The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  13

  Facing the War That Is Our War Now

  Today we speak of “before Pearl Harbor” and “after Pearl Harbor” as if those words were not a place but an event, like the Boston Tea Party. To Americans they signify the beginning of their war, but they have other connotations, too — a grave national error, for example, or a dark smudge on the myth of invulnerability. Pearl Harbor has become a mark on our national time line rather than a spot on the map; Americans not yet born when the Japanese bombed the U.S. Pacific base there can rattle off the date — December 7,1941 — but have only a vague notion of where it actually is.

  This same lack of geographical savvy was present on that Sunday when Americans around the world first learned that the Japanese had bombed a place called Pearl Harbor. It was home port to much of the nation’s fleet of destroyers, battleships, and cruisers, but its location was a mystery to farmers in Kansas and journalists in Europe alike.

  In London on December 7 the first reaction to the news was bewilderment. Mary Welsh was dining with her husband, Noel Monks, in a Park Lane restaurant when a friend from the Daily Express stopped by their table. “A naval base somewhere in the Pacific,” he said in response to their blank looks. In their flat on Marylebone Road, Lael Tucker and Steve Laird heard about it on the nine o’clock news. “I hadn’t the faintest idea where Pearl Harbor was,” Lael said later. “Everybody was phoning and asking, ‘Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?’” Helen Kirkpatrick, a houseguest at one of the great country houses outside London for the weekend, recalled that the company gathered there was “flabbergasted.” She drove back to London the next day and had supper that night with American ambassador John Gilbert Winant, whose conviction that democracy would triumph over Fascism was a welcome change from the defeatism of Joseph P. Kennedy. They listened to Churchill on the BBC. “[He] sounded tired,” she confided to her diary, “or else very tight.”

  Eleanor Packard was in the UP office in Rome when the urgent cable from New York came in. She informed the American press attache, who set up a “war council” in his hotel suite; Eleanor phoned them with the latest from New York as it arrived. At Monday morning’s weekly press conference, she politely inquired if the Italian government had any comment on the actions of its Axis ally at Pearl Harbor. Italy had none.

  Although the outbreak of war had long been anticipated, Americans in Rome were unsettled by the news. The expatriate poet Ezra Pound dropped by the Packards’ to talk it over. An admirer of Fascism and personal friend of Mussolini, Pound lived with his English wife and daughter in a small house in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera. He had been broadcasting against Roosevelt for nearly a year. He said he thought war between Italy and America inevitable, but he intended to stay. Reynolds reminded him that he would be branded a traitor if he did so, and that he would do well to stop praising Fascism and keep quiet. Pound replied that he believed in Fascism, and gave the Fascist salute. Yes, he was paid for the broadcasts, but very little, and that was not why he did them, he said, rising indignantly to pace about the room. He did them to save the American people.

  Eleanor and Reynolds had known Pound years before in Paris when he focused more on poetry than on politics; they thought the lack of appreciation he had received in America for his dozens of volumes of prose and poetry had embittered him. He knew that at home he was regarded as a failure and an eccentric. Italy didn’t treat him as a failure. So he stayed.

  By Wednesday, December 10, it was clear that Mussolini would line up with Germany and Japan and declare war against the United States the next day. The Packards were deep in discussion with other correspondents at the bar of the Foreign Press Club, with Japanese reporters doing their best not to hear any remarks derogatory to Japan so they would not feel obliged to respond, when German press chief Baron Wolfgang von Langen came in and announced that German correspondents in America had been arrested. Yes, Reynolds said, and the same was true of American reporters in Berlin. He knew that Italian reporters in the United States had also been taken into custody, but left that unmentioned. Still, it was a reminder not to dawdle. Excusing themselves, Reynolds and Eleanor returned to the UP office, locked the door, shoved all the files and documents into a tin wastebasket, burned them, and threw the ashes out the window. At home that night, they burned letters from anti-Fascist friends, which, if found, could have been used against them.

