“Civilians from coast to coast were both riveted to and revolted by what the Chicago Tribune called ‘the biggest bombshell since Pearl Harbor.’”

By John D. Lukacs

ON MAY 6, 1943, a weary U.S. Navy officer in tattered khakis staggered to a radio transmitter located deep behind enemy lines in the occupied Philippines and began tapping out a message. As the words flowed from Lieutenant Commander Melvyn McCoy’s experienced fingertips, his exhaustion turned to exhilaration.

It was exactly one year to the day since the fall of the fortress island of Corregidor. Amazingly, McCoy, as the embattled outpost’s communications officer, had authored the last official radiogram sent before “the Rock” was overrun by Imperial Japanese forces. That brief, fading bulletin, sent during America’s darkest hour of World War Two, carried only as far as Honolulu. It said simply: “GOING OFF AIR NOW. GOODBYE AND GOOD LUCK.”

Now one year later, the transmission McCoy triumphantly beamed out into the ether would have considerably greater reach.

“ARRIVED AFTER ESCAPE FROM AMERICAN PRISONER OF WAR CAMP DAVAO WITH THREE MARINE OFFICERS CAPTAIN SHOFNER, THREE AIR CORPS, CAPTAIN DYESS, ONE CAC, MAJOR MELLNIK AND TWO SERGEANTS X ALL CAPTURED BATAAN AND CORREGIDOR HAVE EXTENSIVE INFO REGARDING BRUTALITIES AND ATROCITIES WITH EXTREMELY HEAVY DEATH TOLL TO WAR PRISONERS X”

Although barely a few lines long, the message offered a tantalizing taste of a tale with no equal in World War Two.

Just one month earlier, McCoy and nine other American POWs along with two Filipino convicts had indeed bolted from an escape-proof Japanese jungle prison, one built into a vast swamp that was reportedly inhabited by ten-foot crocodiles, giant insects and tribes of headhunters. It would be the only large-scale POW prison break of the entire Pacific War. But the escapees wanted more than just their freedom; they were driven by a desire to break the news of the Bataan Death March and other Japanese atrocities to the world.

Verification

To staffers in the Allied Intelligence Bureau operating in General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Theater headquarters in Australia, McCoy’s initial cryptic communique, as well as his follow-up transmissions, seemed too far-fetched to be true.

The prisoners had escaped from the Davao Penal Colony, a sprawling plantation designed along the lines of Alcatraz and Devil’s Island where the Japanese were using 2,000 U.S. POWs as slave laborers. At the outset, “Dapecol,” as it was known, seemed an improvement over the camp from which they came, Cabanatuan on Luzon. There, the inmates were routinely tortured, starved and summarily executed. But conditions on the plantation were rapidly deteriorating.

“I felt I was living on borrowed time,” said one of the escapees, Marine Corps Lt. Jack Hawkins.

No Allied POWs had yet escaped from an enemy prison camp anywhere in the Far East, much less in such a sizeable group.

Some thought the succession of messages emanating from the jungles of Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines, so unbelievable that they may actually have been a ruse by the Japanese designed to flush out a troublesome network of guerrillas and spies. It wasn’t.

Amazingly, the intelligence analyst tasked with verifying the startling, static-filled messages, Lt. Col. Allison Ind, had served with the U.S. Army Air Forces on Bataan before evacuating with MacArthur in March 1942. Ind immediately recognized one of the names mentioned in McCoy’s transmissions: Dyess.

William Edwin Dyess

A native of the tiny Texas town of Albany, then-Captain William Edwin Dyess was something of a living legend among the “Battling Bastards of Bataan.” A swashbuckling fighter pilot with recruiting poster good looks, Dyess possessed preternatural leadership skills and a magical aura.

“He was intelligent, magnetic, and fearless,” recalled his best friend, wingman and fellow escapee, Army Air Force Lt. Sam Grashio. “You knew he was the leader. It was something you felt in your bones. His pilots and enlisted personnel revered him and would have followed him anywhere.”

