by Bill Lascher
On April 29, the night before Mel’s departure upon the Clipper, Annalee wired Mel a bit of good news. Someone at MGM liked the screenplay the two of them were working on.
“She sure is a live wire,” Mel wrote in a letter home mentioning Annalee’s message.
If the damn thing does sell—if—and I get some money, the check will come to me, but half is hers.
That’s all except thanks again for everything and I’m already looking forward to home again. I’ll be careful —love, mel
With a roar and a shudder the Clipper lifted from Pearl Harbor on April 30. As gas fumes that would linger throughout the flight drifted through the cabin and its passengers started mingling, another reason for the security precautions became clear: the plane’s passengers. If the United China Relief dinner Mel attended in New York had gathered some of America’s most powerful philanthropists and business leaders, the Clipper manifest featured a spectrum of less widely known names that were nonetheless either incredibly powerful in 1940s Asia or about to make dramatic contributions to the course of World War II. Aside from the Luces, they included generals, spy chiefs and commandos, industrialists, and artists. The largest group was a party of U.S. Army Air Forces and Marine aviation officers headed to Asia to advise the Kuomintang’s air forces, study Japan’s strategy in its bombing raids, and plan air defenses in the Philippines. There was also a British businessman and onetime member of Shanghai’s governing municipal council named Valentine Killery, who was leading a team on its way to Singapore to set up an ill-fated arm of the United Kingdom’s clandestine special operations network. And one woman on board the plane would become a lauded hero by helping to feed thousands of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees.
Mel liked the plane’s crew much better than its “motley crowd” of passengers. Most of the passengers were stuck-up, rude, and inconsiderate to him, especially the British passengers, “who think they own the ship.” While the plane’s captain helped Mel get photos, one of the Brits, Phyllis Gabell—who was secretly traveling with Killery to set up the clandestine unit in Singapore—threatened to sue Mel for taking her photo. The two American generals on the plane were more cooperative; one even tentatively agreed to go on the air with Mel in Chungking.
Eight thousand feet above the Pacific, somewhere between Guam and Manila, “really beautiful” cloud formations and blue waters rolled in from every direction. Only an hour or two of turbulence disturbed the four days of otherwise pleasant island-hopping from Hawaii to Midway, to Wake, to Guam, and then, finally, to Manila before most of the passengers flew on to Hong Kong.
Mel got a special treat during the flight: an invitation to see the crew quarters on the Clipper’s upper level.
“Only myself and two generals rated,” Mel wrote. “Me to take some pics. The Generals to play around with the controls.” Having those generals at the controls, Mel later reflected, “gave passengers their only rough bump” of the trip.
At long stops on Guam and Midway, Mel and Luce started talking. Because of their mutual interest in China, their talks meandered extensively. This was unusual given Luce’s penchant for shutting down conversations on his own terms when he decided he was done with them. Mel must have made a strong impression.
The Clipper landed in Manila on the morning of May 5. It was a Sunday, so there was little opportunity for Mel to see the people he wanted to see in their offices. He caught up briefly with Dick Wilson of the United Press, who’d been one of his editors while he worked in Indochina, and two other friends, but spent his short stay at the Manila Hotel doing little else. He didn’t even have a chance to call Elza and Manfred, which he would regret when he was on his way to Hong Kong soon thereafter.
“My hectic stay here in Hong Kong is the initial real reminder that I’m back in the Orient,” he wrote. Mel discovered, to his dismay, that flights from the British colony to Chungking were fully booked four months out. But Mel knew that “a certain group here”—meaning Kuomintang leaders and other VIPs—could always get a seat on the planes, and he used the pull he had with this group from his XGOY days to secure such a ticket. He’d be flying with CNAC on a special flight with the Luces.
Mel dined with Mickie Hahn his initial night in Hong Kong, bringing with him the first copies Hahn had seen in print of The Soong Sisters, her biography of the powerful siblings. She was one of “thousands” of other friends Mel met up with during his brief stay in Hong Kong. It was a busy, hectic visit that also included a stay at the city’s best hotel.
“Never thought I’d come to that—did everything from order a belt for the Generalissimo to go to Madame H. H. Kung’s for dinner last night, and tea yesterday with Mme Sun,” Mel bragged. “Both of course interesting and all that but I’m a bit tired.”
As the sun comes up and the clouds clear, we look down upon a land of intricate and fairylike beauty. It is the land of the terraces of rice paddies and the land of thousands and thousands of hills, each hill terraced nearly to its top with rice paddies of infinitely varied shapes, some square, some round, but mostly like the sliver shape of the new moon, shapes within shapes until all but the wooded hill or mountaintop is full. It is the landscape which might have been dreamed by a child of pure imagination. The hills in Chinese paintings which seem quite fantastic are representative of those hills.
—Henry R. Luce, “China to the Sea,” Life, June 30, 1941
For different reasons, Luce and Mel each felt a sense of homecoming as their CNAC plane descended past Chungking’s mountains toward Shanhuba. Luce—who was on his first vacation in two years—saw the embodiment of the newest chapter in the grand tale of the country where he was born. Mel was returning to the place that had given his life purpose, opportunity, and community.
