Free Escape From Davao by John D. Lukacs Page B

7.
    Sunk in January off Mariveles, the Duck had been refloated, repaired, and returned to service with Bataan’s “Bamboo Fleet,” a motley air force including the two surviving P-40s, a 1933 Bel anca Skyrocket, a Beechcraft Staggerwing, and a 1934 Waco bi-wing that the pilots flew to the Visayas and Mindanao on evacuation missions. On their return flights, the planes’ fuselages were crammed with everything from batteries and quinine pil s to cigarettes, cognac, candy—and the scarcest commodity of al , news from home. Capt. Joe Moore had discovered an RCA overseas wireless office on the unoccupied island of Cebu, 365 miles south, capable of communicating with California. If not for Moore, Sam Grashio would not have received the cablegram containing news that his wife had given birth to a baby girl.
    The Duck, though, had delivered little good news in the past two days. Fol owing Moore’s mission on April 6, the plane had blown a cylinder. Boelens’s crew was now attempting an emergency transplant with parts from another sunken amphibian.
    The ear-splitting explosions seemed to amplify with each turn of a socket wrench, each bolt and screw tightened. Enveloped by the tumult, the mechanics continued to work as the concussions rattled their tools and their confidence. The battle for Bataan was hurtling inexorably to its terminus. Most certainly, the “pickens,” as Boelens and Dyess used to say, were not good.
    Leo Boelens, the youngest of eleven children born to an immigrant Belgian farmer, possessed an energy and ingenuity acquired in part from his environment. Historical y, the inhabitants of northern Wyoming’s Big Horn basin—from Native Americans and frontier trappers to contemporary farmers and ranchers—were good with their hands. Centuries of evidence ranged from tribal petroglyphs pecked on sandstone wal s to symmetrical rows of irrigated crops to the tanks and smokestacks of the Standard Oil refinery puncturing the big Western sky.
    At five foot seven and a half, 155 pounds, Boelens was an average-sized farm boy. He would never forget his agricultural roots—he humbly referred to himself in correspondence as “a farmer, L.A.B.”—but Leo Arthur Boelens’s hands were not meant to til the Wyoming soil. He dropped out of the University of Wyoming and joined the Army Air Corps in late 1940. Nine months of dissecting engines and learning airplane design, construction, and maintenance in the Air Corps Technical School’s aeronautical engineering program at Chanute Field near Rantoul, Il inois, awakened a latent talent. “I’m sold on this branch,” he wrote his kin.
    Boelens was commissioned in September 1941 and returned home just before shipping out. As a car waited to take him to Bil ings, Montana, and the transport that would fly him to San Francisco, shutters clicked, freezing the farewel in time, locking a smiling, broad-shouldered Boelens in his uniform, in his youth, in the permanence of black and
    white.
    No sooner had Boelens ducked into the car than an uncomfortable feeling swept over his older sister, Christina Snyder, who had raised him fol owing the death of their mother in 1928. They shared a unique familial bond and at that moment she was overwhelmed with a sudden premonition. As the car carrying Leo Boelens motored toward Bil ings, an emotional Snyder turned to the rest of her family.
    “We wil never see him again,” she announced.
    Boelens and his crew were just finishing repairs on the Duck when Ed Dyess’s Ford sedan arrived.
    Dyess, fresh from supervising the evacuation of Bataan Field, was leading a convoy of men to Mariveles Field. There was a rumor that B-17s would be arriving there to evacuate pilots, but Dyess had stopped to inform Lt. Roland Barnick, the pilot assigned to fly the Duck, that he was to wait until the last possible minute for a special passenger from Corregidor, Col. Carlos Romulo, MacArthur’s press officer and the man behind the Voice of Freedom radio