The men of the 21st  Pursuit Squadron followed their charismatic commander both on the ground and in the air. The indefatigable warrior defied death on a daily basis, providing air cover for America’s first amphibious landing of the war on Bataan in February 1942 and, three weeks later, an audacious raid on an enemy supply depot at Subic Bay. The damage he inflicted with his beloved P-40 Warhawk, dubbed “Kibosh,” was so heavy that Radio Tokyo, in hopes of saving face, reported that the raid was carried out by 54 American four-engine bombers.

Later, as the Japanese made their final push on Bataan, Dyess was determined not to abandon his men. The tall Texan refused all evacuation orders and unselfishly sent others out in his place as the fight for the embattled peninsula, which historians would call the “Alamo of the Pacific,” hurtled toward its inexorable terminus.

After Bataan’s April 9, 1942 surrender, which remains the largest in the annals of U.S. military history, Dyess was one of 75,000 Americans and Filipinos forced to endure the infamous Death March. During this roughly 70-mile ordeal, the Japanese purposefully deprived prisoners of food, water and medical care, while relentlessly driving them under a scorching sun. Dyess suffered numerous beatings while shepherding his men forward. All the while he made a mental catalogue of the unbelievable litany of horrors he was witnessing – prisoners being beheaded, buried alive, run over by tanks and used for bayonet practice. He vowed to report the grisly record of Japanese brutality to the outside world.

During his months in captivity, stories of Dyess’ airborne heroics appeared in publications ranging from his hometown Albany News to Esquire magazine. It wasn’t until mid-1943, however, that anybody had any idea that the celebrated hero was still alive.

Ind, hoping to verify Dyess’ identify, radioed questions to which only the escaped POW would know the answers. When the correct replies crackled back to Brisbane over the radio, a momentous sequence of events that would change the course of the war was set in motion. MacArthur immediately ordered a submarine to retrieve Dyess and two other members of the escape party: McCoy and Army Major Steve Mellnik. The other escapees remained on the island for various lengths of time to fight against the Japanese with local guerrillas.

Cover Up

After decorating each of the trio with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest award for valor, MacArthur listened intently as Dyess related his eyewitness account of the Death March, the escalating mortality rates of starving POWs still languishing in squalid camps, and the hair-raising details of the group’s extraordinary escape from the Davao camp.

“I directed the issuance of the story to the press,” MacArthur later recalled. “But that very day Washington forbade the release of any of the details of the prisoner-of-war atrocities. Perhaps the (Roosevelt) Administration, which was committed to a Europe-first effort, feared American public opinion would demand a greater reaction against Japan. Here was the sinister beginning of the ‘managed news’ concept by those in power.”

Arriving in Washington under a cloud of secrecy, Dyess shuttled between debriefings with officials and military brass, including a sympathetic chief of the Army Air Forces, General Henry “Hap” Arnold. But, as MacArthur predicted, it was hardly a hero’s homecoming. He was soon muzzled by FDR and sequestered at the secluded Ashford General military hospital in West Virginia, aka. the Greenbrier Resort.

“The problem is exceedingly complex and of course requires the most careful handling both in relation to our actions at the present time and as to future developments,” wrote Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall in a secret memo to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in October 1943. “The storm of bitterness which will arise, once the public is aware of the brutalities and savagery displayed by the Japanese towards us our prisoners, should be directed along carefully thought out lines rather than left to dissipate itself in a lurid press and unpredictable reactions.”

One by one, members of the escape party returned home, only to learn that they were prisoners again.

“I was reminded repeatedly that my past was a military secret,” recalled Lt. Grashio. “It was maddeningly frustrating. The whole purpose of our escape seemed thwarted, mocked every day.”

Back at home, Dyess suffered from devastating bouts of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I saw it in his eyes – that suffering – when I first greeted him,” remembered his wife, Marajen Stevick Dyess. “I was the only one he could tell. He was breaking inside. It hurt him so.”

