Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Skirting New Guinea, Pons’s crew swept the Doña Nati far eastward into the Pacific along the equator, almost as far east as Fiji, then hooked the ship back south toward Australia. Eventually they passed “right through a hornet’s nest” and traveled as close as a half-hour’s flight from Japanese-held islands. During this portion of the trip, whenever they were awake they took their life belts with them in case they had to suddenly abandon ship. At night they slept in their clothes with the life preservers within arm’s reach. They kept their pocket notebooks and identification papers accessible enough to toss into the sea if it looked like they were about to be captured.

  Four days out of Surigao, the Doña Nati’s lookout saw a ship. Worried that it was an enemy cruiser, Captain Pons ordered his crew to switch direction at full speed, back southwest toward Rabaul, a Japanese base northwest of New Guinea. Pons was trying to make it look like the Doña Nati was a Japanese ship. The vessel’s top speed was fifteen knots, but Pons’s engineer was able to push it to seventeen and a half knots, enough to shake the other ship.

  The following night they spotted a light on the horizon. Pons and his crew waited for it to approach, but it didn’t seem to shift position. Mel and Clark paced back and forth across the deck all night, and Annalee filed her nails down to the quick, but there was no further sign of danger that night. Indeed, the next day their radio picked up a report that Allied forces had launched a large attack on a Japanese fleet at Rabaul a few days earlier.

  On the other side of the world, meanwhile, David Hulburd and the rest of the Time operation had begun to worry about Mel and Annalee. Two weeks after the short messages from Cebu, no further word had arrived in either New York or California. An understandably anxious Elza contacted Hulburd and asked whether he had any further information.

  He did not.

  “I only wish I could give you more information than you already have as to Mel and Annalee’s plans and destination,” Hulburd wrote to Elza. She had forwarded Annalee’s initial telegram to him, and in return Hulburd explained that “love exboth” had meant “love from us both.”

  “So surely they are together,” Hulburd presumed. “Where they are headed for is anybody’s guess, but I feel that they are much safer at Cebu than they would be at Bataan.”

  On the morning of Saint Patrick’s Day, an American aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, and its battle group were sailing east across the Pacific, somewhere beyond the Solomon Islands. The ships were returning to Pearl Harbor for repairs and resupplies after participating in the attack on Rabaul.

  In accordance with the navy’s readiness procedures, the fleet sailed with its lights darkened. At 6:22 A.M., Ensign Joseph Weber, the officer on watch, logged a report that routine air patrols had spotted an unknown ship sailing about forty miles away from the fleet. Half an hour later, the Lexington changed course, but kept a watchful eye on the unidentified vessel.

  At the same time, after a few days of quiet, Clark suddenly jolted Mel out of a True Confessions story right when he was about to read the titular admission. A formation of eight warships was matching their course. The Doña Nati didn’t dare approach to investigate whether the vessels were friends or foes. It was unlikely that the ships were American because they were so close to Japanese shipping lanes and Japan’s South Pacific bases. The flotilla appeared to include an aircraft carrier and other vessels. Not one ship broke formation toward the Doña Nati.

  The reporters speculated that they’d encountered a fleet of damaged Japanese ships headed home for repairs after the attack at Rabaul. It was true that the reporters had seen ships headed home, but what they didn’t know at the time was that they’d seen the Lexington and its battle group.

  As the Lexington traveled on, the passengers of the Doña Nati eased into the cautious placidity of the featureless Pacific. Mel turned to the typewriter he’d purchased on Cebu and began writing a letter to David Hulburd, his editor at Time. “With little to do but shake in my tennis shoes,” Mel opened his letter, which brought Hulburd up to date on the events he’d witnessed in the Philippines since the December 8 attacks.

  “Whether I’ll ever arrive at a point where this letter can be mailed is a matter of fate,” he began. “So far we’ve been scared plenty but very lucky—and I’m knocking on wood.”

  As Mel wrote, it became clear that what was appearing on the page was more than a letter; it could be the beginning of his book. What Mel began was a detailed, multipart narrative of the war so far. He would eventually share it all, he said, “at least all I can tell now.”

