Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  They still didn’t know where they were headed: the jungles of the Bataan Peninsula or the fortress of Corregidor. Either choice meant threading the bay’s minefields, and they knew that if they tried to escape to the open ocean, the Japanese navy lay in wait just past the harbor’s entrance. They were at the mercy of Captains Hastings and Judah. Wherever the sailors decided it was safe to anchor was their destination.

  Chapter 10

  INTO THE BLACKNESS BEYOND

  Flames towered above Manila Bay as the new year dawned. Twenty-six miles away from the Filipino capital, La Florecita bobbed in a channel. On one side was a jungle-covered peninsula, on the other a rocky island. As 1942 began, Mel, Annalee, and Clark woke on the freighter’s deck to the wail of air raid sirens.

  South of the bobbing ship rose Corregidor, a wriggling mass of rock that stood sentinel over the sea. To the north, a verdant carpet of palms and banyans climbed the slopes of Mariveles Mountain, which spanned the horizon and dominated the Bataan Peninsula.

  Corregidor was shaped like an arcing comet with a tail. “Topside” was the higher-elevation plateau—the comet’s head—which housed anti-aircraft and artillery batteries, barracks, a parade ground, and other facilities, most of which had been pummeled in air raids that began two days earlier. “Middleside”—the lower portion of the head—housed more barracks and what had served as the army’s hospital until the facility was transferred to a massive tunnel complex beneath Malinta Hill, the limestone mount where the island’s “tail” began. Behind steep Malinta, the skinny two-and-a-half-mile “Tailside” was where the island’s small airfield, the navy’s radio facilities, and some officers’ houses were located. Sea-level “Bottomside” connected head and tail; it housed three docks on its north side, a power plant, and a small barrio that was home to civilian laborers who worked on Corregidor.

  Seen from certain parts of Corregidor—like Battery Grubbs, one of the artillery installations on Topside—Bataan, with Mariveles gently sloping into the South China Sea, presented an almost romantic vista when coupled with pink-and-orange sunsets. The rugged crags of Bokanita Pass at the peninsula’s southern tip and the sharp, triangular rock of tiny La Monja Island west of the pass framed a scene that at any other time might have been found on vacation postcards. Mariveles’s magma chambers had long since ceased their fury, but during the four weeks of war so far, violence had erupted beneath the canopy of Ipil-ipil, yakal, gum, and apitong trees that climbed the mountain’s slopes.

  It was still dark when La Florecita’s crew lay anchor off Bottomside’s North Docks. Since they served as the loading terminal for transports headed to Bataan, the docks were a natural target for Japanese bombers. Captains Judah and Hastings had hoped to reach Bataan to deliver ammunition but hadn’t made it. Now Mel, Annalee, and Clark had to act quickly. Remaining on the open water in broad daylight was out of the question. The embattled peninsula to their north was likely to be the first target for the approaching planes.

  Mel had passed up offers to relocate to Corregidor a few weeks earlier. Now it was also a likely target, but it was close, and its many fortifications promised shelter. Later the group could figure out how to get back across the channel to Bataan, where the real battle—and thus the real story—was under way. For the time being, they just needed to survive the day.

  The sky was clear, and the sun was rising. The reporters struggled to deploy La Florecita’s lone lifeboat. Finally freeing the dinghy from the ship, they rowed toward Corregidor’s North Docks. It took on water and nearly swamped before they reached the docks. The planes were coming closer.

  “We scrambled up and raced for a dugout, and we came out an hour later to find ourselves under arrest,” Annalee wrote.

  As the reporters argued with the U.S. military police who’d arrested them for arriving unannounced at what was essentially an island-wide fortress, another air raid siren wailed. MPs and arrestees alike scrambled into the dugout. Everyone waited for the raining bombs’ characteristic thuds and trembling to end. They would repeat this dance all day as Japanese planes pounded Corregidor with a heavy series of attacks, and its moves would become familiar as the raids continued for the next week.

