Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Anxious that if war broke out, travel between China and the Philippines would be cut off—it was already a complicated journey involving perilous flights—Mel nudged Annalee to leave Chungking as soon as she could. Still, he continued to understand her commitment to her work, and both of them were willing to wait.

  “Naturally I wanted Ann to leave right away with me,” Mel admitted once he was in Hong Kong on his way to Manila. “But we both felt that she had a job to do, although she is under obligation to no one.”

  Holly Tong also told Mel how pleased he was that Annalee was staying to work in Chungking. Tong wrote Mel repeatedly about how much everyone in his office liked Annalee and her work. Aside from Madame Chiang, her sister Ay-ling—H. H. Kung’s wife—had also taken a strong liking to Annalee.

  “A good thing you are taking her away from Chungking right away because Madame Kung has a strong liking for her and her efficiency plus,” Tong told Mel, somewhat confirming Mel’s earlier joke that Annalee had better come to Manila before “they really tie her down.”

  When Mel wrote home to tell his parents about his engagement, he took care to stress the importance of Annalee’s sense of professional independence. Yet he knew his proposal must have seemed sudden given how rapidly his relationship with Shirlee Austerland had crumbled less than a year earlier, and given the role his work played in ending that relationship.

  Elza didn’t seem too concerned. She later told Time’s John Hersey that she “couldn’t conceive of a more suited person” for Mel. The couple had much in common, Elza explained, in that “both are of tremendous depths of love for humanity and interest in China and, as you know, they are together writing.”

  Though Mel was disappointed that Annalee wasn’t coming right along with him to Manila, he appreciated the break from Chungking life and felt more energetic than he had in a long time. Aside from indulging in Hong Kong life with Holly Tong and “millions” of other friends he had there, Mel worked hard, wrapping up multipage briefings for Time to send out on the Clipper, writing letters, and putting together a ten-minute broadcast for NBC about the fighting outside of Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, where, after a Japanese drive, Chinese forces came back and encircled the attacking Japanese troops, achieving their first major victory of the war.

  While Mel enjoyed the comfortable living in Hong Kong as a break from Chungking, when he finally reached Manila he found the modernity and creature comforts of that city unsettling. With Hong Kong, even though the British weren’t yet fighting the Japanese, everyone seemed to be getting ready for war. Manila, on the other hand, appeared peaceful, and life was surrealistically leisurely. To be sure, it was an uneasy quiet, as if Manila was also waiting for war, but the city’s many luxuries and its nervous calm made for an unfamiliar reality for Mel to negotiate after his second straight summer in Chungking.

  “Everything is completely strange and foreign to me here, and you have to sit around sipping cocktails and hire cars and all that,” Mel wrote. He didn’t find himself well suited for the artifice necessary for Manila’s politics and social schmoozing.

  “The job here in Manila scares me to death,” he admitted. “Not like China where everything comes to me so easily and naturally.”

  Manila was relatively comfortable in part because the Philippines was a commonwealth and still effectively a U.S. colony. “The government of President Manuel Quezon was completely subordinate to the office of the U.S. high commissioner, Francis Sayre, and the economy of the entire archipelago carried a ‘Made in USA’ label,” CBS reporter William J. Dunn later wrote.

  Dunn described Manila as “the Pearl of the Orient.” Indeed, many American expats relished the very characteristics that Mel found stultifying. In some eyes—possibly those with colonial lenses—the city was the Paris of the Far East. Tree-lined grand avenues built during the near half-century of American occupation, airy but shaded arcades, and vast plazas invited the pedestrian ease of late imperialism. Even as tumult roiled in nearly every direction, in the fall of 1941 Manila seemed peaceful.

  But the peace was chimeric. Only six years earlier, a revolutionary movement—the Sakdalistas—had tried to overthrow U.S. rule, shortly before the United States and the newly established government of Manuel Quezon signed an agreement promising the Philippines independence by 1946. This tumult represented only the latest incident in centuries of conflict and colonization.

