Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Annalee was on the plane. As it landed she spotted Mel at the water’s edge, clad in a gleaming white suit, white shirt, and yellow tie.

  “I could see him when the plane landed in the water, and it seemed like hours until they pulled it up onto the beach,” Annalee later wrote to Mel’s parents.

  Finally, the Clipper’s pilot cut the aircraft’s engines. The plane coasted the last few feet to the dock, where its passengers disembarked. Annalee barely had time to say anything to her fiancé. After they embraced, Mel ushered her to a waiting car, which drove the ten miles from Cavite to Manila, turned right off Dewey Boulevard onto Padre Faura, then stopped at the Union Church chapel a couple of blocks away. Mel strode confidently up to the church, while Annalee, wearing a white nylon dress printed with palm trees, ukuleles, pineapples, and leis in green, yellow, and red, linked her arm in his, smiling widely, a broad-brimmed yellow hat tucked under her other arm. For a couple who never expected romance, it was as dreamlike as any fairy tale.

  “It was just like I’d always hoped it would be,” Annalee wrote.

  Carl and Shelley Mydans were there, as well as Allan Michie (a Time reporter about to transfer to England, Michie was also the author of Their Finest Hour) and the Reverend Walter Brooks Foley. As soon as the couple arrived, the small procession gathered in an intimate reception room off the chapel decorated with white flowers and green drapes. Carl served as Mel’s best man; Shelley was Annalee’s matron of honor.

  Reverend Foley performed the modest ceremony. Mel had always dreaded large, formal weddings. He had looked for a justice of the peace to officiate, but most of the ones he found spoke little English and held ceremonies in nipa huts—small stilt houses with bamboo walls and thatched roofs made from local leaves.

  “The morning I came he found Reverend Foley, who was a short blond near-sighted angel, full of extravagant plans for choir chorales and processionals and borrowed bride giverawayers,” Annalee wrote.

  Annalee may not have wanted a big to-do or an ostentatious ring, but she clearly couldn’t restrain her delight at the occasion itself. Her smile did not subside throughout the ceremony. Her hands gently clasped Mel’s as they exchanged vows, and she looked intently at her husband, her eyes grinning and warm. For his part, Mel couldn’t mask the pride on his face, nor his joy.

  Within an hour of Annalee’s landing, she and Mel were married. After their wedding, they wrote letters to their families. In one, Annalee insisted to Mel’s parents that she didn’t go to China to marry Mel, but she “couldn’t think of a better reason” to have gone.

  The celebration continued at the Bay View Hotel, just a few blocks away. Gathered in the lobby were many of the couple’s friends who had also transferred to Manila from Chungking, as well as others Mel had met since arriving. Those who couldn’t be there sent their congratulations. Everyone, from Annalee’s colleagues at MGM to Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, to all the Press Hostel residents, to the entire staff of XGOY (which also aired a brief item about the marriage), sent their good wishes.

  “General MacArthur about knocked me over the other p.m. congratulating me,” Mel wrote. “Admiral [Thomas] Hart’s staff nearly shook my hand off.”

  There was a portable phonograph setting the tune with jazz standards and popular big band recordings. In between songs, the newlyweds ducked into a corner of the lobby where they took turns placing long-distance phone calls to their parents in Los Angeles and Maryland. And then they danced into the night. War was on the horizon and could arrive any day, but that evening it could have been a million miles away.

  Annalee and Mel Jacoby moments after their wedding in Manila, the Philippines, on November 24, 1941. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  For a brief moment after the wedding, Mel and Annalee were able to escape the demands of reporting and the high-stress atmosphere of war zones. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t had the traditional wedding Madame Chiang had originally wanted to throw back in Chungking. Or that all of their things—including most of Annalee’s clothes—were on a ship that would end up diverted to Singapore when the war started. The two young reporters were in love.

  “He types on the desk, and I type on the dressing table, and we both feel awfully sorry for the people next door,” Annalee told Mel’s parents.

