Free Escape From Davao by John D. Lukacs Page A

officer, and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1939.
    The “Minnesota Yankee” and the “Texas Rebel,” as Hawkins described them, would become best friends upon meeting at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1939. Standing at attention, they were a study in physical contrasts. Hawkins was six foot one and weighed 165 pounds, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion that amplified his boyish looks. A short shock of coffee-colored hair framed Dobervich’s ruggedly handsome face and flint-gray eyes, while his crooked nose and burly build betrayed his pugilist past. Gentle and generous to a fault, Dobervich did not fit the profile of the archetypical Marine officer. Hawkins also remembered a distinct language barrier: “He talked in the rapid staccato of the busy North, and I—wel , it always did take me al day to say anything. We weren’t much alike,” he concluded, “but we looked at things the same way.”
    They would be roommates throughout basic school and their first overseas assignment in Shanghai.
    The 4th Marine Regiment—located in Shanghai—since the late 1920s—had lately been charged with protecting American interests and buffering the city’s International Settlement from the encroaching Sino-Japanese War. The two junior officers would spend seventeen months in the wild, decadent city. By late 1941, the Japanese had encircled the city and since the prevailing, yet impractical war contingency plan cal ed for the understrength Marines to break for far-off Chungking and align with Nationalist forces, Col.
    Samuel L. Howard successful y lobbied to evacuate the regiment in late November. Though Dobervich had contracted cerebral meningitis, he, Hawkins, and Shofner would travel together to the Philippines aboard the President Madison .
    Now as they finished their meals, Hawkins sensed that Dobervich was not ful y recovered.
    “Gee, that was good,” said Dobervich. “I’l have to come back over to see you again soon, if you’l promise to feed me like that.”
    “Sure we’l feed you,” Hawkins said laughing. “When do you think you’l be back again?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe in a few weeks … maybe never.”
    “Don’t talk like that.”
    A few minutes later, a gunnysack fil ed with cans and cartons of cigarettes was placed in the truck that Dobervich had driven up from the North Dock. It was a generous gift, “but we gave gladly, knowing that the boys in Bataan were suffering more than we,” said Hawkins.
    “Take care of yourself,” Hawkins cal ed over the growl of the truck’s engine.
    “Okay. You do the same,” yel ed Dobervich. “So long.”
    Hawkins watched Dobervich head down the dusty jungle al ey toward the North Dock and the gray unknown beyond. After lingering for a moment in ruminative silence, he pivoted and began the walk back to his dugout.
    Wednesday, April 8, 1942
    Bataan, Philippine Islands
    Cabcaben Field, 2215 hours. The thunderclaps of a nearby 155 mil imeter gun muffled the sounds of mechanics and pilots ratcheting the grease-slathered, metal ic viscera of a single-engine Navy biplane known as a Grumman J2F Duck. The men had been working in around-the-clock shifts for the past forty-

    eight hours. As the chief mechanic, 2nd Lt. Leo Boelens had scribbled in his diary, “we must stay—get duck out.”
    It would not be Boelens’s first mechanical miracle. Since his reassignment from the 27th Material Squadron, the imaginative Boelens had not only kept the few remaining planes flying, he had also endeavored to create reinforcements, scavenging parts from cracked-up P-40Bs and P-40Es to build a hybrid Warhawk known to the pilots as the “P-40 Something.” Tonight, however, he would be working against more than a shortage of parts. During trips to requisition tools, the twenty-seven-year-old had encountered columns of troops straggling back from the front. “I predict the beginning of the end,” he jotted in his crude diary on April