When life’s perils thick confound you,

Put his arms unfailing round you.

God be with you till we meet again.

—Jeremiah E. Rankin, “God Be with You Till We Meet Again”

Major Stephen Mellnik was one of those who had escaped from Dapecol with Dyess and had reported on the atrocities in the Japanese POW camps. Mellnik later returned to Australia and served on General MacArthur’s headquarters staff, where he coordinated espionage activities in the Philippines. He was, however, also obsessed with one thing: the rescue of the POWs at Dapecol.

While the Philippines was still under Japanese control, there was an active Filipino resistance organization with several groups of guerrilla forces operating on the islands. These Filipino guerillas were supported and largely directed by clandestine US officers stationed at secret locations in the Philippines. It was those forces that had found and protected these Davao escapees, including Mellnik, and had organized their escape from the Philippines. Mellnik’s plan was to use these forces to rescue the rest of the POWs from Dapecol.

Mellnik had managed to secure approval to station an intelligence officer in the Philippines who could contact the guerillas and POWs and develop an escape plan. The agent, Captain Harold Rosenquist, was set to depart for the Philippines in February 1944. Unfortunately, there was mixed support for the mission, and, due to some internal discord within headquarters, his departure was delayed. It was not until June that Rosenquist was able to first meet up with the clandestine forces on Mindanao.

As Rosenquist made his way secretly across the island to the Dapecol site, Mellnik anxiously monitored his progress through infrequent and often-garbled radio messages. Finally, Mellnik was handed a transcript of the following radio message from Rosenquist: “Walked around penal colony. Found no, repeat no, PWs. Happy convicts say PWs evacuated ten days ago, probably to Manila.” They were too late. A few days earlier, on June 6, 1944, Dapecol had been closed, and the remaining POWs were now gone. Mellnik writes that on reading that message he “sat down and cried.”[1]

In this period between February 1944, when Rosenquist was scheduled to go to the Philippines to organize an escape, and mid-June 1944, when he actually reached the camp, the POWs were moved. With that move, the best (and likely only) opportunity for a rescue was lost. Whether Mellnik’s rescue plan could have succeeded remained a contentious issue, but the loss of that chance caused deep regret.[2]

In February 1944, the Japanese camp commander at Dapecol had called for 650 healthy prisoners to work at another location. That was the beginning of the scattering of these Latter-day Saint POWs at Dapecol. Even though the camp then had about two thousand POWs, it was hard to come up with that many healthy prisoners.[3] The POWs were promised more food at the new camp and, as additional inducement, the return of their shoes. The POWs had received shoes in the last Red Cross packages, but the Japanese had confiscated them.[4] Even though conditions at Dapecol were on a steadily worsening course, and notwithstanding the promised food and shoes, only fifty volunteered. The rest were drafted.[5] With a superior Japanese officer looking on, a Japanese doctor selected those capable of hard labor for this detachment.[6]

Seventeen of the Latter-day Saint POWs from the Davao Branch, including Brown and his friend Ernest Parry, were among that group.[7] Hansen and Davey were not on the list, perhaps due to health conditions.[8] A healthy James Patterson was on the list but, due to what he later described as a miracle, he did not go. The day before the group was to leave, Patterson had returned a wallet he had found to its owner, another POW. The grateful owner had given him a banana that he had managed to steal earlier in the day. Patterson ate the banana that evening with his rice and awoke the next morning with a severely swollen face, hardly able to see. The Japanese doctor giving the POWs a final inspection looked at Patterson and sent him back to the hospital.[9]

Rex Bray, who had a few days earlier been senselessly hit in the face by a Japanese guard with a rifle butt, developed a problem with his wisdom teeth. They were removed without anesthesia, a painful ordeal but one that also left him unfit at the time for this detail.[10]

Hamblin was not on the list of those detailed, but he wanted to go to be with his friends who were members of the Church. He volunteered, and his name was put on a waiting list. He later wrote, “Two of the men were called sick and unable to go, so volunteers were called for. This was my opportunity, but at that moment I had a strong feeling that I should not go. In fact, I had suddenly lost all desire to go.”[11] After the war, Hamblin told his family that when the time came for him to call out and volunteer, “he tried at least three times to answer, but he had no voice; it was simply not there.”[12]

Fate had brought these Latter-day Saint POWs together at Dapecol, and fate would now begin to tear the group apart, starting with the separation of these seventeen Latter-day Saint POWs.

Notes

[1] Mellnik, Philippine War Diary, 315.

[2] Lukacs, Escape from Davao, 344–45.

[3] Bolitho, “A Japanese POW Story,” part 5, 1; Sneddon, Zero Ward, 53. See also Lawton, Some Survived, 75.

[4] Bolitho, “Japanese POW Story,” part 5, 1.

[5] Lawton, Some Survived, 138.

[6] Nordin, We Were Next to Nothing, 121.

[7] Clark and Kowallis, “Fate of the Davao Penal Colony,” 118–20.

[8] Davey was suffering from malaria, beriberi, and various infections while at Dapecol and spent most of his time in the hospital. Deseret News, March 24, 1945, 7 (Faith Sustains Interned Mormon Captain); Springgay, “Davey,” 35–36. Hansen suffered seriously from beriberi later in captivity, although he may have suffered some symptoms as early as his captivity at Dapecol. Call, “Latter-day Saint Servicemen,” 115–16.

[9] Patterson, interview, 22–23.

[10] Bray, “War Memories, 19.

[11] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 19.

[12] Marianne Loose, email message to author, October 24, 2016.