  Slipping away for a brief honeymoon, Mel and Annalee drove up the slowly rising slope that led to the village of Tagaytay, forty miles to the southeast. Long a tourist destination, Tagaytay stretched along a ridge atop the many-fingered, horizon-spanning Lake Taal. The lake filled the crater of a massive shield volcano.

  At its heart, a dusty, brown volcanic cone had built up after long-past eruptions. Within that cone was yet another small lake. This geologic matryoshka doll, the placid lake surrounding it, and the steep, verdant canyons beneath the ridge stretched below newly built Taal Vista Lodge. Constructed by the Philippines Railway just a few years earlier, the hotel’s faux-Alpine lodge was its centerpiece. However, the Jacobys shacked up in one of a handful of small private cabins just west of the lodge. Overlooking the north ridge of the lake, the electricity shut off at night and the faucet dripped, but Mel and Annalee were in love and happy to be able to escape—if just for a weekend.

  Even though they were honeymooning, the Jacobys weren’t quite alone. Tied up next to their cabin were the two baby pandas that Madame Chiang had entrusted them to look after until John Tee-Van, the vet who would take them back to the Bronx Zoo, arrived from China.

  News of the pandas’ presence had spread quickly through Tagaytay, and they drew spectators, though not the huge crowds they’d drawn in Chungking. Even Clark Lee and the AP’s Russell Brines were swept up in the commotion. While on their way to explore war preparations in the southern reaches of Luzon, Lee and Brines stopped briefly to visit with the newlyweds and offered “unnecessary and unheeded advice” on caring for the pandas.

  China’s leaders not only sent the pandas as gifts to the United States but also made luxurious offerings to the Jacobys upon their wedding. Annalee’s and Mel’s friends and contacts in China sent a bevy of luxurious and stately gifts. These included gold and silver spoons, an “exquisite” red satin blanket from Madame Kung, elaborate vases, and piles of greetings from all the journalists at Chungking’s Press Hostel.

  Hollington Tong sent a gift of gold worth hundreds of dollars because he hadn’t been able to arrange the “Red Sedan” wedding he and Madame Chiang had hoped to throw for Mel and Annalee in the Chinese capital. Such a traditional ceremony would have involved drummers, fine clothing, and an elaborate palanquin for the spouses. Alas, war made such a celebration impossible. Mel was embarrassed by the gift anyhow, and his conscience couldn’t let him keep it.

  Despite the panda-related annoyances, the intermittent services at the cabin, and a persistent rainstorm, the Jacobys were not dismayed.

  “The running water worked only at intervals, the electricity blinked on and off all one evening, and it poured, but it was still the most wonderful honeymoon anyone ever had,” Annalee wrote.

  Chapter 9

  INFAMY

  Thousands of miles from Manila, as Mel and Annalee exchanged vows, a fleet of Japanese ships gathered in a harbor in the southern Kuril Islands. Around this time, an order from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto circulated among the ships collecting in Tankan Bay, and on November 26—two days after the wedding—the armada left the bay, bound for Hawaii.

  The next day, the U.S. War Department informed General Douglas MacArthur that negotiations with Japan were crumbling. When the general ordered the forces under his command to full alert in preparation for an invasion, Mel and Annalee were forced to return to Manila from Lake Taal.

  The SS President Coolidge was docked at Manila’s enormous Pier 7, preparing to sail to the United States. With all the signs of war, civilians from all over Asia had been clamoring for space on the Coolidge. Among Mel and Annalee’s friends headed back to the United States on the ship were CNAC’s Royal Leonard, Time’s
Allan Michie, Dennis McEvoy—a writer who had been a friend of Annalee’s before she went to Chungking, where Mel met him—and John Tee-Van, who had spent so much time coordinating with the couple about the pandas that Mel and Annalee had grown incredibly fond of him. Tee-Van carried his special cargo aboard the Coolidge. Finally, after worrying about the bears for so many months, Mel and Annalee watched as the pandas were loaded into specially constructed steel cages on the ship’s deck.

  “We saw the boat off and took a long, relieved breath to see the pandas actually leaving, after all we’ve both gone through with them,” Annalee wrote.