Dyess summoned the strength to fight one final battle, this time against his own government.

“The thing I must do – the thing I’m going to do – is to tell the American people what the Japs have done and are doing to their sons and husbands and brothers out in the Philippines,” Dyess said. “I want the American people to understand Japanese psychology and the way they make war. I am going to tell my story through the medium that will get it to the most people most effectively.”

Turning down lucrative offers from LIFE and Collier’s, Dyess employed the contacts of his socialite wife to enter into a publishing agreement with the Chicago Tribune, which, with more than 100 associated newspapers in its media empire, boasted the largest readership in North America.

Outrage

Eventually, Washington caved. With the help of veteran journalists in the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information, the story of the Davao escape and Japanese atrocities was released by the U.S. Government in late January 1944, perfectly timed in order to harness the full fury of America’s anger.

Civilians from coast to coast were both riveted to and revolted by what the Tribune called “the biggest bombshell since Pearl Harbor.” The story went viral. It was carried on shortwave signals, splashed across headlines in the Stars and Stripes and spread through the ready rooms, barracks halls and chow lines everywhere America’s fighting forces could be found.

The outrage was so immediate, the desire for revenge so palpable, it shifted the strategic military operations in the Pacific Theater. The Marshall Islands campaign was launched almost concurrently with the story’s release. There were public pronouncements from local commanders on the proliferation of bombing raids, while privately, GIs and Marines swore to not take prisoners, nor surrender. “Like the Indian fighters of the West, each planned to save a bullet for himself,” declared Newsweek.

On the home front, news of the Death March atrocities roused America from its growing complacency about the war. The revelations led to drops in absenteeism at armaments plants, while once stagnating war bond sales and even military enlistment rates skyrocketed. Most notably, the government loosened up wartime censorship policies, enabling the press to more freely report the truth about Allied victories and even setbacks.

News of Japan’s abuses were also picked up by the international press. The coverage greatly embarrassed the regime in Tokyo.

Heroic to the End

Sadly, Ed Dyess, would never know just how successful his and his comrades were in their self-appointed mission. On Dec. 22, 1943, while on a routine flight over Los Angeles, Dyess’ P-38 Lightning suffered a catastrophic engine failure. Rather than bail out and let his plane careen into a residential area, he tried to make an emergency landing on a Burbank boulevard. Pulling up at the last second to avoid killing a motorist, the aviator struck a church. Dyess was killed instantly when his plane cartwheeled into a vacant lot and exploded. He was just 27 years old.

Nicknamed “the One-Man Scourge of the Japanese” by the New York Times, Dyess would be a prototype, albeit a posthumous one, of the wartime military celebrity. A young, wholesome all-American hero with considerable acting talent and experience, Dyess was something of an 1940s-era hybrid of Jessica Lynch, the celebrated POW of the 2003 Iraq War, and Navy Seal Robert O’Neill, the national hero credited with killing terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.

“If Dyess had survived the war,” one of his wartime peers, a retired Air Force three-star general, once told this author, “with his looks, talent, charisma and leadership skills, he would have ended up running the Air Force or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That, or nobody would have ever heard of Audie Murphy.”

Ultimately, the “Dyess Story” proved that that the American pen was mightier than the Japanese samurai sword, that perhaps the most important weapons in America’s arsenal of democracy were its typewriters, printing presses, radios, and the calls of its corner newsboys, as well as the most powerful weapon of all, an infuriated, well-informed and unified population.

And that the extraordinary efforts of just one amazing hero, in a world war fought by tens of millions of troops, can lead to victory.

(Originally published on April 5, 2018)

John D. Lukacs is the author of a book and executive producer of a documentary film, called 4-4-43 on Lt. Col. Ed Dyess and the Davao escape. He is leading a grassroots campaign called the “Mission of Honor” to secure Dyess the Medal of Honor. To learn more, visit 4-4-43.com.