  Mel’s book began in Japanese Indochina, moved to the “proving ground” in China, then went on to the diplomatic skirmishes of the past four years and the private reflections that others had shared with him about the entry of the United States into the war. Mel gave Hulburd a day-by-day, blow-by-blow accounting of the Pacific war so far, interweaving the larger story with detailed descriptions of individual units and personalities and with accounts of his reporting and movements as well as Annalee’s, Carl’s, and Shelley’s.

  Mel’s prose in this draft retooled some of the descriptions he’d composed for his dispatches for Time. There were countless horrors that Mel recalled as he composed his book, but he wrote surrounded by a world that could still present moments of beauty.

  Around 8:00 P.M. that same night, back on the Lexington, Ensign Weber assumed watch as the sea again vanished into darkness and the aircraft carrier again changed course. Little out of the ordinary had happened on the ship since Seaman Second Class Peter S. Runacres broke his left ring finger while removing a shell from a gun during a drill.

  Then, shortly after Ensign Weber’s shift began, a bright streak shot across the constellation of Leo. For the next three hours, meteors blazed across the skies to the northwest, performing a celestial show for anyone who happened to sail across that fearful expanse of ocean. Perhaps that night, after Mel stopped typing, he looked up and saw the same meteors. Perhaps he shared the sight with Annalee, Clark, and the rest of the Doña Nati’s passengers.

  The next morning, Pons’s engineer spied two specks quickly approaching the Doña Nati. They didn’t change course. Suddenly, one disappeared, while the other grew larger on the horizon. Everyone’s first suspicion was that the first was a submarine diving to continue in stealthy pursuit. Mel grabbed what he’d written the night before and again prepared to throw his recollections overboard.

  Then dark rain clouds engulfed the Doña Nati. By the time the storm passed, one distant vessel still hung on the horizon, but the squall had bought time for Pons to alter his course, allowing the Doña Nati to circle behind the approaching ship. It was no longer gaining on the Doña Nati.

  Mel noted that none of the Filipino sailors panicked. No one even reached for a weapon. Instead, the crew steered the ship wide around the threat. By nightfall they’d lost sight of both vessels. If there had been a submarine, it hadn’t revealed itself.

  The following day brought no sign of either distant ship. That night was almost relaxing. Crewmen played guitars and ukuleles, “singing their version of American jazz tunes, vintage 1930.”

  As the Doña Nati’s passengers finally found a moment to relax, Time’s staff in New York only grew more anxious. There was still no word from Mel or Annalee. Neither Hulburd nor Luce nor the Meybergs nor the Whitmores had heard anything.

  “I wish I knew where they are now,” Hulburd eventually wrote to his colleague F. D. Pratt. Pratt was preparing materials to be mailed to subscribers with the next issue of Time, and he’d asked Hulburd to give him an update on the status of the magazine’s reporters around the world.

  Hulburd did know that Carl and Shelley Mydans were alive but still prisoners at Santo Tomas University in Manila. Shelley had been appointed a room monitor, and they were both believed to be getting at least a subsistence diet. However, Hulburd knew nothing more about Mel and Annalee than that they’d fled on the Doña Nati.

  “The Jacobys are having just about t
he most hectic and exciting honeymoon anybody ever had,” Hulburd wrote.

  Around the same time, Elza was receiving notices that the draft deferral Mel had requested in November was about to expire. Obviously, there was no way he could report, so she asked Hulburd, as Mel’s supervisor, to respond to the draft board. When he did, Hulburd explained that Cebu was the last place he knew Mel to be.

  “I wish to inform you that he is now some place in the Pacific on his way, we hope, to Australia,” Hulburd wrote.

  Back on the Doña Nati, radio news kept the reporters guessing how close Japanese convoys might be. Stories about new bombing raids at Bataan and Corregidor offered dark reminders of where they’d been. Late in their journey they heard that MacArthur had made it to Australia. Later they would find out that the general’s dramatic escape was led by the same man—Bulkeley, now a captain—who had shepherded the Princesa away from Corregidor.

