TDIH: Damon Gause's "Great Escape"

He made a 3,200-mile trip across ocean waters in a 20-foot outrigger skiff, finally landing in Australia.

On this day in 1915, a future World War II pilot is born. Damon “Rocky” Gause is perhaps best known for his “great escape” from the Japanese in the Philippines.

Unbelievably, he made a 3,200-mile trip across ocean waters in a 20-foot outrigger skiff, finally landing in Australia.

Gause was serving with the 27th Bombardment Group when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, then the Philippines, in December 1941. After those attacks, Gause sent a radiogram to his new wife in the States: “Am alive and giving them hell—Rocky.”

It was the beginning of a very long adventure.

You may know that things went badly for Americans in the Philippines during the spring of 1942. The Japanese drove Americans back to the Bataan peninsula, and Americans were ultimately forced to surrender on April 9.

On that day, Gause had been away getting supplies. He ended up on the run, evading the Japanese for two days before being captured.

He was pushed into a clearing with other captured American soldiers, but he had no intention of staying. Once the Japanese got organized, he knew there would be no escape. For now, he could see that the sentries were being careless, and he eyed one in particular.

“As he drew abreast,” Gause later wrote, “I glimpsed a sheathed knife . . . . I leaped on his back, pressing my left forearm against his throat with all my strength and grabbing for the knife with my right. . . . At last the knife came free, and I slid it into his back.”

Then he ran.

“I suddenly had super human strength,” Gause described, “and leaped over boulders and fallen trees with ease. . . . I was a hundred yards out in the water when my pursuers appeared on the sand, and I was already churning the water in the direction of Corregidor, three miles away.”

Let’s just say that he was a bit of a train wreck by the time he made it to Corregidor. Remember: He’d been on the run for 2 days before being captured, without adequate food or water. Now he stumbled ashore, completely spent.

Fortunately, American nurses were still on the island. He was soon on his feet again, commanding a machine-gun battery. He’d befriended one of its Filipino officers, Lt. Alberto Arranzaso.

The fight on Corregidor was just as hopeless as the one on Bataan. When Americans on that island surrendered on May 6, Gause knew he could not stay. The Japanese would kill him for what he’d done to the Japanese guard. He left with Arranzaso in a small boat, intending to cross over to the mainland.

The journey became difficult when nighttime crosscurrents pushed them in the wrong direction. Making matters worse, they were spotted by Japanese fighters after dawn. The boat took a hit, sending the boys into the water.

Arranzaso was injured, and he did not know how to swim.

Gause hoisted Arranzaso across two bamboo poles, with the help of a Filipino scout who’d joined them. He used his socks to bind Arranzaso’s wounds. Towing Arranzaso, he and the scout swam for shore.

A strong current just off the beach proved insurmountable.

“[W]e were so weak that every movement of our arms was a struggle,” Gause later wrote, “and we could not pierce the swirling belt of water . . . . hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and exposure made me a little delirious, and for the first time I lost hope.”

The scout left, trying to find a boat to rescue Arranzaso, but he was gone too long. Arranzaso saw the writing on the wall. “Sir, my game is up!” he said. He let go of the poles, falling into the water. “Arranzaso had sacrificed his life to save mine,” Gause concluded.

Without the extra burden, Gause successfully swam to shore, falling into an exhausted sleep on the sand.

But how did he make it to Australia? Naturally, the story continues tomorrow.

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