Hell On Mindango

HELL ON

For months after the tragedy of Bataan and Corregidor, a frayed and thumb-worn copy of Arizona Highways was the only reading matter among thousands of half-starved and disease-ridden American prisoners of war in a squalid, vermin infested Jap prison camp at Davao, on the Philippine Island of Mindanao. It was finally consumed as cigarette paper, along with the pages of a King James version of the Holy Bible. And there was no sacrilege in that. The story is told by Capt. Fred Gallagher, of Tucson, who in the first three years after Pearl Harbor lived more thrills and felt more heart throbs than have been even remotely imagined for the wildest movie thriller ever concocted in the most frenzied of Hollywood styles.

Fred Gallagher, at the outbreak of the war, was employed as a civilian construction expert building airbases for the army on Mindanao. He made his way to Corregidor, by that time under heavy siege. Thirteen days later, a Japanese convoy appeared in the bay. "It looks like it's about time to join the army," Gallagher remarked to a high ranking officer who stood beside him, and on the spot was breveted a first lieutenant in order that he might wear a uniform and be accorded the same treatment by the captors as other military prisoners of war. After surviving the Death March of 1942, Gallagher was transferred to the prison camp at Davao where he spent nearly all of the next three years.

Conditions were horrible, but there was barely enough food. There was hunger and sickness and heartbreak in the camp as month followed dreary month and time stretched out into years. Clothing became rags, human bodies dwindled gradually into little more than skeletons, and hope ebbed. "Rats chewed at our hair as we slept, and carried it away to build their nests," Captain Gallagher says. "We were given only a handful of rice a day, and at times a jigger of clean water would have sold for $10,000 if there had been any water, or money to buy it with; but, of course, money had no value, anyway, in that prison camp."

When taken prisoner, Gallagher had in his possession a copy of Arizona Highways which had been given to him by Mrs. Margaret Spear, secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila, a short while before.

"Before the journey from Corregidor to prison began, we were ordered by our captors to destroy all our belongings," Gallagher said, "but the copy of Arizona Highways was my prized possession and I managed to conceal it on my person and smuggle it into prison camp with me. If I'd been caught I'd have been severely punished. But I took the chance.

"It was the only reading material in the camp. Many boys from all parts of the United States begged me to allow them to read the magazine, and it was surreptitiously passed along from man to man. Its pages and its pictures helped more than I can tell you to pass away the weary hours.

"Under prevailing Japanese prisoner wages, we had to labor almost a week to earn a handful of tobacco, and even then there were no papers with which to roll cigarettes.

"One day I caught the chaplain tearing out the pages of his Bible and shaping them into strips to make cigarettes. He told the others they, too, could use the Bible pages but he made them read the Scripture first."

In the autumn of 1944, Captain Gallagher was one of only 83 out of 750 American prisoners being transferred to Japan, to survive a massacre by the Japs when a prison ship was torpedoed by an American submarine. The prison ship was one of a convoy of seven Japanese vessels, all of which were sunk by an underseas wolf-pack, five of them during the first day of the attack.

Conditions aboard the prison ship were almost indescribable. Of the 750 prisoners aboard, 500 were jammed into a forward hold measuring only 40 by 50 feet. The hatch was battened down

MINDANAO

with a network of rope which left only a small and insufficient opening for air.

"We were naked," Gallagher said, "and for the first three days without water to drink. We had to sit with our legs crossed beneath us, because there was no more room. To stretch our legs we had to first ask the man in front to stand. We were so crowded that after the first eight hours, 150 passed out.

For nineteen terrible days of a journey that normally would have required scarcely more than a day and a half, the prisoners endured this inhuman and harrowing condition, while their Jap captors attempted to silence cries for food and water by threatening to hurl grenades into the hold. Then, without warning, the first of two American torpedoes struck.

"This is the real McCoy," Gallagher shouted to the man next to him; then the second torpedo exploded and almost instantaneously he found himself under water, pinned down by a mass of human corpses, and struggling to get free. He gasped for breath, and lost consciousness, for how long he does not know. When he came to, he was floating face up on the surface but in total darkness, imprisoned in a portion of floating hull. He looked around and saw a patch of light coming through the opening of a hatch. Swimming to it, he was met by a burst of machine gun bullets fired by Japs from the bridge section of the ship, which was still afloat.As the Japanese turned their attention to other targets, he gained the hatch and saw land not far away. Temporarily deaf from concussion of the explosions and water pressure, and for the moment blinded in one eye, he lost consciousness again.

When he finally came to, he started swimming toward the shore, moving directly into the setting sun, whose glare screened him from the Jap machine gunners and aided his escape.

Japanese in a lifeboat rowed among the surviving American prisoners slaughtering them by the score with rifle bullets and bayonets which they swung as swords.

Gallagher, with 82 other Americans, finally gained the comparative safety of the land. That night as they sat concealed on the beach they saw thirty more American prisoners, who had been recaptured, slain in cold blood by the Japanese.

The 83 who escaped were contacted in their hiding place by Filipino guerrillas and escorted inland where they found an amply supply of food, arms and medical stores which had been smuggled in by American submarines. Eventually, the guerrillas sent them back to the coast, a 25-mile journey from their inland base. Three miles from the shore, Gallagher collapsed with an injured foot, but was placed on a pack animal by natives and escorted the remainder of the way. Off the coast, he and his companions saw an American submarinethe largest in the world, he believes which took them aboard.

Captain Gallagher spent some time in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington regaining his health, then came back to visit his foster mother, Mrs. C. E. Rose, who resides in Tucson. Gallagher was graduated from Tucson High School in 1928 and attended the University of Arizona in 1930. He later was an employe of the National Park Service and at one time was a landscape engineer in Tucson. He was married on March 20, this year, to Miss Marian DePew, of Bloomington, Illinois, a stewardess on American Airlines.

By the rules, that should end the story, but it doesn't quite. Captain Gallagher is going back to the Philippines. He has a score to even with the Japs. They didn't treat him very nice. But that isn't all.

"I have another reason to return," he says, "and in a hurry, too. My father, John J. Gallagher, was killed by the Japanese near Zamboanga, on Mindanao, and my sister was only recently liberated from a Jap prison camp. Her husband and baby were killed or died in prison, and my brother is still in prison somewhere in Japan."