  In a saccharine coda to the panda saga, United China Relief arranged a naming contest for the bears after they arrived at the Bronx Zoo in 1942. It was another piece of the panda diplomacy effort, as publicity about the pandas was used to garner sympathy for United China Relief in the United States. Specifically, in a calculated effort to get donors to support the campaign’s projects related to war orphans, the pandas were presented as a gift to America’s children. Newspapers around the United States asked their readers’ children to suggest names for the pandas. The daughter of a Columbus, Indiana, newspaper editor submitted the rather uninspired winning entries: “Pan-dah” and “Pan-Dee.”

  While the Jacobys were relieved not to be responsible for the pandas any longer, they hardly had an opportunity to relax. Manila teemed with anxiety. Though the Americans didn’t know the Japanese fleet was steaming toward Hawaii, everyone paying attention knew that war was likely any day.

  MacArthur’s press aide, Lieutenant Colonel LeGrande “Pick” Diller, organized a small party for Mel, Annalee, Carl, and Shelley at the Manila Hotel on December 5. Though it was clear that Diller valued his friendship with Manila’s press corps, he also wanted to prep them for the chaos many expected any hour, let alone any day.

  “We did have such a good time, and they were such fine people,” Diller later wrote of the meal.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Diller, fellow press officer Lieutenant Colonel Sidney Huff, or other military leaders coddled the press. Still, it’s clear that MacArthur’s staff wanted to cultivate relationships with the writers and photographers of Time and Life. The right “optics” would be crucial for maintaining public support in what could be a long, grueling commitment in the Pacific, and Luce’s empire had the era’s most accessible lens. Regardless, Diller and Huff didn’t have to convince reporters why war seemed inevitable. By this point, anyone could easily trace the line that had led to the current crisis.

  After Japan expanded its influence in Indochina—as Mel had witnessed while stringing for the United Press—it set its sights on Thailand, Britain’s colonies in Southeast Asia, and the Dutch East Indies. Nervous about Japan’s growing dominance of Asia, the United States slapped a series of embargoes on the empire. By July 1941, MacArthur had been called out of retirement to command newly combined American and Filipino armed forces, the latter of which were undertrained and lacked modern weapons.

  Over the course of the first few months of 1941, the United States—then still officially neutral—and Britain had developed a “Europe First” strategy focused on defeating Germany while limiting their efforts against Japan. Rather than send new resources to strengthen the forces under MacArthur’s command, the nearly bankrupt Philippines had been left to defend itself even though it wasn’t independent and the country couldn’t afford to equip and train its own soldiers. As the historian Eric Morris described it, “That was a polite way of saying that the Philippines would be abandoned to the enemy.”

  As war neared, the Philippines’ newly reelected but largely powerless president, Manuel Quezon, and other officials complained to Washington about their vulnerabilities, but little changed. MacArthur secured thirty-three new long-range B-17 bombers, but that was far from enough; in any event, their late acquisition would soon prove moot.

  War was a near-certainty, but Thailand, not the Philippines, emitted the “surest scent of action, after which comes Burma,” Mel believed, and it was in Burma that General Claire Chennault’s group of mercenary pilots—the Flying Tigers—were finishing training. Fresh with news from newly arrived sources in Manila, Mel urged his editors to be prepared to break the fighting group’s story.

  Something was coming, and Mel knew it.

  On December 6, Mel informed David Hulburd that he was going to start sending reports by cable rather than over radio broadcasts. The latter were too easily intercepted, and Mel’s messages contained confidential information. Mel understood how dangerous conditions were becoming in the Pacific. His notice to Hulburd about the cables might have been the last message he sent before war began.

  Communication lines with Hong Kong were silent.

  Radios tuned to Bangkok broadcasts received dead air.

  Wireless communications with the United States carried only static.

  The streets outside the Bay View were empty.

  The morning of December 8, 1941, was deceptively quiet.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was Carl. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. A newspaper slipped under Carl’s door declared the news in bold headlines. Mel didn’t believe his colleague, so he looked at his own paper and “saw some screwy headline that had nothing to do with Honolulu.”

  Still doubtful about what Carl had told him, Mel returned to bed, but he couldn’t fall back asleep.

