by Bill Lascher
“If this really flares up properly it will be real copy and I’ll have a swell chance to do some good,” he wrote. “That’s my hope.”
There was one problem. Dick Wilson, the syndicate’s Manila bureau chief, had already asked another United Press reporter named Pierre Martinpantz to correspond from Hanoi. This led to an awkward and uncomfortable working arrangement for both Martinpantz and Mel. Martinpantz could see everything Mel sent to Bellaire, and he got defensive and angry after Mel asked Bellaire how they were supposed to work together. Martinpantz worried that Mel was hired because he was getting pushed out, and he responded by obstructing Mel’s work.
“In one way or another, he managed to block about every move I made, making it impossible for me to even get an interview unless on the q.t.,” Mel wrote.
Bellaire had thought it wouldn’t be a problem to have both correspondents in Hanoi. The two could complement one another’s work, and if Mel went on a reporting expedition, the United Press would still have someone in Hanoi. The United Press would also pay Martinpantz for contributing to Mel’s stories. It took a few weeks, but the two reporters were able to smooth things out. In any case, Mel now finally had his in with a news syndicate. It was an uncertain, low-paying gig, but it was work in a place where there would be plenty of news. Moreover, Bellaire assured Mel that if major developments occurred in Indochina, he expected to be able to offer Mel a more attractive assignment.
Just as he had seemed to lighten when he finally left Shanghai for Chungking, Mel seemed similarly cheerful in the letters he wrote to his mother and Shirlee about this latest offer. Both of them noted his fresh energy. In one letter he sent to Shirlee, Mel proudly added a new title to his signature: “foreign correspondent, ahem.”
Mel was excited about the new job, but it was chaotic. Twice a day he, the AP’s Yates MacDaniel, and Archibald Trojan Steele, whom Mel had met in Shanghai, visited an English-speaking press liaison in Admiral Decoux’s office. Taking pity on the American reporters, the liaison would verify or deny whatever rumors the reporters brought to him, then summon whichever official could comment on the news item they were working on.
“Sometimes that takes a lot of argument,” Mel wrote to Bellaire. “At times we get categorical denials of things we may have seen ourselves.”
It would then take hours for officials to censor and translate the reporters’ write-ups, only to have another censor at the wire office chop them up again.
“Then maybe they go off,” Mel wrote.
Mel claimed that he had good enough sources for plenty of good, ongoing beats, if not for the censors. He knew of some stories that were interesting but likely to stir up too much trouble to pursue. Unless he thought that they were absolutely vital, or that he would be scooped, Mel tried to save those until they would be easier to complete.
Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Hanoi’s cable office closed at 10:00 P.M., with no exceptions, and that every message sent by the press had to be translated into French. Even this wasn’t the end of the government’s intervention. In Hanoi, Mel couldn’t see the American newspapers where his stories appeared (Shirlee and Elza were dutifully saving them for him), but he could hear them. A broadcast station in Manila would air announcers reading United Press copy. Mel could pick up its broadcasts in Hanoi, and he was not happy with how he was being edited.
“From the Manila broadcasts it often sounds like someone else is filing,” Mel wrote Bellaire. He said that the misinformation resulting from poorly edited stories of his had put him on the spot more than once.
“The government here has listening posts, and I’ve been blamed on behalf of UP [United Press] for some pretty bad rumors.”
At 5:45 one morning in late September, an air raid siren rang in Hanoi. Mel leapt from his bed and instinctively grabbed his camera. Preparing to head to a dugout as he’d done in Chungking, he ran instead straight into a wall.
“Then I opened my eyes and found out I wasn’t at the press hostel and the door was behind not in front,” Mel wrote.
There hadn’t been a raid, but Hanoi seemed to be girding for war. On September 27, Japan began landing thousands of troops in Haiphong, the port city near Hanoi. Only five days earlier, Vichy had finally relented to the Japanese demands and Admiral Decoux had hammered out an agreement with the Japanese, but word didn’t reach all of Japan’s forces before they’d engaged in a brief series of skirmishes around Dong Dang in northeastern Indochina. The agreement was signed the same day Japan entered the Tripartite Pact, which established the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy. The timing was not a coincidence.
