Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Mel and Annalee were as heartened as Teddy was by the sight of so many old friends, but in all the familiar faces two were noticeably absent, the two who they may have most wanted to see: Carl and Shelley Mydans, who couldn’t share in this reunion.

  “There are a lot of familiar faces in our group missing,” Mel wrote. “Some are captured, the rest just dead. Then we remember the men we left on Corregidor taking it on the chin and our food doesn’t taste quite so good. And our friends in Manila—maybe they’re hungry.”

  Mel had brought to Australia his and Carl’s photographic film, a godsend for Life. The photos gave readers an unprecedented perspective on the battle of the Philippines.

  “Unbelievably in months when Hong Kong, Singapore, Java and Rangoon fell, a small body of Americans and Filipinos held their ground against an enemy who elsewhere appeared irresistible,” Life’s editors wrote in the opening of “Philippine Epic,” a thirteen-page photo essay composed of Carl’s and Mel’s images from the Philippines. “LIFE had not expected to see pictures of these men and their battle until after the war.”

  The piece opens with a shot that Mel took of General MacArthur, black cane in his right hand, strolling out of the Malinta complex deep in conversation with General Sutherland, his chief of staff. On one side of the image a few Filipino scouts and American enlisted men watch the generals, awestruck.

  A roughly chronological arrangement, the piece begins with Mydans’s images of the Philippines’ first anxious days of war—well-dressed civilians gathered in air raid shelters, sandbagged bookstores, and the arrest of Japanese civilians. It then erupts with a two-page spread of flame- and smoke-filled pictures of the bombed Cavite shipyard near Manila, burning oil tankers, and a firefighter carefully laying three bodies side by side, bodies identified as his own wife and children.

  The series then shifts from Mydans’s stark depictions of Manila’s first taste of war to Mel’s hectic escape. The photos here, capturing scenes from both Bataan and Corregidor, were the first images most Americans saw of the battle in the Philippines. They show the frenetic activity of MacArthur’s headquarters in the Malinta tunnel complex under Corregidor and the operations aboveground, the rubble and destruction wrought upon Filipinos’ daily lives in places like the small village of Mariveles, and the resilience and desperation in Bataan’s jungles, which “made the Bataan fighting anything but trench warfare.

  “It resembles old time American Indian fighting,” the picture’s caption explained during an era when Western militaries were still acclimating to guerrilla tactics. “Both sides frequently find substantial groups of the enemy inside their own lines. Warfare is an unceasing game of stalking and being stalked.”

  There are pictures of Marines, “Filipino Joe”—the generic term for unspecified Filipino enlisted men—and wounded soldiers recovering in open-air base hospitals on Bataan, as well as a series of intimate glimpses Mel caught of VIPs relocated to Corregidor, including General MacArthur, President Quezon, and their families. There is even one photo of an exhausted-looking Annalee.

  The series closes with what might be considered a hopeful image. In the full-page picture, Arthur MacArthur—the general’s four-year-old son—stands in overalls on Corregidor. One hand grips a closed Chinese fan. In the other, the boy clutches a small stuffed bunny, with a cautious, almost imperceptible smile.

  All the comforts of a major city far removed from the war seemed to Annalee “too good to be true.” She said as much in a letter to Elza and Manfred Meyberg. Even the opportunity to actually do that, to write a simple letter to her in-laws, was a surreal luxury.

  Mel and Annalee made a home for themselves in room 311 of Melbourne’s Australia Hotel. Mel spent much of his time fielding offers from publishers for “This Is Our Battle,” the book he and Annalee began drafting aboard the Doña Nati. It wasn’t pure journalism. From Australia, Mel characterized the work baldly and somewhat uncharacteristically as a “propaganda book” and promised Hulburd a “lengthy story” about the battle that broke out in the Philippines on December 8, 1941.

  Even as the Jacobys settled into Melbourne, they knew a new hell was enveloping the place they’d just escaped. On April 9, months of resistance in the Philippines had come to a jarring halt at 12:30 P.M. when Major General Edward P. King reluctantly surrendered Bataan and its defenders to Japan.

