Be still, my soul: The Lord is on thy side;

With patience bear thy cross of grief or pain.

Leave to thy God to order and provide;

In ev’ry change he faithful will remain.

—Katharina von Schlegel, “Be Still, My Soul”

The Fifth Air Base group was ordered by General Sharp to proceed to Camp Casisang near the town of Malaybalay to surrender to the Japanese. By now these soldiers, soon to be POWs, understood the savage reputation of the Japanese Army to whom they were ordered to surrender.

Corporal Ralf Wilson later wrote of this time when he was fearfully anticipating surrender: “Anxiety struck in my throat. I needed help beyond myself. Then I remembered my parents’ teachings and determined to go off by myself and pray. In the jungle I came upon an old quarry. It was a beautiful little place. I knelt and opened my heart to the Lord and pleaded for His help. After a time, I heard a very clear and distinct voice say, ‘It’s okay, Ralf, you’re going to be all right.’ Immediately a sense of peace washed over me. The sun was shining down through the trees, the birds were singing, and I felt a quiet reassurance.” With that, Wilson surrendered, believing he had the Lord’s promise that he would return home.

[1]

The Japanese did not place many restrictions on what these surrendering soldiers could bring into the camp; in fact, they actually directed the soldiers to bring in all remaining food supplies. Goodliffe and his Latter-day Saint friend, Christensen, were among those tasked with gathering up all the supplies they could in the two days allotted. They were mostly able to load up canned pineapple from Del Monte.[2] The surrendering soldiers loaded trucks with the food and other supplies they had collected and began the slow journey north toward Malaybalay.

A few miles south of Malaybalay, the Japanese had set up a checkpoint, and it was there that the soldiers of the Fifth Air Base group had their first encounter with their captors. Waving their bayoneted rifles, the Japanese soldiers signaled the Americans off their trucks and ordered them to raise their hands. The Japanese then searched each American; because there were more than five hundred American captives, that took a while.[3]

In terms of the discipline and treatment of the prisoners, this was a very different Japanese Army from the one to which those on Bataan had surrendered. Some of the Japanese soldiers took fountain pens and pencils, watches, rings, and similar personal items from the surrendering soldiers. When an armed guard searched Christensen, he pointed his bayonet at Christensen’s watch, and Christensen wisely decided to just give it to him.[4] However, there were also accounts of Japanese soldiers, after carefully searching and seizing such personal items, returning them.[5]

Patterson related that with a quick movement of his bayonet, a Japanese soldier took from his wrist the Bulova watch his mother had given him. However, the next day, a Japanese commander lined up his troops, and those who were found with stolen items were severely punished. As for the Japanese soldier who had taken Patterson’s watch, “they just beat him practically to death because he wasn’t supposed to do that.”[6] There was none of the malicious brutality toward the surrendering prisoners that had been so prevalent at Bataan. After the search, the captives were ordered back into their trucks and driven to Camp Casisang.

U.S. troops massing for surrender to the Japanese at Camp Casisang on Mindanao Island.

Camp Casisang had been a training camp for the Philippine Constabulary, a military police force. It was located at the edge of some rolling plains and consisted of several rather crude barracks with walls rising three or four feet, leaving an open space of about three feet below the roofline. The roofs were covered with thatch made from leaves of nipa palm trees. The barracks surrounded a kitchen and dining building with a metal roof, and there were a few crude latrines.[7] Within a week, there were about eleven hundred American soldiers in the camp. While the influx of prisoners put some strain on the camp resources, especially on water, these POWs did not experience the same level of starvation and sickness as those on Bataan. In addition to their own remaining food supplies, they had been able to bring into the camp such luxuries as stoves and refrigerators.[8] Consequently, these captives were given adequate amounts of food and, for a while at least, they were able to continue eating the same kind of food to which they were accustomed. Compared to others, Patterson said they “ate like kings.”[9]

Added to their relatively good fortune was the fact that their guards did not exhibit the spiteful and vicious behavior of those on Bataan. Rather, the Japanese for the most part left the prisoners alone. Christensen later wrote that the Japanese commander had attended college in the United States with General Sharp, so the prisoners received “a few unexpected liberties and quite good treatment.”[10] There were no work details other than to secure wood for the cooking fires. The captives organized baseball teams, set up a recreation hall, and started a library, among other things.[11] In this more easygoing prison environment, the Latter-day Saint soldiers were able to continue the regular Sunday School classes led by Staff Sargent Hansen that they had begun at Del Monte.

