by Bill Lascher
“Very charming lady, but I would like to write what I could—instead of what I did,” Mel wrote.
Even amid Chungking’s charms, Mel developed complaints. For one thing, despite his profile of Madame Chiang, another of an influential advisor of Chiang’s named W. H. Donald, and Mel’s reporting on the new Dalai Lama’s selection for the San Francisco Chronicle, a publication for which he’d long wanted to write, Mel had few opportunities to do his own reporting.
“Haven’t done a doggone thing in writing articles,” he complained. “Sick of turning out Sunday magazine trash and no time for much better stuff at the moment.”
As early as February, Mel had realized that by nature he was “too critical to remain a propagandist” and that some of Holly’s crew felt he was “too objective.” Earl Leaf, Mel’s China News Service contact in New York, also realized that Mel might actually contribute more as an independent reporter, so Leaf worked to connect Mel with outside news wires. Meanwhile, Teddy White was planning to take a trip and offered Mel fill-in work with Time and Life while he was away; in the end, however, the magazines didn’t use any of Mel’s material.
It may have seemed to Mel and other reporters that the world revolved around Chungking, but American newspapers still lacked sufficient Asian coverage. Throughout his stay in Chungking, Mel had been corresponding with the Institute for Pacific Relations, whose influence had helped him find a job. John Oakie, the San Francisco Bay Region Division’s secretary, told Mel that he was “delighted” that Mel was in a position to watch the events transpiring in Asia. Mel sent Oakie notes about political events in China, and Oakie was eager for more details now that the European war dominated headlines.
“The atmosphere between here and the Far East has been pretty murky since the outbreak of a really first class show in Europe,” Oakie wrote. “There is almost no news coming through from China and the magazine output here is simply hash and rehash of old stuff, with a certain amount of addition or subtraction for wishful thinking and pessimism.”
Mel wanted to help Oakie. He agreed that the papers should carry more material about Asia. It was his job to care about that. But he still paid attention to events in Europe. Indeed, Mel had long thought that what happened in Europe had tremendous effects on Asia, and vice versa. He was even thinking about leaving China for Europe, possibly as a volunteer for the Canadian or Free French air force, or as a Red Cross ambulance driver, which a group of his friends from Shanghai were preparing to do. Mel also thought about talking to the military attaché at the American embassy in Chungking, who had previously said that he could help Mel land a plum assignment in the Army Air Corps if the United States entered the war.
“I realize that would worry you both, but in the meantime I fear you worry here, too,” Mel wrote to his mother and stepfather.
So when France fell on June 22, 1940, Mel took note. Three days later, he was at a government office during an air raid. The office’s dugout happened to be just below the French embassy, and many members of the embassy’s staff were taking shelter inside. Mel knew some of them. Everybody was depressed.
“They don’t know which government they represent even,” he wrote.
As Mel explained in a letter that day, he also had an eye on his future. France’s surrender reminded him how much the news from Europe was dominating space in American publications, leaving few interested in buying his freelance stories about China. A more permanent job started to sound appealing.
There were still many reasons to stay. The United Press kept insisting that a job in Shanghai would open up by fall, and Hollington Tong’s enticement of a gold salary for Mel to commit to a full-time position remained on the table. Meanwhile, Teddy White assured Mel that Time would have an opening come September and that Mel would get first dibs at the position. Chungking wasn’t as easy a place to leave as he had expected, anyhow. Mel had come to love its flaws.
“Learning to bum cigarettes from visitors, enduring a cold water bath, eating only Chinese food, getting letters home by clipper, settling the world’s problems over rice wine, and watching the Chinese in their tremendous efforts is all part of Chungking’s fun,” Mel wrote in “Unheavenly City.” “You get to like it.”
Mel had arrived in Chungking idealistic and eager, but it didn’t take long for the city’s inefficiencies and discomforts to get under his skin. Only now, as the summer progressed, did he begin to realize that in fact much of what was “wrong” with Chungking was, in a way, what was right about it.