  “At last Bataan fell,” began an April 20, 1942, Life story accompanied by photos from Mel and Annalee of tin-roofed hospitals, gangrenous wounds, and “valiant” nurses who served at soldiers’ sides. “Its defenders had won for Americans four precious months in which to strengthen the worldwide fronts. White and brown, they had done the job like Americans.”

  Soon the horrific Bataan Death March would begin. One of the darkest moments in U.S. military history, the march killed between 7,000 and 10,000 Americans and Filipinos. Tens of thousands more ended up in terrifying Japanese prison camps and the “hell ships” that transferred the prisoners between camps. In Melbourne, long before the specifics of the march came to light, the sadness of the surrender was already felt.

  On Bataan, the scene was horrific. Withdrawing troops set fire to fuel stores. The passengers on ships withdrawing across the channel to Corregidor quivered beneath the covering fire blasting over their heads. And then, just as the moment’s trauma began to set in, the peninsula rattled violently.

  This was not a continuation of the attack; rather, a series of earthquakes had erupted across the Philippines. The nation sat, after all, above subduction zones at the western edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many of its islands’ most notable features—Mount Pinatubo, Mount Apo, and Lake Taal, for example—were volcanos (even Mariveles was a dormant volcano), and with a volcanic landscape come earthquakes.

  Geology does not rest for war. Nature does not take sides.

  Australia felt the day’s symbolic reverberations.

  “If ever men were grilled to lead a fight for their country through sheer hatred, it is these,” Mel wrote. “They know they are slated for bigger jobs, but in their hearts most of them wish they were with the rest of the gang.”

  In Australia, Mel and Annalee felt the same mixture of sadness and anger almost anyone who had seen Corregidor and Bataan felt: Why had these outposts been left to wither in the heat of Japan’s invasion? Where were the reinforcements promised so long ago? Where was the convoy?

  “In Australia we saw again the pilots who had left Corregidor by submarine,” Annalee wrote in an article that appeared later that year. “They were bitter. They had come out so they could go back to help their friends, and they still had nothing to go back in. Their comrades were still eating mule, still waiting for planes, still facing a not-too-gentle Japanese capture.”

  Though Mel now discussed the urgency of the Philippines’ plight, as he began writing “This Is Our Battle” he also wove the situation in China into his narrative. From the first moment Time’s staff received word that the couple was safe in Australia, word spread about the adventure they’d had.

  Meanwhile, the Jacobys did what they could to catch up with the real world and begin to enjoy married life.

  “Being married is wonderful,” Annalee wrote. “We’re probably the only two people who were actually happy on Corregidor.”

  Mel and Annalee had themselves escaped death, injury, and capture, but they did not flee the Philippines unscarred. Australia was not home. In fact, Mel didn’t even write home for two weeks after he and Annalee arrived in Brisbane; only in the unsettled realization of what had happened in Bataan did he write a letter. Melbourne may have been a reunion, but it was an uncertain one marred by the absence of friends.

  “It’s hard to get used to all these temporary luxuries,” Mel told Elza and Manfred when he finally wrote. “We are living in a comfortable false security now.”

  Mel wanted real security. He thought about home, and an image came to mind of his parents’ home in Bel Air. Then and for decades to come, Elza and Manfred’s house
was known for its elaborate floral displays.

  “Your telegram about the flowers in the garden at home made me want to tell Mr. Luce that I would come, but I don’t think it’s smart right now.”

  After Mel and Annalee arrived in Melbourne, Time wanted him to write up his escape. He composed a 4,000-word account that he sent as soon as censors cleared sensitive details about the route they’d taken, who helped them, and what their blockade runner looked like.

  Weeks after sneaking out of Corregidor and months after their New Year’s Eve escape, Mel and Annalee had lost everything except the $700 that remained in their pockets, but they had made it. Still, their future was uncertain. The army draft—for which Mel’s employers at Time had already twice arranged deferrals—again loomed. Meanwhile, the publishing offers continued. The couple had to make a decision. They could abandon frontline journalism and return to the United States to complete the book. But if they did, Mel risked being drafted (though he wasn’t completely opposed to joining the service as an officer). Meanwhile, despite Annalee’s accreditation as a correspondent, if she returned to the United States, the government might still prevent her from getting another passport to leave the country.

