McDole Glenn - Last man out: Glenn McDole, U.S.M.C., survivor of the Palawan massacre in World War II

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Wilbanks, Bob, 1931
Last man out : Glenn McDole, USMC, survivor of the Palawan massacre in World War II / Bob Wilbanks.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7864-1822-2

1. McDole, Glenn. 2. Palawan Barracks (Concentration camp). 3. World War, 19391945Prisoners and prisons,Japanese. 4. Palawan Massacre, Philippines, 1944. 5. Prisoners of warUnited StatesBiography. 6. Prisoners of warPhilippinesBiography. I. Title.
D805.5.P35W55 2004
940.54'7252'092dc22 2004018233

British Library cataloguing data are available

2004 Bob Wilbanks. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover photograph: remants of B shelter inside the Palawan camp with the charred bones and ashes of prisoners (U.S. War Department)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the 139 American prisoners of war who
were slaughtered by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial
Army on December 14, 1944, at the Puerto Princesa
Prison Camp, Palawan Island, in the Phillippines.

This book would not have been possible had it not been for Kathy McDole, Glenn McDoles daughter. She gathered old War Department files and put on paper Glenns account of what happened to him and his buddies, who fought on Corregidor in 1942 and later ended up prisoners of war on Palawan Island, the Philippines. For Kathy McDole, it was a labor of love for a man who is now one of the few living survivors of what became known as the Palawan Massacre.

Putting this book together has not been easy; after all, the events in this story took place over 60 years ago, and the memories of the few still living who experienced it are beginning to fade.

I am deeply indebted to Jack Shelley, a longtime Iowa broadcast journalist with WHO Radio and Television, and retired professor of journalism at Iowa State University; Don Muhm, retired farm editor of The Des Moines Register; Dons wife, Joann; Bekki Rannebarger; Glenn McDole; and my wife, Jane.

Shelley, who was a war correspondent in Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War, continually asked questions with the merciless zest of a professor who had corrected student papers for 20 yearswhich he had.

Don Muhm, who also wore khaki, but served during the Korean War, was the first to tell me I had a manuscript that was worthy of a publishers attention. He read it, critiqued it, made suggestions on form and content, and encouraged me to keep at it.

Joann Muhm was my cheerleader. When I had my doubts, she, along with my wife, Jane, gave me the confidence I needed.

Thanks are also due to Bekki Rannebarger, a whiz-kid at the computer who kept me on track.

My sincere gratitude goes to former Marine Glenn McDole: I thank him for his patience while I pried into his past for hours on end.

I offer my sincere thanks to all of these people.

In the great Pacific War, 40 percent of American and Allied POWs died from starvation, torture, execution and disease in Japanese prison camps. Almost all the prisoners were slave laborers. Those too weak to work received only half the food of their comrades, who barely survived on a single mess kit of bug- and worm-infested rice per day. They worked from dawn to dusk, six to seven days a week.

At the outset of World War II, Japans armies had captured thousands of American and Allied soldiers, sailors and Marines, and there is little doubt among historians that all of them would have been executed had Japan won the war. But the armada sweeping toward Japan across the Pacific, and two huge bombs, one which fell on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki, ended all thoughts of killing the thousands of prisoners scattered across Asia and the Pacific.

The Japanese war machine required labor, and a lot of it. The demand for the raw materials to make guns and other weapons for its war of conquest in the Pacific and Asia was more than its citizenry could provide, so it used slave labor.

The book you are about to read is the story of one of the Palawan survivors, Glenn McDole, of Ankeny, Iowa. In 1940, McDole was a hot-tempered, good-looking 19-year-old Urbandale, Iowa, high school dropout. Angry because he would be too old to play basketball his senior year, he stormed out of school. He thought about his future and decided to join the U.S. Marine Corps until he became old enough to enter the Iowa Highway Patrol. He joined the very next day and, soon after, headed off to boot camp in San Diego, California.

After boot camp, Mac, as his buddies called him, was shipped to the Philippines. It was peacetime, and those in the enlisted ranks didnt think or talk much about the rumors of war in the Pacific. It was good duty in the Philippines, and Macs only regret was that he had not been shipped to Shanghai, China, where he would have been stationed with the famed China Marines, the 4th Marine Regiment. When the China Marines were shipped out of China to the Philippines, Mac finally got his wish. His battalion became part of the famed regiment shortly after all hell broke loose in the Pacific on December 7, 1941.

Mac fought on Corregidor until it was surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942, and for nearly two and a-half years, he and his buddies were subjected to hard labor, repeated beatings, near-fatal illnesses, torture and near starvation. He was given just enough food to keep him alive for work as a slave laborer.

This is a story of survival. It is McDoles story of what happened to him and his comrades as they shared food and cared for each other with a grim determination to survive. Youll find a cross section of American youth in this story, young men from across the United States who were the children of the Great Depression and were toughened by it. Then came the slaughter and the mad scramble to stay alive. This book takes you through all of it: the fighting on Corregidor, Glenn McDoles capture and imprisonment by the Japanese, the brutal beatings and executions, surviving in conditions no Iowa farmer would impose on his cattle or hogs, and that terrible day when 139 young Americans were slaughtered.

Lady Luck must have been looking over the shoulders of the eleven young men who survived the slaughter as they made their way to freedom by swimming the bay and then walking to safety through the jungle of Palawan. There is nothing pretty about this storyno rose gardens or love letters from homeas you follow a young, scarred Glenn McDole, who found himself to be the last man out of Puerto Princesa, Palawan Prison Camp 10A.

This terrible event occurred over 60 years ago, and we have done our best to keep all the events in this book as accurate as possible. Although memories dim over time, both Glenn and I have gone over the timeline of events in this book many times, and were both satisfied with the story you are about to read.

It should be noted that a little over a month after the Palawan Massacre, 123 hand-picked members of the U.S. Army 6th Rangers Battalion slipped through enemy lines on the island of Luzon, killed all the Japanese guards, and rescued over 500 sick and dying prisoners at the Cabana-tuan prison camp. This successful life-saving mission was told in the best seller Ghost Soldiers