Free Escape From Davao by John D. Lukacs

there?”
    Unlike most of the 4th Marines, Dobervich had been on Bataan since mid-January with the Marine detachment guarding the forward USAFFE headquarters. His appetite had bridged their friendship across the North Channel—this was his third visit to Hawkins’s mess in as many months. Mashing his rice and corned beef hash, he did not mince words with his reply.
    “It looks kind of bad, Jack. The Nips are pushing hard.”
    “How much longer do you think Bataan can hold out?”
    “Not long. Seems to me the folks at home would get something out here to us. I don’t believe they realize what’s going on.”
    “Guess not,” mused Hawkins, a twenty-five-year-old, straight-shooting Texan barely three years out of Annapolis now in command of a reinforced platoon of four dozen machine gunners. “Looks like we’re the lost sheep…. I wonder if al these boys here realize what they’re up against. I know mine do. I don’t try to kid ’em along.”
    “I think most of them do, Jack,” said Dobervich. “I suppose a few believe in that bum headquarters dope about ‘Help is on the way,’ but not many.”
    “These boys out here deserve plenty of credit, don’t they?” said Hawkins. “To go on scrapping when they’re up against a stacked deck like this.”
    “You bet they do,” concurred Dobervich.
    Having reached their consensus, they returned to their mess kits.
    An Annapolis plebe deciding that he did not like ships or the sea—anything Navy, real y—during his first summer cruise is quite a revelation. Such was the dilemma of Jack Hawkins in July 1936. Fol owing the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Hawkins’s ship, the USS
    Oklahoma , was ordered to Bilbao, Spain, to pick up American citizens. The student crew was transferred to the Wyoming , and it would take only a few days of rol ing across the choppy Atlantic on the cramped older battleship for Hawkins to change his mind about the Navy. Nevertheless he was perhaps destined for a military career.
    While growing up in the northeastern Texas farm town of Roxton, then nearby Paris and later Fort Worth—like his English ancestors who arrived in Virginia circa 1707 and drifted west, Hawkins’s family relocated several times—Hawkins had several role models to emulate, including his future brother-in-law, a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, and his Civil War veteran grandfathers. He was, after al , named for Andrew Jackson Hawkins, a relative who had served in the Louisiana Cavalry. He was also a descendant of one of Queen Elizabeth’s famed Seadogs, Admiral Sir John Hawkins, the commander of the Victory in the sixteenth-century defeat of the Spanish Armada. Regardless of that portion of his pedigree, Hawkins knew that he did not have the salty sea air and cannon smoke in his blood. He also knew that he could not leave Annapolis, his chance at an education and a future. There was only one answer: the Marine Corps. With just twenty-five slots for Marine placement per class, it would take four years of dedicated scholarship and subterfuge—to mask his poor eyesight he memorized the eye charts used in physical
    inspections—but Hawkins earned a slot.
    For Mike Dobervich, the decision was equal y simple: the military or the ore mines. In the early 1900s, many immigrants mined hematite and manganese from the northeastern Minnesota earth, sent for their families, and settled in the mining town melting pots of the Minnesota Iron Range. One of them, Obrad Dobervich, a Serb, settled in Ironton, where he and his wife Mara brought up eight children. Al six of the Dobervich boys boxed; al would fight in World War II. They also learned the value of an education—five, Michiel included, would attend North Dakota Agricultural Col ege in Fargo. Resourceful and hardworking
    —Austin Shofner would christen him “Beaver”—Dobervich lived with the mayor of Fargo while earning a reputation as an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer, honors as a four-year ROTC