas. They gathered up his skinny, bleeding, muddy body and carried him to their camp. They fed him and put him to bed. And now he was in San Francisco, on his way home to Hughes Springs, Texas - the kind of place that can help a man forget jungles and Japanese. Free at last!
POW's Prayer - By Jean Ray and L. Vancil
Father, your own Son was a prisoner. Condemned, he died for us. Victorious, he returned to bring us the gift of life everlasting.
Comfort us now in our longing for the return of the Prisoners Of War and Missing In Action. Help Us Father; inspire us to remove the obstacles. Give courage to those who know the truth to speak out and grant wisdom to the negotiators, and compassion to the jailors.
Inspire the media to speak out as loudly as they have in the past. Protect those who seek in secret and help them to succeed. Show us the tools to do your will. Guard and bless those in captivity, their families, and those who work for their release. Let them come home soon. Thank you Father. Amen.

[SGRock]

Thank you Hamp for putting that in and God Bless You.