  Eleanor lamented the break with ordinary Italians she had known through the years. They had exhibited none of the fanaticism of their German allies, but had remained unfailingly polite and helpful. At breakfast the next morning the cook and maid were both in tears. Why would Mussolini declare war on the United States? America must be half Italian, they had so many friends who had gone there. At the office, where Reynolds paid the salaries to date of the staff, several men turned their heads away as they shook hands, embarrassed at their emotion.

  At one o’clock Eleanor and Reynolds locked the office and made their way, skirting the crowd of thousands, toward the Palazzo Venezia. Many men were in Black Shirt garb, and Mussolini, when he appeared on the balcony, was wearing the same. In a scene out of a Laurel and Hardy movie, he was followed by the German ambassador, who towered above him, and the tiny Japanese ambassador, whose delicacy was in sharp contrast to Mussolini’s paunchy form. He spoke briefly, pausing after each sentence to allow the professional cheering squad to do its duty. The applause was amplified by loudspeakers, but Eleanor noticed that most people were silent. Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had never been popular, and the shouts of “Duce! Duce! Duce!” at the end were theatrical but lacked feeling. The passivity of the demonstration marked the first open protest against Mussolini that Eleanor could recall.

  As they turned to leave, a White Russian colleague, whom they knew to speak excellent English, addressed them in Italian. Had they heard, he remarked in an impersonal tone, that the Italians were arresting American correspondents? It was all the tip-off they needed. Grabbing a taxi, they directed it to the American embassy and, once there, made a run for it straight through the line of carabinieri. Other American reporters were arrested that same afternoon. About midnight the Packards had a bite to eat and then left the embassy, having concluded that some reasonable arrangement would likely be made, and it was perhaps best not to appear to be avoiding arrest. They were escorted to the stone gateway, and had just stepped out into the darkness when two men joined them with the gruff message: “We have orders to take you to the Questura.”

  The Philippines lie on the far side of the international date line, so when Japanese bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, it was Monday, December 8, in Manila. Mel and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby lay asleep in their room at the Bay View Hotel, and Carl and Shelley Smith Mydans in theirs. When Carl heard the swoosh of the morning paper pushed under the door and opened his eyes, the headlines were exceptionally large and black. Shouting to Shelley, he jumped out of bed, grabbed the paper, and read aloud: “PEARL HARBOR BOMBED. WE ARE AT WAR WITH JAPAN.”

  Correspondents in the Pacific knew very well where Pearl Harbor was, but the residents of the Bay View were nonetheless dumbfounded. No one had thought Hawaii within reach of Japanese bombers; everyone had expected the Philippines to be the first object of Japanese aggression. In fact, Japanese planes bombed Clark Field outside Manila within hours of Pearl Harbor. After the attack, with Carl occupied elsewhere, Shelley interviewed members of the New Mexican National Guard who had manned the antiaircraft guns. The score was all in Japan’s favor. Although the pilots had been ordered into the air when news of Pearl Harbor first came through, they failed to encounter the enemy, so returned for lunch. American planes were thus wing-to-wing on Clark Field when the Japanese bombers arrived. Life printed Shelley’s story of two sergeants in their early twenties who had never fired at a live target before that day:

  We just got in position when pursuits started coming over us. I was down on my knees behind the sandbagging at the gun when I got
hit... if I’d been six inches further over, I’d have got it. It felt like a red-hot wire going right under my arm and past the forearm. I looked down and saw some blood and it felt hot a minute. But I didn’t have time to think about it, just wiped the blood off and kept firing.... We were just a bunch of little kids out there when we started. We didn’t know what it would be like. We had no officers — our second lieutenant was still at lunch — we sergeants were the only ones there.

  If Shelley considered inserting a few obvious questions into the story — such as, did the U.S. military think the Japanese held the American lunch hour sacrosanct? — she squelched the impulse. They would never have seen print anyway. General Douglas MacArthur, the man in charge in the Philippines — like General Chiang Kai-shek, the man in charge in China — had the perfect confidence of Henry Luce.