Mel watched as Japan flexed its muscles in Southeast Asia. The crisis with French Indochina had emboldened the swaggering Asian empire, which seemed to enjoy pushing around a European power. Aside from cutting off supply lines to China and securing a better base from which to attack its enemy, Japan was now in striking distance of Burma, Malaya, and Hong Kong, all of which were British colonies. It was a busy period for Mel and his work, but it was paying off.
“Getting a few years of experience crammed down my throat in a few days,” Mel wrote. Other correspondents told Mel that Indochina was the hardest place they’d ever worked. They had to cover the entire country, not just Hanoi. Everything was different from Chungking.
Where Chungking reporters’ lives revolved around the crumbling Press Hostel, in Hanoi they converged at the Metropole, a once-opulent, Parisian-style structure on a leafy Hanoi avenue. Mel worked from room 229. Though he spoke enough French to get by and write copies of his news briefs for Vichy censors to review, he hired a translator/fixer, whose services took a big chunk out of his daily food and drink budget. With access to French officials not easily forthcoming, much of Mel’s reporting, as was true for other journalists in Hanoi, happened at the Metropole’s bar, where he gathered dope on the off-duty French colonialists, Japanese officers, American diplomats, and British businessmen who seemed to buzz about at all hours.
“Getting news means sitting in the lobby at least six hours a day buying people drink after drink, talking, hinting, smiling, etc.,” Mel wrote. “I have again learned as in other places the value of friends.”
Though Mel was enjoying the work, he began to feel like he’d been in Indochina for years. Despite Indochina’s growing significance, Mel discovered that it wasn’t easy to work with the United Press. The newswire’s instructions for him weren’t always clear. Matters got so bad that he wired Bellaire that he would leave for Hong Kong if the United Press didn’t send a clear assignment or make arrangements for him to stay in Hanoi.
Meanwhile, covering Hanoi involved delicately negotiating Indochina’s rapidly shifting politics. Mel had to work with French officials and Japanese officers, but he also knew that each stakeholder he contacted had agendas they had to protect. At one point in the beginning of October, the French invited reporters to follow Admiral Decoux on a tour through Saigon, Cambodia, and possibly the Thai border, but at other times colonial officials capriciously shut off access to French sources when they didn’t like a reporter’s coverage. Then, a week into October, Vichy used forced retirements to replace all its generals in Indochina, including Maurice Martin, who’d resisted Japanese pressure in September. The move signaled Tokyo’s increasing influence in the colony.
Back in California, Shirlee was eager for Mel to come home, though she recognized what an opportunity his assignment in Hanoi was. In a letter she wrote to Elza, she noted that Mel expected the assignment in Indochina to last six weeks or so, though he had told her that he couldn’t be certain how long it would last. The thought of Mel staying in Asia longer was bittersweet. She didn’t want him to be away longer, but with it looking like the United States was getting ready to enter World War II, draft-eligible men like Mel weren’t being allowed to leave the country. She didn’t want to encourage him to stay away, but she also wanted him to be able to get as much as he could from being out of the country now that he was finally making progress
as a reporter. She even sent a telegram at the end of October urging Mel to “stick it out, dear.”
Mel continued to write that he wanted to go home. He loved the work he was doing in Indochina, but he hated how uncertain his future was with the United Press.
“Though the pay and all is okay I don’t like this week to week business any more and I want to make some definite plans,” he wrote.
Still, it’s clear that he wasn’t in so terrible a hurry as he claimed. He had waffled on Shirlee in Chungking. At one point he talked about bringing her there, but at other times he told his mother that he couldn’t even tell if it was a good idea for Elza to invite her down for a holiday, suggesting that he didn’t really know where their relationship stood. Often he didn’t mention Shirlee at all.