Even in this more favorable prison environment, there were limits to what the Japanese would tolerate, and there were brutal consequences for breaching those limits. Camp Casisang was by no means a maximum-security prison, and it was not difficult to get through the single fence surrounding the camp. A couple of Filipino POWs slipped out one night to visit their wives, who were living nearby, and were caught trying to sneak back into the camp before roll call the next morning. They were summarily tried, sentenced to death, and made to dig their own graves along with the postholes for their execution posts. They were lashed to the posts, shot by a firing squad, and then cut loose and rolled into the graves they had dug. All the POWs were required to watch the executions. It took several rounds for the executioners to kill the two Filipino POWs. The Japanese were not bad shots but wanted to make them suffer and wanted all the other prisoners to see that suffering.[12] The Japanese had made a point that all understood. As Christensen later recorded, “This made us get any such similar notions out of our heads right away.”[13]

Although the atmosphere in the camp was more subdued after these executions, Camp Casisang was comparatively still a very good place for these soldiers to be. Their good fortune was not to last, however. In the first part of October 1942, the Japanese asked for men with technical skills to volunteer to work in Japan. Believing that this would lead to a more comfortable place, many claimed to have skills such as driving a truck or other training from civilian life. About two hundred volunteered to go. It was a ruse to bring a labor force to Japan—not for any technical work, but for hard, miserable, nontechnical slave labor in the cold and wretched mines and factories of Japan.[14] It does not appear any of the Latter-day Saint soldiers in the Fifth Air Base volunteered for the technical positions.

Two weeks later Camp Casisang was closed. Tied together with loops around the waist of each POW and guarded by soldiers with machines guns, the Americans were loaded onto flatbed trucks and taken to Bugo, the small port barrio on the coast. The POWs were immediately loaded on Japanese Troop Ship #760; they sailed for two days along the northern and eastern shores of Mindanao to Davao. Although crowded into the holds of the ship, the POWs were allowed to spend time on the deck, which relieved the crowding in the holds. For the most part, this was not an especially unpleasant voyage, compared to those that would come later, and these POWs were likely treated as well as Japanese soldiers on troop transports. It was also a relatively short trip. Two days later, on October 20, 1942, they arrived near Lasang on the Davao Gulf. Here things changed, and not for the better.

At noon, in the heat of the day, they disembarked and found themselves with a different breed of guards. These were occupation troops, made up of Japanese as well as some Formosan conscripts. They were young and mean. The POWs were marched through the streets and about twenty miles up a narrow road in the hot sun toward the Davao Penal Colony, which was often called Dapecol. As the afternoon wore on and the tropical sun took its toll, men began to reel, catch themselves from falling, continue for a distance, and then just collapse. The march did not stop for those who collapsed. However, unlike at Bataan, where those who fell behind were killed, these collapsed POWs were simply thrown in the back of the trucks hauling their gear to the prison camp.

The road narrowed and they entered a thick and impenetrable jungle; the only way through was on the narrow track they traversed. Using bayonets and rifle butts, the guards stepped up the pace. Finally, at around midnight, dehydrated and exhausted, they walked into a clearing and through the camp gates; to boost their morale, they sang “God Bless America.”[15] Each then found a spot and collapsed for the night.[16]

When this group from Camp Casisang arrived, there were already around one hundred POWs in the camp. These POWs had come from Cabanatuan about ten days earlier to prepare the camp; Hamblin was in that group. Those from Cabanatuan had endured the siege and battle of Bataan, the Bataan Death March, and the hellish conditions of Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan. They were emaciated, suffering from a variety of tropical diseases and nutritional deficiencies, and had little in the way of possessions, most likely just some sort of cup for eating.

In contrast, the units from Camp Casisang had surrendered intact and had been relatively well fed. Since the Japanese had not put any limit on what they could take, they arrived at Davao with barrack bags and footlockers. The Japanese interpreter at the camp mocked them, saying that with their barrack bags they looked like Santa Claus. The other POWs nicknamed them the “Foot Locker Fifth.”[17] With Latter-day Saint POWs from Camp Casisang and Cabanatuan moving to Davao, Dapecol became the focus of their imprisonment.

Notes

[1] Wilson, in Courage in a Season of War, 323. An account of this incident is also included in the transcript of a talk Wilson gave in 1998, which can be found at familysearch.org in the documents page of Ralf Thomas Wilson (KWZC-S4H).

[2] Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 9.

[3] Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3 (October 24, 2009), 1; Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 42–43; Patterson, “Interview,” 29–31.

[4] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 9–10.

[5] Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 43.

[6] Patterson, “Interview,” 29, 32.

[7] Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3, 1.

[8] Ibid.; Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 44–45.

[9] Patterson, “Interview,” 31–32.

[10] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 10.

[11] Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 44–45; Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3 (October 24, 2009), 2.

[12] After the first round, the then-wounded men slouched down. Immediately, a strong voice from the Filipino side of the compound shouted, “You are in the American Army—die like Americans. Attn-Hutt.” They then jerked their heads up in an effort to come to attention, as they were killed by succeeding rounds. Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3, 2.

[13] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 10. See also Patterson, “Interview,” 31–32; Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 48–49; Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3, 2.

[14] Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3, 2; Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 47–48.

[15] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 10.

[16] Bolitho, “Japanese Story,” part 3, 3; Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 50–51.

[17] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 11; Hamblin, “My Experience,” 15.