“You damn a government bureau for incompetence and laugh at the city’s bus system,” Mel wrote. “Instead of marveling at the fact that the buses still run, you write home in your letters ridiculing the wheezing old charcoal burning monsters . . . but all the time you have forgotten that the Chinese themselves are laughing about the buses too and a thousand other things that you don’t see.”
Chungking was hot. It was loud. It was squalid. It was crowded. It was deadly.
It was home. Chungking was home.
Chapter 4
THE HAIPHONG INCIDENT
As the summer of 1940 stretched toward fall, the Chungking press corps paid ever closer attention to the developments in Indochina, the French colony south of China that consisted of present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
After the Nazi takeover of France, Marshal Philippe Pétain assumed control of a newly formed puppet government located in the spa town of Vichy. Initially, Pétain took a hands-off approach in French Indochina, and so regional forces and colonial officials there were unclear how, or whether, to become involved with the conflict in nearby China. Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis worried Mel. German influence in France might shift French Indochina’s relationship with Japan and China, and Japan’s entrance into the Axis could also endanger Great Britain’s colonies in Hong Kong, Malaya (Malaysia), and Singapore.
“I hope America realizes what a German win would do in the Far East,” Mel wrote.
In January 1940—five months before France fell—Japan began a series of attacks on the Kunming-Haiphong railway. This railway connected Haiphong, a crucial port near Hanoi in what is now North Vietnam, with Kunming, a major logistical center in southwestern China. Using the railway, European and American suppliers were able to transport fuel, ammunition, and other supplies through Haiphong to Kunming. With its war effort slowed by the grinding resistance of a China that made up for its lack of modern weapons with sheer numbers, Japan changed tactics that summer and accelerated its attempts to cut off this and other supply lines.
Even after the Vichy government was installed, France was not at war with either China or Japan. The colony had long profited from shipments of arms and other equipment to China. At first it worked to keep the Haiphong-Kunming railway open. But as ties among Japan, Italy, and Germany—which ultimately held Vichy’s puppet strings—tightened, Indochina began absorbing further Japanese pressure.
With all that was happening in Indochina, and aware that the French colony’s fate could affect the balance of power in Asia, Mel looked into reporting there. It seemed to him that reporting on the intersections between France’s fall and Japan’s rise might be a better use of his talents and passions than waking up at 4:00 A.M. to write news summaries only to have engineers bungle the broadcasts.
“As you can imagine with trouble about to brew in either Indochina or around Hong Kong, I am anxious to get out of here and see what’s happening in the outside world,” Mel wrote to his mother.
That July, Mel’s decision was made easier when political jockeying at XGOY became so rampant that Mel blew up at the entire station staff. The station’s engineers were acting like prima donnas and refusing to cooperate with the program staff, who worked closely with Mel. The constant friction made it impossible for Mel to get any work done. So he resigned, effective at the end of the month.
“Damn these politics,” Mel wrote, not going into detail about the workplace political intrigues he cursed. “I really fumed and st
ormed around here, and with the heat and all it wasn’t very cool. Delivered several to-the-point lectures to some of these officials, hypocritical, inefficient little mugs for which I was thoroughly congratulated by my superiors.”
Though Holly Tong felt powerless to do anything, because so many staffers at the station had family members who had tremendous influence in the Kuomintang’s power circles, he was reluctant to let Mel leave. But Mel’s mind was made up, and Tong understood why. Knowing that he couldn’t compel Mel to stay, he finally accepted his resignation and wrote an encouraging letter praising him for his energy and work ethic.
“I feel that your initiative will take you far in whatever field of activities you may be engaged,” Tong wrote. “Your willingness to work in all kinds of adverse circumstances is an asset for success. I shall follow your career with keen interest.”