Mel started calling Shirlee his “fiancée” in wires to Bellaire and others, even though he didn’t speak as concretely about marriage in his messages to his family. In one cable, he told Bellaire that he was interested in a permanent assignment only if he could bring Shirlee to Indochina, but that seemed impossible.
With war clouds continuing to gather, most Americans had evacuated from Indochina by the beginning of October. Regular shipping schedules had been suspended and the last passenger ship scheduled to leave Hanoi would sail by the second weekend of the month. Mel worried that he would have to hurry onto one of those last ships if he wanted to make it home. It hadn’t helped that by then Shirlee had started “frantically querying” Mel on his plans.
After sending rushed telegrams of his own to Bellaire, Mel wrote a letter to him to clarify his position. He said that he was enjoying his work very much, but that he needed to know how long the United Press could sustain him.
“If there are chances of a future steady post of some sort I would like to remain of course,” Mel wrote. He stressed again that he had been on his way home, “not only to get a wife,” but to get domestic newspaper experience, most likely at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Over the next month, it became increasingly difficult for Mel to do his work. As Japan’s occupation of Indochina continued, Vichy began clamping down on Mel. French officials weren’t happy with the interviews he’d done with Japanese representatives now stationed in the colony, and they began using censors to stop his inquiries by slowing them down immensely.
“I have been told by numerous friendly officials that there is really nothing personal about the new restrictions and they all advise that I leave,” Mel wrote to Bellaire at the beginning of November. “There are all sorts of complications. Police constantly looking over my room, a little man on a bicycle who follows me, telephone tapping—all of this of course applies to every foreigner in Hanoi.”
The situation became so bad that in mid-November Mel complained to Charles Reed, the American consul in Hanoi, that the censorship was beginning to look like discrimination by French officials in favor of Japan’s state-run Domei news agency. Shortly before Mel’s complaint, Reed had asked Hanoi’s governor-general to protect American property after Japanese soldiers occupied an American warehouse in Haiphong. The warehouse—which stored hundreds of barrels of oil—had been flying the U.S. flag when the Japanese troops stationed themselves there, completely disregarding signs reading THIS IS AMERICAN PROPERTY in English, French, and Vietnamese. Mel had tried to report on this, but French officials stopped his cable about Reed’s complaint for a full day.
Japan believed that the North American syndicate was only a cover operation disguising a Chinese firm that was using the warehouse to import war matériel. Eventually, Japanese soldiers took down the American flag and blocked a ship from unloading supplies in Haiphong. This led Reed to order Robert Rinden, his vice consul, to investigate.
On November 21, Rinden went to Haiphong. Reed told Rinden to let Mel go along with him, as Mel wanted to shoot pictures of American property blocked by Japanese troops. That day a driver brought them to the warehouse, which was outside of Haiphong alongside the main highway, near the port.
When Mel and Rinden arrived, numerous Japanese soldiers were gathered outside of the warehouse. A U.S. flag still flew above the facility. Mel wanted to take a picture before it got dark, but Rinden wondered if they should come back another time with permission from the Japanese. Since French officials had issued Mel a photography permit, he told Rinden that he didn’t think they’d get in trouble.
Turning off the highway, Rinden instructed the driver to pass the warehouse along a side road while staying a few hundred yards away from it. After passing it once, Mel asked the driver to stop, snapped three quick pictures of the warehouse, the U.S. flag, and the Japanese soldiers’ adjacent tent, then told the driver to return to Haiphong.
Back on the highway, Rinden looked back and saw a large military truck filled with Japanese soldiers speeding up toward their car. He told Mel that he thought they were being followed. Mel didn’t believe him. But when they reached the city, a group of Japanese soldiers blocked the way in front of them while the truck pulled up behind. Two soldiers got out, rushed over, opened the car’s doors, and tried to force Mel and Rinden to get out.
Through a soldier who could speak English, an officer ignored Rinden’s consular ID, insisted that they had been spying, and demanded that Mel turn over his camera and destroy his film. Mel refused. The officer told Mel and Rinden to get back in their car, then ordered two of his soldiers to climb onto its running board while they drove slowly behind the truck to the city center. As the car passed the Hotel Europe, Rinden told the driver to stop, speaking French and hoping the soldiers wouldn’t understand.