  Japan began an aerial siege of Corregidor on December 29, resumed bombing on New Year’s Eve, and continued the onslaught through January 6 before shifting its attention—temporarily—to the forces gathering at Bataan.

  “That was our introduction to Corregidor,” Mel noted.

  The night before, while still at the Bay View, Mel had called Lieutenant Colonel Diller, General Douglas MacArthur’s press aide, to discuss his plan to sail aboard La Florecita. Diller told Mel that he “couldn’t exactly stop” him and Annalee from landing in Bataan, hinting that MacArthur and his subordinates wouldn’t try to keep the reporters from coming.

  “MacArthur, he said, understood my position with the Japanese and was 100% sympathetic,” Mel wrote.

  Nevertheless, the military police didn’t treat the reporters lightly at first. They were highly suspicious of their sudden appearance. After all, as Clark later noted, “the M.P. book had no provision for two civilian men and a girl in a military area in wartime.”

  In comparison to other Western powers’ colonies in the Pacific, the Philippines had been relatively accepting of the U.S. presence—but this attitude wasn’t by any means universally shared by its people. Domestic and foreign fifth columnists existed throughout the islands, as they did across Asia and the Pacific. In the Philippines, many groups were suspected of collaborating with the Japanese empire. The most prevalent were followers of Benigno Ramos’s Ganap Party, which had grown out of Ramos’s Sakdalista Party, an anti-American group that had been defeated in an early 1930s drive for independence for the Philippines. Ramos had fled the Philippines, but he returned when the Japanese invaded. Now his followers were widely known to be rooting out anti-Japanese resistance throughout the Philippines and otherwise assisting Japan, whose Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere vision of kicking the Americans out of Asia appealed to the Ganaps.

  There had also been decades of Japanese immigration to the Philippines, and many Americans suspected that some of these immigrants had been forewarned of the attacks. Clark himself had reported that Japanese civilians in Manila were packed and ready for internment when American soldiers came for them, suggesting, he argued, that they knew to be ready before the war began for U.S. soldiers to come for them. Others thought that German and Spanish priests, of whom there were many in the heavily Catholic Philippines, were suspect. Germany was Japan’s Axis partner, while Spain, though officially neutral in the war, helped supply its partner in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which targeted Communists, and Francisco Franco’s government had worked closely with the Catholic Church.

  Collaborators were accused of signaling high-value targets to bombers, sabotaging American and Filipino supplies, and spreading propaganda. It is unlikely that the military police suspected Mel, Clark, or Annalee of such activities, but nerves on Corregidor were jittery after three incessant, pounding weeks of war. Anyone who showed up unexpectedly was at least worth looking into.

  Regardless of suspicions, Corregidor and Bataan were strained. The highest-ranking U.S. military and civilian officials in the Philippines had all relocated to Corregidor, but even they struggled to get Washington to commit to a supply convoy and reinforcements for their now-encircled forces. War Plan Orange Three, a strategy developed before the conflict began, had called for six months’ worth of supplies for 43,000 soldiers on Bataan, plus reserves for 10,000 more for Corregidor. Before Manila fell, the army’s quartermaster corps had coordinated a massive movement of supplies by barge and land.

  By January, there were almost twice as many troops on Bataan, around 83,000. Another 12,000 people were on Corregidor. (That number was probably slightly lower when La Florecita arrived, as the number of personnel on Corregidor rose as U.S. forces were pushed off Bataan.) In addition to feeding, healing, and inoculating their troo
ps, U.S. commanders also had to consider the needs of 25,000 civilian refugees scattered throughout Bataan. Even under the best circumstances, supplying these numbers would have been a Herculean task. These were far from the best circumstances.

  Feeding just three additional mouths on Corregidor could prove a headache, as would housing even three more bodies in the claustrophobic tunnels dug beneath the island’s surface. While extensive, these shelters would become ever more crowded as barracks and officers’ quarters on the island’s surface became targets and as more than 1,000 hospital beds lining the concrete walls of one set of the side tunnels—or “laterals”—filled with injured and sick soldiers.