  “We had come far enough to know that help can go through—the Japanese Navy can not cover the entire ocean, making us feel in a small way that our trip takes on significance and is helping our friends in Bataan and Corregidor,” Mel wrote.

  Finally, in the relief this news brought, the reporters broke a promise they’d made not to talk about what they hoped to do when they reached Australia. Someone mentioned what he’d eat first. Tentative thoughts turned to imagined glasses of cold beer or the thought of putting on clean clothes. Soon everyone began chattering like kids on Christmas Eve.

  But first they had to finish their journey.

  Clark began staying up all night, hoping he’d be the first to see land, but he fell asleep. Then, on the morning of March 27, Mel saw it. He yelled out Clark’s name. Clark woke with a start. He swore as he ran out to the deck rail to see. Sure enough, there it was. Australia. Brisbane to be exact.

  As the Doña Nati approached the port, an Allied bomber roared past overhead. This was the first time in months that a plane flying overhead didn’t alarm them. Indeed, the Americans’ hearts swelled. The numerous U.S. ships and military vehicles the Doña Nati passed as it sailed up into the Brisbane River cheered them even more, as did a boatful of smiling people who greeted the ship’s arrival.

  “Our first glimpse of the country was the friendliness of the boatload of laughing men and women waving at us and our American flag, then the smiling doctor who came aboard a few seconds and gave us a handshake in welcome,” Mel wrote a few days later.

  Before stepping off the Doña Nati, Mel stopped to say goodbye to the crew. The ship’s engineer smiled conspiratorially. Mel inquired why the engineer was so pleased with himself. Just as soon as the vessel had pulled alongside Brisbane’s docks and he’d shut off the ship’s engines, he told Mel that one of its pistons had cracked. All the strain he’d put on the Doña Nati pushing the ship beyond the cruising speed it was designed for had finally destroyed the engine.

  Chapter 12

  “ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE”

  David Hulburd was just about to send his memo to F. D. Pratt about the fate of Time’s reporters when the wireless machine at Time’s Rockefeller Center headquarters clattered and buzzed. Before Hulburd sent his memo, someone pulled a message from the machine and yelped excitedly. It had terrific news. Mel and Annalee were safe.

  “No details yet, but what a trip they must have had from Bataan and Cebu,” Hulburd scrawled in blue letters that looped across the bottom of the memo. The news was a PR coup for Time.

  Then at the pinnacle of its popularity, Time cast itself as the nation’s most turned-to source for news about the war. Whatever private relief Hulburd and his colleague felt about Mel and Annalee’s safety—aside from personal concerns, Time Inc. had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy on Mel when it hired him full-time—the memo he wrote to Pratt became a valuable marketing document. The magazine’s circulation desk saw an opportunity in the news of the Jacobys’ arrival in Brisbane.

  When Time’s next issue came out, the magazine’s sales staff cleverly packaged subscribers’ issues with copies of Hulburd’s memo, complete with a facsimile of his excitedly scrawled note about the Jacobys’ escape. The young couple were becoming standard-bearers, representatives of the risks to which Luce’s troops would go to bring stories from the war back to U.S. shores.

  Their families were understandably relieved by the news as well. “Both Fine Address Lennons Hotel Plans Indefinite,” read a telegram Mel and Annalee sent together to Mel’s mother and stepfather. Mel followed up a day later with: “I hope you were not too worried, Mother.”

  Shortly after the Doña Nati limped into Brisbane’s harbor, Australian immigration officials recorded the names “Melville Jack Jacoby” and “Annalee Whitmore Jacoby” on alien registration forms. Asked how long they planned to be in Australia, the couple, uncertain themselves, left no answer. Instructed to declare the purpose of their visit, the Jacobys wrote simply, “war coverage.”

  After escaping Corregidor himself, Douglas MacArthur had established headquarters in Melbourne, nearly 900 miles southwest of Brisbane. Following heavy defeats in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, the Allies were regrouping in Australia. With them came much of the press corps covering the Pacific Theater.

  The couple seemed less certain about how to answer another required question on the form. Asked to list the names and addresses of friends or family in the country, they wrote: “General Douglas MacArthur. Lennox Hotel?” As reported on the form, they carried $700 in U.S. currency and claimed to be in sound mental and physical health.