  Mel and Annalee thought instead about returning directly to Chungking, where conditions were worsening. They knew that city’s rhythms well. They thought perhaps they could even continue to cover the war from China as husband and wife, the way the Mydanses had done before everything changed in the Philippines.

  But with the Japanese and Americans battling across the Pacific, getting back to China wouldn’t be easy. Even if the Jacobys made it to Chungking, they’d have each other, but they wouldn’t ever be safe or secure. Bombs would continue to fall all around them, and the possibility of a Japanese victory would always loom.

  Mel and Annalee’s escape had been undeniably dramatic. It also made for a wonderfully upbeat story after the United States endured the Pearl Harbor attacks and the fall of the Philippines. Almost as soon as the Jacobys reported from Brisbane, the producers of the March of Time radio series set to work on an episode that would dramatize the escape while informing listeners about the state of the resistance in the Pacific.

  For the last five minutes of the show, CBS planned a live radio linkup with Mel. Mel didn’t want to be the focus of the piece, however, so he offered to get someone who’d served on Bataan. He turned to Brigadier General Harold H. George (“Pursuit Hal,” who had led Bataan’s air defenses). Time told both Mel’s family and George’s, and they (and Annalee’s family as well) were ecstatic about the chance to hear their voices after so many months. But when the announcer broke in after the melodramatic and sappy dramatized depiction of Mel and Annalee’s escape, he was unable to reach Melbourne, disappointing the families.

  Instead, the announcer read a cable that Mel had sent to his Time editors describing General George, who lauded the American fighting forces in the Philippines when Mel interviewed him.

  While Mel arranged the March of Time broadcast, General George prepared his own next mission. On April 22, Lieutenant General George Brett, the newly appointed commander of the Allied Air Forces for the Southwest, ordered Pursuit Hal to rush at once to Darwin, a port town in northern Australia. Darwin had been bombed repeatedly following an intense raid on February 19, and it looked like it was about to become the next flash point in the war. As described by Colonel Allison Ind—George’s assistant and chief of intelligence at the time—Darwin mattered not just because it represented a possible foothold for the Japanese on Allied territory; it was also close to enemy positions on the island of Timor—300 miles away—and in the Celebes, a group of Indonesian islands another few hundred miles farther away, where Japan was massing its forces for what many thought was an upcoming invasion of Australia.

  “Indeed, it was a case of plugging the threatened break in the dike with bare fingers,” Ind wrote. “There was little else, should the flood pressure increase.”

  General George was to assume command of the U.S. Army Air Forces in Darwin. Pursuit Hal, the army hoped, could translate his expertise from defending Bataan amid such pitched odds to leading a far better prepared defense of Darwin’s skies. The order energized General George, and his clearly defined mission left him a “changed man.”

  “This metamorphosis was characterized initially by a furious burst of energy and planning,” Ind wrote. “He was happy. Here was action. He was a man of action. Here was field service. He loved field service. Waves of rank at a main headquarters depressed him. Again he would be with his men fighting a war on a tooth-for-tooth basis, only he insisted that it be three-teeth-for-a-tooth basis, ‘—or you aren’t winning this war!’”

  Following his aborted March of Time broadcast, Mel learned about General George’s order to transfer to Darwin. A battle was brewing, and a story. Preparations for the defense of Australia would provide the kind of heroic narrative of U.S. resilience that Time’s editors craved. Because he knew the general, because he had seen what the pilots under his command had done in Bataan, and because he had long been interested in aviation himself, Mel realized that he was uniquely positioned to tell such a story, and he began reporting a series of dispatches on the Army Air Forces’s mobilization in northern Australia.

  General George invited Mel to come along to see the preparations firsthand. Even though this meant traveling across Australia so soon after the trip through the Pacific, the trip’s distance didn’t seem to faze Mel, who told Clark Lee that it was little more than a “short hop” to see a few airfields. Whatever Mel called it, the 2,300-mile trip would take two days one way. George planned multiple stops along the way to inspect and show off the string of air bases the Allies were hastily constructing across the continent. As Ind recounts, the general was enthusiastic about Mel joining him.