  Annalee Whitmore, now attached to Liberty magazine, set out after stories of her own. That night, looking out the windows of the Bay View into the blackness, she watched “searchlights cutting the sky into parallelograms.” With dawn came the air raids. At first the alarm system malfunctioned, and she and Mel lay clutching each other in the darkness as the thud of bombs came closer. The roar of planes seemed to shake the room, and from the window, in the direction of Nichols Field, they watched a patch of red spread through the sky. In the morning they learned that all the forts and airfields around Manila had been hit.

  Whitmore sent off her stories in “cablese,” i.e., lacking obvious words any editor could supply, and Liberty printed them verbatim.

  Friday, December 12. Manila’s tenth air-raid alarm on. Bombed day before yesterday, night before that, day before that. May be again any minute. Can still look across bay and see fires.

  We’re used to hearing shots now. Don’t even stop to wonder if they’re snipers, antiaircraft fire, automobile backfires. Hospitals overflowing. Enlistment stations jammed with volunteers. Taxis, gasoline, even film requisitioned by army. Many stores padlocked — rest shut down at four. Nothing on streets after sunset except tired volunteer wardens and few groping cars, headlights painted out. All light globes removed; chandeliers yanked down. We live with packed bags in world of blindness at night once we leave dim hotel lobby.

  Rumors run riot—Japanese landed on Luzon, marching here; parachutists at large; fifth columnists on air-raid-alarm staff; water supply poisoned. Eleven people rushed to hospitals violently ill after drinking tap water. All sent home in perfect health. Nerves....

  Schools closed. Bloody railroad bombings began. Drugstores had no more bandages, iodine. Hardware stores empty except for clutching crowds around flashlight counters. Our grocery taped and padlocked beneath sign, “Cheerful service to all.” Favored buyers admitted after speakeasyish whispered conference. Frenzied buying inside — half shelves bare. Drove by evacuees sitting patiently on small bundles of belongings, waiting to be picked up by Red Cross trucks.

  Hotel boys painted windows of bathroom thick dark green. That night we used it, with one feeble medicine-cabinet light, for our office. Our doorman joined navy; our lavandera fled to provinces with laundry; hotel boys deserted; menu shrank. “What to do in case of poison-gas attack” posted in lobby....

  Next day it really came — a little before noon, when cracking of antiaircraft guns started from every direction — drone of engines — air-raid siren. Twenty-seven planes directly overhead, very high, in perfect formation. A dogfight began. One plane down, crashed in distance. Bombs spurted in big semicircle of white, gray, black smoke columns. Geysers of water rose and fell in bay, leaving two ships burning. .. .

  Mydans, Smith, Jacoby, and Whitmore were four of some 3,500 American civilians in the Philippines. At first that was reassuring — surely the United States would not abandon so many of its citizens — but what their government could do was less clear. The inadequate defenses that Shelley and Carl had noted in the fall proved just that, but the editors at Life missed the import of that message. They liked Shelley’s story on the two National Guard sergeants defending Clark Field, they cabled, and how about a story of Americans on the offensive? Something like the stories coming in from MacArthur’s headquarters about heroes in the air, and such. Shelley was amazed that they thought an offensive still possible in Manila. Censorship was tight, so she simply cabled back: “Bitterly regret your request not available here.” Her cable hit the Time Inc. office like a bomb; only then did the editors perceive that America was in real danger of losing the Philippines.

  In fact, denial was general, even among the correspondents. Some conjectured that perhaps Japanese troops would bypass the capital. Had they not landed on Luzon nearly two weeks before, and still not been seen in Manila? But Annalee was present at USAFFE (U.S. Army Forces Far East) headquarters on the morning of December 22 when the daily communique was passed out, indicating that eighty enemy warships and transports had been sighted off Lingayen Gulf, headed for shore. The invasion is upon us, she thought. What shall we do now?