  It took hours—interrupted many times by additional raids—before army brass who knew the reporters vouched for them. The reporters recognized many of the people they saw as they rushed in and out of shelter, and fortunately some of these people recognized the reporters.

  “The Rock [Corregidor] was teeming with faces, many of them familiar, most of them more than friendly,” Mel wrote. “Soldiers and officers seemed glad to see someone from the other world.”

  Mel sought out Pick Diller and stressed that he had planned to go to Bataan but with bombers approaching that morning, their boat had brought them here to Corregidor. They could get on the next ferry off the island, but they were curious if the freighter they’d provisioned back in Manila for an escape and left in the Pasig River might be available. Diller and the reporters spent all day asking around.

  Everyone was so busy running in and out of shelters that night fell unexpectedly. Though the reporters would have to sleep on a trolley platform, they were no longer treated as intruders, or even as a distraction. Instead, they were welcomed warmly on Corregidor by officers and enlisted men alike.

  “During the night a dozen soldiers came by smiling and offering the three of us anything and everything from a place to bath [sic] to whiskey without soda,” Mel reported.

  “One soldier sat by us the next morning until we awakened and asked if we wanted coffee. A cook from a nearby enlisted men’s mess sent a breakfast invitation. They were on three meals a day then.”

  Such generosity was memorable, for over the next four months the siege of Corregidor and Bataan would tighten rations further and further. Soldiers would be limited at first to half rations of about two meals a day, or 2,000 calories—and they often received even less—and then they would turn to slaughtering the Philippines’ endemic, oxlike carabao for food. Later, their pack mules, horses, or anything else they could get their hands on would become sources of food as conditions on Bataan worsened and supplies dwindled.

  The garrison at Corregidor requisitioned La Florecita to ferry supplies to Bataan almost as soon as the reporters arrived. With the boat now unavailable, if the reporters wanted to go farther than Corregidor, they would have to find another way.

  Dusty and crowded Corregidor was not an ideal home for Mel, Annalee, and Clark. Each had work to do. They had news to report and stories to tell, and they wanted at least to get to the front lines on Bataan. They weren’t motivated simply by a desire to scoop their competitors or to get their names on front pages; to them, their mission was covering the war.

  Telling the story of the conflict and the people waging it was the best way the trio could serve their country. After all, Mel had already avoided the draft multiple times, in part by reasoning that he could make more of a contribution to the war effort working in the Pacific as a reporter—still at the battle’s front lines but behind the keys of his typewriter instead of the trigger of a gun.

  Fortunately, General MacArthur believed the same. Just weeks into the war, MacArthur’s command already stood accused of insufficiently preparing for the Japanese attacks, leaving the USAFFE limping and ragged. On top of the onslaught, the USAFFE’s leadership felt neglected by Washington, which also seemed to pay little attention to the broader Pacific fight. In addition to War Plan Orange Three’s guidelines for the Pacific, the U.S. military’s overall war-fighting strategy, Rainbow Five, prioritized defeating Hitler in Europe over fighting Japan.

  On January 14, U.S. and British leaders wrapped up three weeks of meetings in Washington, D.C., known as the “Arcadia conference.” It was the first time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt had met in person since the United States entered the war. At Arcadia, the two countries committed to Rainbow Five, also known as the “Europe First” strategy. This made it clear to those stationed at Bataan that no convoy would be coming. Just as Arcadia concluded, MacArthur sent a four-paragraph communiqué to his forces saying that it was impossible to retreat further. The message opened with a promise he’d never be able to deliver:

  “Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched,” he wrote, imploring his troops to hold the line until the reinforcements could fight through.

  “It is a question now of courage and determination,” MacArthur continued. “Men who run will merely be destroyed but men who fight will save themselves and their country.”