  Two days before Mel’s trip, he and Annalee cabled her parents in Maryland. The Jacobys were excited to check in with the Whitmores, including their dog, and to report that Annalee had sold another story to Liberty about Corregidor. The dog, reported the Evening Star in Washington, D.C., was included in the family’s reply, cabling, “Woof.”

  Before Mel left Melbourne, he dined with Carlos Romulo, newly arrived from Bataan and now General MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and a press assistant. Mel identified with Romulo first and foremost as a fellow journalist, but also as a representative of the nation Mel was coming to appreciate as much as China. He told Romulo about how scrupulously he had noted the conditions he witnessed on his and Annalee’s voyage through the Philippines.

  “The natives hailed us as deliverers, as if we were gods because we were Americans,” Mel told Romulo at dinner. “When I think of the loyalty and the abiding, simple faith the Filipinos have in America and realize we haven’t lived up to it. . . .”

  Mel trailed off, but Romulo perceived that his interest in opening American eyes to the Philippines’ dire situation was sincere. It echoed Mel’s concern for China, and though by that point Mel felt deeply for the Filipinos, he also thought about that first home of his in Asia, and the people there. As far away as he may have been from the Chinese people, he couldn’t forget them.

  Mel would leave with George on April 27. On the night of April 26, Colonels Diller and Huff arranged a dinner at the Australia Hotel to formally celebrate the Jacobys’ safe escape. The entire press gang present in Melbourne came for the celebration. Yes, the lines between soldier and correspondent were blurred, but the intimacy shared by source and subject was understandable.

  “[Mel and Annalee] had been through everything with us and we understood each other so well,” Diller later wrote to Mel’s mother.

  In the hotel lobby, joy spilled forth from the table of reporters and press officers with whom they’d survived so much. So raucous was their laughter that it leapt into the camera lenses, and so happy were the reunited friends that the photos these lenses captured still seem to chatter nearly three-quarters of a century later. In one, Teddy White gesticulates across the
table, his face beaming while he makes a point. At his side, Annalee, her hair in curls for the first time in months, can’t stifle a laugh. Colonel Diller crumples in smiles on Teddy’s other side.

  In another shot, across a table covered with potted succulents, Mel smirks mid-bite, still wearing his khaki correspondent’s uniform and a brown coat but now filling them out better than he had when he’d first arrived at Brisbane. Next to Mel, Peggy Durdin gazes across the table and gestures toward her mouth as if adding description to the story.

  The gang from Chungking and Manila all knew how precious a night like this had become in this pounding of a war. Almost everyone, Mel noted, “had narrow escapes from Singapore, Burma, the Indies.” Now those who made it to Australia gravitated toward one another.

  These were old friends. Permanent friends. Friends who would carry this moment together always, whatever “always” meant.

  As the feast rolled on, the correspondents’ party continued up the stairs. Diller, Huff, Peggy Durdin, the Jacobys, and Romulo packed the room of the United Press’s Frank Hewlett.

  Mel and Annalee were reminded of that other gathering five months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, in Mel and Annalee’s Manila hotel room. But now fear was replaced by joy. Mel sprawled across Hewlett’s bed, eagerly prodding Romulo to describe his own hair-raising escape from the Philippines.

  “Tell us the story, Carlos,” Mel insisted. “Tell us how you made it out, and don’t spare a thing. Tell us about the antiaircraft fire.”

  It was clear that Mel had already heard the story; everyone had. But as the “last man out of Bataan,” Romulo’s story was already legendary beyond the Philippines.

  “And the earthquake,” Mel said. “Tell us everything.”

  Mel wanted every earthshaking detail of Carlos’s escape from Bataan. Mel’s own escape didn’t lack theatrics, but he couldn’t get enough of Romulo’s tale. After all, what did it lack? An amphibious vehicle converted into a rattling plane, enemy fire, even the minute-long temblor that shook the earth right as the plane took off. This was a year of great escapes. None of the reporters packed into the room wanted the story, or the night, to end.