  Christmas morning was quiet. Shelley and Carl opened their presents beside a tiny tree in their room at the Bay View, while in the courtyard below a Filipino serenaded them with “God Bless America.” Mel and Annalee had Christmas dinner — turkey, a bottle of champagne — with Clark Lee and Russell Brines of the AP. A phonograph scratched out old songs. Brines asked Annalee to dance, and Lee took advantage of the moment to warn Jacoby that events were moving fast; it was time to fold up and get going. “Especially you,” he said. “You are on their blacklist for your work for the Chinese government in Chungking.”

  Both couples were faced with a dilemma. They had seen Clark Field and the naval base at Cavite knocked out in the first few days, seen squadron after squadron of Japanese bombers blast the old walled city, seen the centuries-old Santo Domingo church go up in flames. From private sources they also knew that as Japanese troops landed outside Manila, American-Filipino forces were retreating into Bataan, the thirty-mile peninsula stronghold along Manila Bay. Immediate action was called for, but how should they act? Should they try to leave Manila — an initially dangerous but, if successful, surely preferable course? Or should they join other civilians in almost certain internment? Shelley, always mindful that someone else might need a place on a boat more than she, leaned toward staying. Besides, a boat she and Carl considered leaving on had been blown up in the harbor, which gave one pause. Annalee, with her determination, her predilection for decisive moves, favored escape. If Mel’s name was on a Japanese hit list, she thought, surely escape was the better course.

  On the last afternoon of the year, Carl, Shelley, Mel, and Annalee, along with AP reporters Clark Lee, Russell Brines, and Ray Cronin, collected in the Jacobys’ room at the Bay View. Mel had located a captain who was taking a freighter to Mariveles, on Bataan, that night. Clark Lee announced his intention of going. Carl assessed the plan as too risky and opted for internment for Shelley and himself. Cronin and Brines, whose families were also in Manila, chose the same course. Jacoby could not make up his mind; in the end it was Annalee who said, “We’re going, Mel.” With that settled, they proposed a farewell drink together, only to discover that the women, having heard stories about the effect of alcohol on Japanese troops, had poured all the liquor down the sink.

  At ten-thirty that night the captain picked up his passengers and drove to the docks. The U.S. military had dynamited the oil storage tanks, and flames leapt toward the sky. By their light the four scrambled onto a tug and from there to a small freighter, which promptly backed out into the bay and headed toward Bataan.

  At dawn on January 2, 1942, Carl and Shelley watched Japanese troops enter Manila, riding up the boulevards on bicycles and tiny motorcycles, little flags with the rising sun on their handlebars. The city “lay ringed by fire waiting for the conquerors,” the Mydans team wrote later in Life, and continued, “The river was ablaze, and the bay, dotted with the hulks of sunken ships, was scummed with thick oil. As the smoke condensed in the thunder clouds above us, it rained black rain.”
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br />   Orders were issued that all non-Filipinos were to collect whatever they could carry, including food for three days, and gather at a central point. Shelley and Carl hid Carl’s cameras on the off chance they might see action anytime soon. Crammed with other Americans and their possessions in the back of a truck, they set off for the deserted University of Santo Tomas, arriving at the great dusty compound at sunset. The main building was overflowing with anxious men and women and crying children. Numbed, the couple walked along the concrete hallways, peering into barren classrooms — concrete floors, plastered walls, a blackboard, all lit by a single bare bulb. Sleeping quarters for men and women were separate. They found a spot for Shelley on the floor of a room with thirty other women.

  The next morning, after coffee contributed by those who still had coffee, the internees began to organize themselves. Their captors appeared to have forgotten them. Luckily, their Filipino friends had not; they came to “the fence” — an area near the gate where the yellow concrete wall and barbed wire stopped — with food, clothes, and bedding. The only food the prisoners had during the first week came in that way, thrown over the eight-foot wall. Once in those first few days a man with a German accent, standing in front of Shelley in the food line, mentioned that he had been interned before. All within hearing were interested. It was during the First World War, he said. He was a German citizen caught in Canada on business when hostilities began. There was a German community in the area; all in it were interned, and he with them. Certain that it was a temporary measure, they kept telling their Canadian guards that in just a few more days they would surely be released.