Fugitives: Evading and Escaping the Japanese

5. Panay

FANAY A single-engine Grumman flying boat later joined the fleet. Navy men had retrieved it from almost total submersion offBataan, replaced the engine with one from a plane previously junked, and restored the rest with salvaged parts from other wrecks. It lacked a tail wheel and most of the fabric under the tail was scraped off. For two weeks we spent most of our time at Capiz, with occasional short trips to Iloilo on the south coast ofthe island. Life was slow and easy. We were away from the stress that had been our daily regimen on Masbate. I appreciated being on an island where there was a semblance of a military force on my side of the confrontation. The food was interesting and varied, and the daily fare of Filipino cuisine did not become boring. Actually this was not really the native diet, for the cooks had been trained by Americans and the meals were as stateside as the cooks' educations and the available supplies could make them. More evacuees from Masbate arrived around the middle of February . These were some of the people who had opted, several weeks previously, to believe the Japanese's promise that they would not be molested-the gamble Hanson, Mason, and I had not taken. The Japanese had reneged on that promise, one of the early indications that the Japanese word was not worth much. The new arrivals included Harold and Louise Spencer, Homer fana~ 45 Mann, Graham Nelson, Fred Fredericks, Bob Armstrong, Rose Preiser, Henry and Laura Schuring and Clifford, their son, Jack Treat, and a few others. Graham Nelson recounted their story. "About forty Japs came to the mine on the afternoon of 3 February and set up camp at the airfield. They called us all together and told us no one would be molested, but we were to stay close to the barracks and the staff house area. It was sort of an internment without being fenced in. "The Japs visited with us occasionally and were quite friendly. They even brought us some food a few times. But soon a Filipino who had been spying on the Japs for us and feeding us bits of information came with bad news. He had been told by a Japanese officer that the following morning we were to be herded up like cattle, moved to Aroroy, and loaded on a boat to be taken to a concentration camp near Legaspi, on Luzon Island. Our spy said the officer seemed to want this news leaked to us so that there wouldn't be many of us left to move. "Everybody took off for the hills that evening or early the next morning except Barney Faust and his wife, the Rowes, Harry and Mrs. Morrison and their year-old son, and me. I stayed because I couldn't make up my mind where to go. I hung around the staff house until almost nine o'clock, then got my gear together to move out. "As I went out the front door I saw a party of Jap soldiers coming up the road. I turned and ran out the back door, crawled under the end porch, and lay there for hours watching the legs of the Japanese as they moved the remaining Americans to trucks. They took them to the boatand eventually to a concentration camp, I guess. "In the afternoon I took off, and here I am." We were now without income-producing jobs, and most of us had no stash of cash, so we sought jobs with the army. I was assigned as Assistant Superintendent of Construction at the Santa Barbara Airfield . Ken Hansen was my boss. The Santa Barbara Airfield, fifteen miles north of Iloilo on the 46 Fugitives main road to Capiz, was one of five airfields being constructed under the supervision of mining men from Masbate. Our job was to supervise the earthwork and paving for a landing strip five thousand feet long by three hundred feet wide. The airfield site was a large, almost level field previously devoted to growing rice. The field was divided into rice paddies-squares about one hundred feet, surrounded by low dirt dikes. Connecting the dikes were shallow, narrow ditches forming a grid to carry irrigation water throughout the field. The water level inside the paddies was carefully controlled during the growing season, for the plants required flooded conditions at certain stages...