Just as Mel was resigning from Tong’s employ, his friend Teddy White was preparing to leave for a reporting trip to Indochina and Singapore. Mel decided to go with him; then, if further news didn’t break, he would head home (but he cautioned his mother in a letter that he would come back to Chungking if breaking news, like a cease-fire with Japan, occurred). Another reason he could be delayed in returning home might be an inability to buy a ticket; the United States had frozen Japanese and Chinese assets that summer, and Mel didn’t know if he’d be able to withdraw money from his bank accounts while he traveled.
Mel expected that the connections he’d built in Shanghai would pay off with an assignment from the United Press. If that happened, then he could get a press pass to travel farther through Indochina than he could without one. He also imagined that he could keep writing features for the San Francisco Chronicle and McClure’s. Moreover, Teddy had helped Mel get in touch with Life magazine. Mel was bringing his camera, and he hoped to market his pictures to the photo-heavy weekly.
Early on the morning of August 10, Mel and Teddy took off on a DC-3 bound for Kunming, in Yunnan Province. A temperate town about four hundred miles southwest of Chungking, Kunming was also a logistical hub near China’s borders with Indochina and Burma (Myanmar). Because roads connecting Kunming to these French and British colonies had not yet been blocked by Japan, it didn’t have the same shortages as Chungking, though prices were still very high. Faced with the sudden abundance, however, Mel didn’t care.
“You should have seen me walk down the streets and being amazed at being able to buy chocolate, canned milk, cigarettes, brandy—it seems to me everything,” Mel wrote. “Guess there are things I have forgotten altogether.”
The food was plentiful in Kunming, and the air was fresh, but Mel still couldn’t believe that the long trip he’d started would eventually bring him back to the United States, though he didn’t yet know quite when. Mel was thinking back on Chungking.
“Left Chungking on Sunday and miss it already,” he wrote.
Mel spent the first part of his trip interviewing business, political, and military leaders in Kunming, writing up long summaries about their backgrounds and their assessments of where the war was headed. He’d done similar interviews with many key Kuomintang leaders just before leaving Chungking. Between the pages of a brown leather notebook, Mel penciled page after page of notes on topics ranging from the dynamics of Wang Ching-wei’s puppet government in occupied China to the economic breakdowns of various provinces, to assessments of the Communists, to pages-long backgrounds of Kuomintang military leaders.
But shortly after Mel and Teddy reached Kunming, Mel had to stop working altogether. He had contracted a case of malaria and ended up bedridden for a week. Teddy had a schedule to keep for Time, so he went ahead to Indochina without Mel.
On August 26, Mel had finally recovered enough to travel, and he began a three-day train trip to Hanoi on the rail line that Japan was trying to shut down. In fact, on his way back from Hanoi on the same railway, Mel would see trainloads upon trainloads of petroleum barrels and other supplies being shipped into China.
Hanoi, French Indochina (Vietnam), bustles in late summer, 1940. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby.
Hanoi wobbled between peace and war. Throughout the city, laborers busily dug air raid shelters even as the city’s inhabitants attempted to maintain the routines of everyday life. The city’s leafy boulevards were lined with flower vendors. Streetcars chimed around corners as rickshaws raced by, pulling French colonialists in sun hats. Europeans still ate lazy lunches by Hoan Kiem Lake, but nearby businesses piled sandbags against their windows.
“It was quite exciting landing here and seeing a modern city with hundreds of cars, and street trams, and being able to buy at a fairly reasonable price anything I needed,” Mel wrote to his parents at the end of August.
While Mel was convalescing in Kunming, Life had cabled Teddy asking him to see if Mel could do a photo story on the defense of Indochina. Now that he was in Hanoi, Mel wanted to interview General Maurice Martin, who had just taken over France’s negotiations with the Japanese over Japan’s incursions into Indochina. But the press was closely watched in Hanoi, and every telegram Mel sent or received was first examined by censors. If he wanted to do that story, he’d have to get the colonial officials’ permission.