  After filling out the forms, Mel, Clark, Annalee, and Lew Carson walked to the docks and hailed a taxi. Every single hotel in the city was booked, Clark reported. They were filled with American pilots. Finally they found a room at the Lennons Hotel. Clark suddenly remembered that he’d offered to buy a round of drinks if they made it to safety.

  Annalee and Mel each wanted a Tom Collins, but before gin, soda, and lime, they had to attend to a more serious matter: advocating for Carl and Shelley Mydans. The Jacobys had last received information about their friends’ condition when they were still on Corregidor. The very first message they sent to Hulburd was that the Mydanses were okay but might not have enough food.

  Two days later, Mel, Annalee, and Clark flew from Brisbane to Melbourne, where they planned to visit MacArthur’s headquarters, then get to work. Ten thousand feet over Australia, the landscape seemed strikingly ordinary. The rows and rows of houses lit up beneath the plane for the world to see—their occupants unconcerned by the now-distant prospect of air raids that Mel and Annalee were so used to—were real.

  “In Bataan at night, sentries always barked at soldiers carrying guns with glistening barrels that might be seen by enemy snipers hidden in the nearby trees and bushes,” Mel wrote aboard the plane, reflecting on the sight. “Our only light in Bataan came from the Moon and then the men prayed it would go down fast. Tonight at 10,000 feet over Australia we can look down upon rows of houses lit up—it’s an amazing sight to us and hard to believe it’s real.”

  In Melbourne, they went straight to the Menzies Hotel. Like the Manila Hotel earlier, Menzies had been turned into MacArthur’s headquarters. After the reporters showed up, word quickly spread around the hotel that they were safe. General MacArthur himself came to welcome them to Australia. Mel wrote about the broad, welcoming smile the general flashed.

  “I knew you’d make it, Mel,” the general said.

  There was a bet to pay off. Six weeks earlier, back in Corregidor’s nest of tunnels that last day before their long journey, Pick Diller and Sidney Huff—now full colonels—had shared a toast with Mel and Annalee, convinced that they’d make it through the Pacific alive. That day they’d gambled on the reporters’ chances. If they did indeed make it to Australia safely, the reporters owed Diller and Huff a champagne toast. Mel and Annalee were happy to pay up. It was a joyful encounter at a time starved for such moments, and the celebrations continued well into that night.


  Diller and Huff arranged a reunion of sorts in the Menzies Hotel lobby. Nearly all of Mel’s friends from Chungking—the “old gang” from his Press Hostel days—had trickled into Melbourne from every corner of Asia and the Pacific to report on the next phase of the war following the fall of the Philippines. Familiar faces—including Till and Peggy Durdin and Bill Dunn—appeared, and many of them told adventurous escape stories of their own.

  There was one more familiar face in Melbourne: Theodore White. Teddy had just returned to the Pacific front from New York. The sight of Mel’s old friend from Chungking days was heartening. Then Mel introduced Annalee to Teddy. He was instantly smitten. Meeting her and seeing Mel were twin highlights of an assignment in Australia that was already uplifting for Teddy.

  “I found, you know, when I went home [in May 1941] that almost all of my old friends had ceased to mean anything to me,” White later wrote about being in Melbourne.

  And suddenly when I got back into the newspaper gang in Australia I found that these were my people in a very intimate and peculiar way. And most of all, my people were the boys who had been with me in Chungking—the old gang.

  Till Durdin and his wife turned up after a series of miraculous escapes in Melbourne. And then Mel and Annalee turned up after their super-miraculous escape from Corregidor, and there we were all of us, the old gang in Melbourne again, in our intimacy and friendship.

  Riveted by his friends’ escape from the Philippines, White imagined Mel and Annalee could make quick work of the book they had started, and he cabled two Random House editors he thought might be interested in their story.

  “Time’s Corregidor correspondent Melville Jacoby just arrived here after miraculous escape with hair-raising stories Philippine campaign which I believe make superb book material,” White told Random House’s Bennett Cerf and Robert Haas.