  As early as the fifteenth century, Muslim sultans from Malaysia and Indonesia began expanding into the Philippines, an attractive prize to outsiders. Around the same time, Chinese pirates regularly plundered the region. Then came Spain.

  Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, during his fleet’s circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan established the Philippines’ first Catholic church and began nearly 400 years of Spanish occupation, before being killed by a datu—a member of the region’s ruling class—named Lapu-Lapu. Despite Lapu-Lapu’s ensuing hero status, the Philippines had still not shaken Europe’s hand from its throat by the twentieth century. The U.S. defeat of Spain in 1898 only transferred the islands from the clutches of a descendant colonial power to an ascendant one.

  Though American propaganda cast the Philippines as a loyal partner, its population was hardly passive.

  Mel worked hard to keep his mind off how much he missed Annalee. Though his new position came with a raise and official status as a Time employee, it wrenched away all the stink and beauty and adrenaline of Chungking. The visceral experience of a capital under constant bombardment subsided, replaced by an anxious cycle of socializing and politics.

  Mel felt dizzy from all the rushing around he was doing. He likened it to times in the past when he’d rush back home to get a million things done at once before taking off again to who-knew-where. In Manila, he couldn’t use the same excuses he’d used in Chungking for not getting things done.

  “You have to get things done quickly and efficiently,” Mel wrote. “You can’t blame anything on bombings or slow Chinese or anything.”

  Mel’s new post consisted of “a very gay and artificial and very expensive life.” One night in September 1941, he spent $40 to take a group of army officers out on the town, though he won some of the money back betting on the races with his guests. At the time, Mel’s salary was $250 per month, but three-fifths of that figure paid for his small hotel room on the sixth floor of the Bay View Hotel. Though Manila wasn’t cheap, Time did cover Mel’s other expenses, plus he had the raise he received when he took the new job, and he had another pay bump to look forward to in January. Meanwhile, being in the publishing titan’s employ made it easier for Mel to develop sources among high-level officials.

  “Fortunately the name of Luce behind me helps,” Mel wrote. “In fact the doors just swing open.”

  But maintaining those sources required going on expensive outings. He also had public relations duties on behalf of the Luce empire, giving speeches and mingling at civic clubs.

  “So much contact work in this business,” he told his parents. “Meeting big shots, impressing them, and getting their confidence in 10 easy lessons that it’s getting to be a routine struggle.”

  Mel needed to nurture relationships with U.S. Army and Navy officers, Filipino military figures, and government officials. Though he may not have liked the glad-handing, Mel transitioned comfortably from officers’ clubs and diplomatic receptions to shared cigarettes with enlisted American soldiers and Filipino reservists. He also befriended shipping magnates, businessmen, and assorted other characters, such as Amleto Vespa, a “screwball” former Italian spy who invited Mel to his map-plastered Manila flat for rambling conversations about Axis strategy in Asia and the Pacific. H. J. Timperley, the China News Service rep who worked with Earl Leaf, wrote the introduction to Vespa’s 1938 book, Secret Agent of Japan, the movie of which was filmed in Chungking in 1940, when Mel first worked in the Chinese capital.

  Aside from cutting ties with his contacts in Chungking and dealing
with the politics of working in Manila, Mel also had to give up most of his broadcasting. NBC said he could continue to contribute, but the network already had a full slate of reporters in Manila. Opportunities for Mel to report on the radio were infrequent.

  But Mel appreciated the access he had in Manila, even if he felt out of his element there. He was also comforted that many of his friends were surfacing in Manila. Meanwhile, neither his cabled reports to Time nor his private communications were censored the way they had been in Chungking.

  When Mel was preparing to leave Chungking, he’d written about his promotion coming with a second raise on top of the one he’d been given at the end of August and the promise of a third raise in January. He was also getting a bigger expense account that would cover most of his living costs in Manila, and in Manila he’d be able to keep in better contact with his family because the mail went more regularly and he had access to phones.

  “And still I [sic] rather be in Chungking where things are happening,” he wrote.