While he waited for permission to interview Martin and report in Indochina, Mel—who had finally caught up with Teddy—still had some recuperating to do from his bout of malaria. Reveling in the comfort of an electric fan, he wrote letters from the Hotel Metropole explaining that he would probably head home if he didn’t get permission to do the interview.
Despite a doctor’s suggestion that he not rush back into work, very soon after Mel reached Hanoi he started reporting again. Shortly after he arrived, at the beginning of September, Japan threatened to invade Indochina after a month of negotiating with Vichy officials. Japanese troops entered Indochina on the fifth, and Martin suspended negotiations a day later.
As the talks dragged on, Japan made more moves toward the colony while other countries—particularly the United States—weighed the possibility of intervening. Robert Bellaire, a United Press manager in Shanghai, had learned that Mel was in Hanoi, so he asked him to start sending two-hundred-word summaries of the “hottest” news about the unraveling situation. Because of the expense of sending large amounts of material by wire, Mel would further break these brief summaries down into smaller messages.
While Mel worked on securing interviews, he prepared extensive background notes on Indochina, its neighbors, their political dynamics, the local economic climate, the history of the region, and the attitudes of the colonized Lao, Khmer, Annamite, and Tonkinese populations toward colonial powers. He envisioned these notes as useful material if he could get them out of Indochina—not a trivial matter given how heavily censored the colony was and how few ships were traveling from there.
In one set of questions Mel prepared for an interview, he focused on local history, culture, politics, and economics. Among the questions he wanted to explore was why Indochina didn’t have a higher standard of living given its abundant resources. Posing the issue this way was mostly rhetorical; he was trying to assess how effectively France was managing the local economy and to what extent it was exploiting local populations. His questions drove to the core of power dynamics in Indochina as he attempted to zero in on who controlled important industries like oil and rubber, how influential local Communist groups were, and even why local rice farmers’ crops seemed to be failing. He also asked questions about what the government was doing to move local populations away from subsistence farming.
“The French have given no thought at all to making this country independent and industrial,” Mel wrote at the conclusion of one piece.
Armed with these questions, Mel arranged interviews with high-ranking officials aside from Martin. Only four days after he arrived, he interviewed Admiral Jean Decoux, the Vichy-appointed governor-general of Indochina. The next day he met with the Japanese consul in Hanoi, and a few days later with another Japanese official.
&n
bsp; “Anyhow, here I am really running around fast, liking the job immensely, doing my best, and hoping for [an] in with UP [the United Press],” Mel wrote in a letter to his parents.
Mel even pulled a hotel bellboy aside to get his impression of the political climate. The bellboy told Mel that Japanese officers and diplomats gave large tips, tried to play locals off against the French, and interviewed them about local Annamite questions. This tactic was successful. Many of the local Annamites were so incensed by decades of French abuse that they welcomed Japan, which had just announced its vision of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—which ostensibly aimed to unite Asia against European colonialism but would actually replace foreign empires with a system run by and subservient to Japan.
On September 11, Mel began his twenty-fourth birthday with Teddy and another reporter in meetings with sources at the Chinese consulate. They then returned to the Metropole to celebrate Mel’s birthday. Teddy, who was leaving for Singapore the next day, gave Mel a cigarette case and other “trinkets” as gifts. But there was an even better surprise waiting for Mel: a wire from the United Press asking him to formally sign on as a special correspondent based in Hanoi. They’d liked his earlier reporting and the initiative he’d taken to do it without a commitment from them. The United Press was eager for more and would pay Mel $25 per week, plus expenses. In one letter, Mel said he had “worked like the very devil” to get the job, but then just a few lines later he turned more modest.
“Just a lot of luck and I’ll be fired soon,” he wrote to Elza and Manfred. He was worried that his French wasn’t up to par and that he’d have to compete with high-ranking reporters from other newswires, but he liked the job, and he said he was working as hard as he could to earn the United Press’s favor. Mel also told his family that he thought what he was witnessing was both history and a situation that would “determine the future” of Asia.