When the driver stopped, Mel and Rinden both jumped from the car and tried to walk to the hotel. Before they could, the soldiers surrounded them with their guns drawn. Rinden told someone to get the local French police, who tried to get the Japanese soldiers to let Mel and Rinden at least go to the hotel. The troops again blocked their way.
“The French police were unable to cope with this,” Mel wrote to Consul Reed.
The Americans’ pursuers wanted to take them to their headquarters, but Rinden refused. As a compromise, the French brought them to their own police headquarters, where a “Commander Fradin” admitted that he was more or less helpless. Another writer later recounted Mel’s recollection of the conversation he had with Fradin:
“Who is the sovereign power in this country,” Jacoby asked him, “you or the Japanese?”
“We are, of course.”
“Well, if you are the masters, how does it happen that we can be arrested on French territory by the Japanese?”
The officer smiled sadly and answered, “When a man has lice in his hair, who is the master?”
Fradin tried to get Mel and Rinden to sign a statement that the Japanese actions had been justified, but Mel refused. Then Fradin asked for Mel’s camera. Mel surrendered it after asking Fradin to agree not to hand it over to the Japanese.
Mel and Rinden returned to Hanoi that night, with a French escort for their safety. There Reed lodged an official complaint with both French and Japanese officials in Indochina. Four days later, Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, formally protested the incident to Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka, calling it an “especially flagrant” violation that represented the latest in a “deplorably large number of incidents involving American nationals and the Japanese military in China.”
After Mel’s arrest—which Mel downplayed as a “foolish camera incident” in a letter to his family the next day—Japan would demand that the French expel him from Indochina. But first Vichy gave Mel a personal minder, a former Standard Oil employee named Daniel Armand de Lisle, who accompanied Mel everywhere he went for the remainder of his time in Indochina and worked as his “personal censor.”
On Mel’s first night back from Haiphong, he and de Lisle went to Hanoi’s airport to meet Alice-Leone Moats, a Collier’s magazine scribe who was flying up from Saigon. She was at the beginning of an around-the-world reporting trip that would also bring her
to Chungking, Russia, and Africa. For the next two weeks, she, Mel, and de Lisle would travel all over Indochina together. But when Moats arrived, she was surprised to see Mel at the airfield. She had heard about his arrest right before she left Saigon and didn’t know he’d already been released.
“By that time, however, the Jacoby affair had become an international incident and the French made out an order of expulsion,” Moats later wrote in her book Blind Date with Mars. “Then, after thinking it over, they changed their minds. He was leaving soon anyway, and it seemed wiser to allow him to remain until his successor arrived.”
Mel and de Lisle brought Moats from Hanoi’s airfield to the Metropole. Despite its grand French Colonial architecture and the leafy, bucolic neighborhood where it was located, to the ever-judgmental Moats the hotel was a “dismal, grimy place with lumpy beds and limp curtains that looked so dirty I preferred not to touch them.” Clearly, she was in for a surprise when she later arrived in Chungking and saw that city and its accommodation options. (Mel, coming from the other direction, found the Metropole immeasurably luxurious after eight months living in the Press Hostel.)
However, Mel’s arrest amplified what Mel later called French Indochina’s “stiffling [sic] atmosphere.” For one thing, he was being followed. Shortly after the arrest, French police told Mel that agents loyal to Wang Ching-wei, the puppet leader in Nanking, were chasing him. Wang’s henchmen had beaten and tortured numerous reporters in Shanghai, including Mel’s friends Randall Gould and Hallett Abend.
Mel acquired a .45-caliber pistol to protect himself, though the precaution made him uncomfortable. His new status as a target also earned him a bodyguard, not to mention a “snoop” who followed him everywhere he went.
“The latter though is quite a distinction because even the diplomats have them now in Hanoi,” Mel wrote, adding that it was remarkable “how low my opinion is of the French now.”