  In Manila, where things weren’t happening, Mel groused that others saw him as a spectacle simply because he’d come from Chungking. Any mention of the city was met with oohs and aahs. Westerners still untouched by war were curious about the Chinese capital’s constant air raids, but almost as quickly as they asked what it was like to endure such frequent bombings, they lost interest, returned to their drinks, and resumed the usual society gossip that pervaded Manila.

  Mel didn’t lose interest in the war. In his first two and a half months in the Philippines, he collected news, constructed personality backgrounds, assembled political roundups, and analyzed war preparations. He crammed these reports into hundreds of pages of detailed cables he sent to Hulburd, who used these reports as the basis for weekly news roundups. The magazine’s editors picked the best or most interesting items, rewrote them, and ran them without bylines. Though most in Time’s huge audience in America didn’t know it at the time, Mel was their only link to what was happening in China—and their window into the buildup for war in the Pacific.

  As Mel and Annalee’s wedding day approached, the letters he wrote to his parents in California suggested that he was anxious about his upcoming nuptials. In one note, he asked his family to “advise to last detail” what a ring should cost. Possibly before they could respond, and despite Manila’s rising cost of living (though the residents of Manila acted like war wasn’t on the horizon, rapid inflation in the Philippines in the fall of 1941 reflected economic insecurities about the conflict in Asia), Mel spent $746—three months’ salary—on two rings. Even though Annalee had told him not to buy even one, he wanted to give her both an engagement ring and a wedding band.

  One of the rings was a jade and “platinum affair with just a bare outline and simple design.” The other featured a square-cut one-and-a-half-carat diamond head with small diamonds branching off its platinum mount.

  “Looks like half a milk bottle it is so big,” Mel told his parents when he bought it.

  Mel even bragged to his family that he bought the rings “Grandpa style” by haggling the jeweler down 20 percent. Even with the bargain, Mel felt a pinch. But ever the romantic, he wanted to provide Annalee with some semblance of a normal engagement.

  Getting the engagement ring to her was another challenge. In Hong Kong, Mel met with Bill Dunn, who was headed to Chungking on assignment from CBS, and entrusted him with delivery of the ring.

  “It was my only time I played Cupid,” Dunn wrote, “and I mentally saluted Jacoby. . . . Talented and well-informed, [Annalee] would prove a valuable source of information for a reporter new to the scene.”

  The plan was still for Annalee to join Mel in Manila, but Mel was growing concerned that she wouldn’t make it before war spread beyond China. The fighting there was getting worse, as was the antagonism between the United States and Japan, leaving Annalee with fewer and fewer opportunities to find safe passage from Chungking to the Philippines. Each day Mel grew more pessimistic about “Washington’s too obvious appeasement gestures” with the Japanese.

  Mel also had to obtain a marriage license, a headache in Manila. He described the ordeal as a comedic goose chase.

  “You ring up everyone in town,” Mel described. “Then you quit and ask someone who refers you to an office. You ring that office and after getting the room boy to speak takalog [sic] you get someone to speak English. Then he speaks at you to the effect that you can’t get married and why get married when it costs ten pesos for the papers when a common law wife is just as good and besides you can leave her if she is no good.”

  This story, wildly embellished, went on and on. There were closed government offices to visit, multiple forms to fill out and send to embassies, and bureaucrats to bribe. At every office someone else asked a variation of the “why get married . . . common law wife is just as good” question until Mel, having been sent back to the first office he had gone to, finally said he was getting a justice of the peace and didn’t want a big wedding.

  “And he says why didn’t you say so in the first place marriage is a great thing,” Mel wrote.

  When Mel wasn’t running around in circles trying to find a marriage license, he often took in the vista from his room at the aptly named Bay View Hotel. Over the tops of the trees lining Dewey Boulevard, Mel’s gaze fell toward the southwest and the grayish-blue waters at the mouth of Manila Bay, which stretched across the horizon. Beneath the water’s surface were miles and miles of submerged mines. U.S. destroyers and submarines carefully negotiated them, while smaller inter-island freighters ferried loads of rice and fruit between the capital and the rest of the Philippines.