  He called Clark Lee, who confirmed the news.

  There had been ever-more-frequent Japanese flybys of the Philippines in the preceding days, but still, the news was a shock. “We’d known about the Japanese flights, all the other signs, but we didn’t quite believe it even out there,” Mel wrote.

  While Mel was on the phone with Clark there was a knock at his door. He hung up and heard another knock, heavy and insistent. Mel found Carl standing outside the hotel room door, already dressed and ready to head into the city.

  That World War II would be fought, and won, in the skies was clear early in the conflict. Though Japan delivered its first blows at Pearl Harbor, more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific from the Philippines, it followed its opening act with devastating raids on two airfields—Clark and Nichols Fields—in the Philippines. Two squadrons of B-17 bombers, dozens of P-40 fighters, and other planes were destroyed, eliminating much of the matériel that had been sent at MacArthur’s request.

  Despite the news of the attacks in Hawaii nine hours earlier, the planes had been left in the open while their pilots ate lunch nearby. Flyers didn’t receive warnings of the approaching Japanese planes until they were almost overhead.

  “By noon the first day, pilots were waiting impatiently on Clark field for take-off orders to bomb Formosa,” Annalee wrote, referring to the Japanese-occupied island now known as Taiwan. “Our first offensive action had to wait for word from Washington—definite declaration of war. Engines were warmed up; pilots leaned against the few planes and ate hot dogs.”

  Twenty minutes later, without warning, Annalee wrote, fifty-four enemy bombers arrived, delivering a brazen, devastating raid on Clark Field that crippled an already underprepared American garrison.

  These raids sparked a decades-long debate about who was responsible for the blunder, but whoever should be blamed, the United States lost fully half of its air capacity in the Philippines in this one devastating first day of the war.

  “MacArthur’s men wanted to fight—but most of all they wanted something to fight with,” Mel wrote in a flurry of cables he sent Time following the war’s commencement and the airfields’ decimation. Unfounded rumors of convoys and flights of P-40s coming to join the fight began almost as soon as the attacks subsided. They would not cease for months.

  On that morning, Manila’s Ermita neighborhood was quiet. Mel arranged a car for the Time employees to share. Together they raced up Dewey Boulevard, to Intramuros, the walled old-town district that had been Spain’s stronghold during its 300-year occupation. When they reached the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East
(USAFFE) headquarters at 1 Calle Victoria, they found MacArthur’s driver, who had arrived early in the morning, asleep in his car.

  “Headquarters was alive and asleep at the same time,” Mel wrote. MacArthur’s staff was weary-eyed but busy as they girded for war. Within hours, helmeted officers carrying gas masks on their hips raced back and forth across the stone-walled headquarters, stopping only briefly to gulp down coffee and sandwiches. The general himself was his usual bounding self, striding through the headquarters as staff and other witnesses confirmed reports of attacks throughout the Philippines. Mel and Carl were concerned about their jobs. Would wartime censorship clamp down on their reporting?

  “The whole picture seemed about as unreal to USAFFE men as it did to us,” Mel later wrote. “We couldn’t believe it, and MacArthur’s staff had hoped the Japanese would hold off at least another month or so, giving us time to get another convoy or two in with the rest of the stuff on order.”

  This hesitation, of course, was partly to blame for the devastation that occurred that day and the unsettled footing with which American forces fought during the brutal months to come.

  Meanwhile, deep-seated racial prejudices kept many Americans from believing that Japan was capable of carrying out the attacks.

  “Those days were eye-openers to many an American who had read Japanese threats in the newspapers with too many grains of salt tossed in,” Mel wrote. “They still couldn’t believe the yellow man could be that good. It must be Germans; that was all everyone kept saying. We were just beginning to pay for years of unpreparedness. The shout ‘It’s Chinese propaganda’ had suddenly lost all traces of plausibility.”

  Regardless of who was to blame, U.S. forces reeled.

  Manila was quiet even as chaos engulfed the headquarters, where a scrum of reporters waited for updates. Rumors flew beneath the shady trees of Dewey Boulevard, rippled up the Pasig River, and raced past the storefronts along the Escolta.