  Indeed, while other Western colonies in Asia quickly fell, the Philippines continued to fight back against Japan, even though its defenders fought without sufficient bullets, food, or fuel for whichever vehicles hadn’t been destroyed. It may have been a heroic resistance, but despite what the hopeful rank and file continued to believe, there was no convoy steaming across the Pacific to rescue them.

  Given their access to the front pages and covers of major publications back in North America, the six reporters operating on Corregidor presented these forces with the only voice that could be heard across the vast ocean that separated them from the United States. Suddenly the reporters’ bylines were appearing next to “With USAFFE in Northern Luzon” in the dateline. These five words would define Annalee, Mel, Clark, and the others. A simple attribution for procedure’s sake carried a weight that wouldn’t be understood by the people who read them.

  “It is a matter of fact phrase but it means a world turned upside down,” Annalee told her readers in Liberty magazine, “a world where a chocolate bar is more unusual than death; where quiet is only a prelude to explosion; where the United States is 8,000 miles away; where Manila, just across the water, is enemy territory.”

  They call it “Pacific,” Clark Lee would later pointedly note, but he and his companions quickly realized this place was anything but.

  For now, Corregidor was the reporters’ home. Cleared to stay on the island and given accreditation from the military, the trio were little fettered in their work as they set out to report firsthand the U.S. entry into the war. Accreditation opened the door to many opportunities for them, including the chance to ride along on supply trips from the North Docks to the Bataan Peninsula, where the couple would see the kinds of horrors that had transformed Bataan into what Annalee called a “subdivision of hell.”

  According to a War Department field manual issued later that month (though no doubt never distributed to Corregidor), accredited reporters were permitted to accompany fighting forces into the field and report on the spot. Their reports were subject to wartime censorship, military law, and other restrictions, but they also had wide freedom to talk to soldiers, travel aboard military vessels that had extra space, and use available radio or other transmission facilities (with some restrictions). Accredited reporters would receive the same medical treatment as soldiers if injured, and if they were captured, they could expect Geneva Conventions protections as prisoners of war, provided they carried appropriate certification. They were differentiated from “visiting” correspondents, who were given permission to visit only on specifically outlined itineraries and to publish their reporting only after their visits.

  “Pressmen are allowed to visit any front or headquarters at will, writing mainly feature color, background, personal experiences stories,” Mel reported for the journalism news weekly Editor and Publisher. “Most of the correspondents have done everything with the troo
ps except fire guns or fly planes.”

  Newly outfitted with army-style uniforms whose arms featured an embroidered C, for “correspondent,” Mel resumed his work for Time and Life.

  “In Bataan the troops fight with their backs to the sea-wall and no longer wear clean shirts but have learned to eat the thick Bataan dust, lick gritty teeth and take blood,” Mel wrote in a dispatch to Life that was reprinted in the Field Artillery Journal. Such evocative details and candid accounts of the soldiers’ desperate resistance—Mel relayed firsthand narratives from Bataan and Corregidor that appeared regularly in Life on top of his own reporting—shocked the American public. As a result of Mel’s work, Americans already demoralized by Pearl Harbor now saw the mess unfolding in the Pacific.

  “The pictures of Bataan wounded were wonderful in timeliness to really give people the jolt and realization of suffering that is being endured over there by our boys, Americans and Filipinos, and those valiant women, our nurse corps,” read one letter to the editor that appeared in Life.

  As Mel had envisioned before the war began, he and Annalee worked as a team much as the Mydanses had done in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Annalee helped compile Mel’s dispatches to Luce’s magazines, but she also wrote some of her own and continued an assignment she had arranged in Manila: writing highly descriptive features about the war for Liberty, a five-cent weekly magazine that competed with the popular Saturday Evening Post. In one blow-by-blow of the first days after the outbreak of war, subscribers read Annalee’s visceral descriptions of air raids, closed schools, desperate evacuees, and bloody attacks on railroads. In another, she described new recruits, among whom were former doormen as well as Harvard Business School grads.

  “Now they’ve gone through weeks of constant attack,” she wrote.