  Occasionally, Mel tracked Pan-Am’s giant, silver-bellied Boeing 314 Clippers as they crossed the sky, their whalelike hulls and slender pontoons gliding into the harbor during stopovers on their transoceanic journeys. Each Clipper flight between the United States and Hong Kong promised mail, supplies, and new visitors.

  Soon, Mel hoped, one of those flights would carry the woman he planned to marry.

  As October turned into November, Mel’s attention turned to a more vexing matter: transferring the pandas that had been caught in Wenchuan to Manila. They were due to arrive on November 16, and Mel was responsible for finding a place for them to be stored and cared for.

  “I’ve been going wild again over the Panda situation,” Mel told his parents in a mid-November letter, a day before the bears were due in Manila. “I’ve had to do everything from hire station wagons, to finding places for them to stay, to getting special kinds of bamboo and sugar cane flown down from the provinces on a chartered plane. What a business. People phoning all the time wanting to see the animals, or borrow them, sell insurance, an air conditioning plant, grape juice and everything imaginable.”

  Even Annalee was roped into the chaos that seemed to surround the panda hunt. After she reached Chungking, much of her early work had involved preparing Madame Chiang’s speeches about the bears, which had been brought to the home of Bertram Rappe—the missionary Mel had stayed with after the Press Hostel was bombed—after they reached Chungking. There they were placed under the watch of armed guards. Annalee, who found the bears incredibly cute but the source of many headaches, wrote scripts about the pandas for XGOY’s broadcasts and proposed press releases about the hunt to find them.

  Meanwhile, Mel was far from the only reporter told to relocate from China to the Philippines. Since Manila was an American possession and the entire U.S. Asiatic fleet was based here, this was the country’s principal stronghold in the Pacific. Like other industries, the islands had long been the base for U.S. news organizations’ operations in Asia, and many had located their bureaus there. As the prospect of war with Japan neared, it seemed likely that the first phase of the fighting would begin in the Philippines, so newspapers and broadcast networks wanted their reporters to be in the commonwealth when that happened.

  On November 14, an Associated Press reporter named Clark Lee met a Japanese source of his i
n a bar in Shanghai, where Clark was based. The source had a tip from the Japanese colonel who was his country’s spokesman in Shanghai. Clark had recently reported that it looked like Japan was preparing internment camps in barracks outside of Shanghai. Through the source, the colonel warned Clark that if he didn’t want to be interned in these camps once a war started, he should leave in the next ten days. Clark redoubled efforts he had already begun to find either an escape to Chungking or passage on one of the last few freighters left in Shanghai. Finally, he secured the last free cabin on a Dutch ship, the SS Tjibak, and left for Manila.

  Born in Oakland, California, Clark was nine years Mel’s senior. He was, as Mel put it, a “tall, dark, husky, handsome, experienced newsman,” and he had spent the past three and a half years reporting from Shanghai. Before going to Shanghai, Clark had been in Hawaii for two years. There he met and married Lydia Liliuokalani Kawânanakoa, a Hawaiian princess. She had come with Clark to Shanghai, but she left in August 1941, in part because of an earlier warning from Japanese officers who suggested that a possible war with the United States would make it impossible for her to flee.

  Clark had also reported from Japan and in the battlefield, where he had accompanied the Japanese army and even ridden in one of their planes. However, he wasn’t a Japanese apologist, and he had often reported critically on Japan’s actions in China, thus earning himself the threat of imprisonment the colonel had made that night. Indeed, Clark’s writing was far more jingoistic than Mel’s. Mel’s work was certainly patriotic, but he wasn’t as melodramatic as Clark, who sometimes seemed to trade facts for color.

  Still, Mel was impressed by Clark. The two met shortly after Clark arrived, and Mel suggested to David Hulburd in a cable that he “watch his stories.”

  From the edge of Pan-Am’s facilities along the southern arc of Manila Bay near the Cavite shipyard, Mel watched a Boeing 314 cross the sky. It was Monday, November 24, 1941, just three days before Thanksgiving.