CHAPTER FIVE
                             --------------------
 
                       "Escape From The Japs"
  
 
 
     The week following the Sunday on which we had planned
 
to escape was one in which all of us lived in a state of constant
 
alarm. Each time a guard approached any member of our intended
 
escape party, that member was certain that the Japanese had
 
stumbled onto the equipment we had hidden in the jungle the week
 
before, and that the end had come. In the eleven months since
 
the fall of the last American stronghold in the Philippines, we
 
had come to know our Japanese captors too well to hold out any
 
hope of leniency in the event of discovery. We had not been able
 
to take our escape equipment far into the jungle--our presence would
 
 have been missed--and there was always the off chance that
 
a wandering Japanese soldier would find it.
 
     As each day passed without discovery, each of us sent
 
up a prayer of thanks. And each of us prayed that, on the coming
 
Sunday, we would not be punished by an order to work.
 
Our luck held.
 
     Perhaps one reason we were not discovered was the fact
 
that the Japanese guards at Davao Prison Camp were not the highest
 
 type of enemy soldier we had met in the months of our captivity
 
since the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. There were about 250
 
of them to guard the 2000 American military prisoners. If this
 
number of Japanese guards should seem small, it should be remem-
 
bered that more than a thousand of the prisoners were so weak
 
from disease and hunger that they probably would not have been
 
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