Though there was a crowd at Shanhuba to see Luce and his wife, a sizable group of Mel’s old Chungking friends also turned out to welcome him “home.” Well, to welcome Mel and the seventy-seven pounds of “stuff” he lugged from Hong Kong along with him.
It was, Mel understated, “sort of good to be back.”
So much had changed for Mel in the four months he had been away from Asia. He didn’t have a permanent job, but now his prospects for secure work in journalism were strong. When he boarded his Clipper flight, he had been disgusted by the preferential treatment granted to Henry Luce, yet by the time Mel arrived in Chungking he was not only impressed by the publisher, but the publisher had been impressed with Mel. In fact, it sounded from Teddy White like Luce was going to offer Mel a job with Time and Life. Indeed, Luce had taken a liking to Mel on the Clipper and cabled New York to inquire about him after they’d landed.
Maurice Votaw, Jim Stewart, an unidentified reporter, Ni-Nü Cheng, and Melville Jacoby share rare snacks on the balcony of the Press Hostel in Chungking, China. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.
Chungking had also changed. Perhaps everything but the city’s sodden air and slippery steps was different. The country was unraveling. On January 6, the day Mel had left Hong Kong to head back to the United States, a crisis that came to be known as the “New Fourth Army incident” had erupted, washing away the foundations—already eroding—of the United Front between the Communists and Nationalists.
Government troops had massacred thousands of Communist forces in Yenan, forces that had stayed behind after the Kuomintang ordered them to advance on Japanese troops to the north, a move that would have been suicidal for the Communists. Each side blamed the massacre on the other. The Communists believed that subordinates of Chiang Kai-shek had orchestrated the attack and that he later covered it up; the Nationalists alleged that the government troops were attacked and had returned fire out of self-defense.
As Teddy White and Annalee later detailed, Chungking “buzzed with rumors of an open breach, of an all out civil war.” According to the two of them, the government troops who carried out the attacks treated the Communists they’d captured savagely.
“The New Fourth Army incident drew a line of emotional hysteria acros
s all future relations of government and Communists,” they later wrote. “In the beginning it had been a war of all China against the Japanese; now it was a war of two Chinas—a Communist China and a Kuomintang China.”
When Mel arrived in Chungking that May, it remained unclear how matters stood between the two factions. One of Mel’s reporting priorities would quickly become assessing whether the United Front that had been forged following the 1936 Sian incident could be salvaged or if indeed China’s resistance was fracturing.
“The Communist-Kuomintang question is still an open sore,” Mel wrote a month after his arrival. “No one knows exactly how things stand.”
Still, just as he had done when he wrote calmingly to Elza about hysterical coverage of air raids, or even earlier, during the chaos following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Mel told his mother that conditions in China weren’t nearly as bad as rumored. Whether that was true for China as a whole, Mel discovered upon returning to Chungking that the same could not be said of the places there that had felt most like home. The city’s infrastructure was crumbling as the war dragged on, leaving the Press Hostel without electricity and consistent water supplies. It was also overcrowded—Mel had to squeeze in and share Teddy’s room—and there were holes in the wall from nearby explosions.
“Aside from these minor points—everything is fine,” Mel deadpanned in a letter.
Meanwhile, Holly Tong’s radio operation was in shambles, which had serious consequences for Mel’s stringing for NBC. The Japanese had pounded XGOY’s facilities, and Mel discovered that Mike Peng, the station manager, was struggling to keep the station on the air.
But Mel now had an out: Teddy White, who was going back to the States with Henry Luce after the publisher’s visit, suggested that Mel take over his duties for Time. After connecting with Luce on the Clipper, Mel felt comfortable taking the job despite his earlier belief that he had a bigger future at Newsweek. With the new position, Mel resigned from XGOY, happy that he would no longer be drawing a salary from the government, though he still volunteered to help keep the station’s broadcasts on the air.
Helping XGOY stay afloat was hard. It meant working in darkness until 10:00 P.M. in a fifty-foot-deep dugout. With Chungking’s electrical infrastructure in shambles, the station kept its equipment powered with batteries pulled from cars.
Mel spent much of his first week back in Chungking scouring the city for any piece of equipment he could use to whip the station into shape. He scrounged up spare batteries to power the station. He found extra vacuum tubes. Some nights Mel and XGOY’s staff would even broadcast without lights in the studio.
Still, once the studio was on the air, the result was much the same as it had been a year before. XGOY’s straining equipment sent Mel’s voice through Chungking’s souplike fog along radio waves that undulated for 10,000 miles to a little California beach town with a long wooden pier, hugged by dry, brownish mountains.
There in Ventura, on the sand a couple of miles south of the pier, tall rhombic antennae caught the signal and transmitted it through a nest of wires to a nearby Tudor-style home. (Doc Stuart and Alacia Held had moved their radio operation from their downtown dentist office.) Before seeing the day’s patients, Stuart and Held carefully monitored the incoming transmission, recorded and transcribed the broadcast, then retransmitted it to propagandists and news outlets.
The broadcast closed with a familiar sign-off spoken by a young journalist from nearby Los Angeles.
“XGOY is signing off now,” Mel said. “This is the Voice of China, the Chinese international broadcasting station, Szechuan China. Good morning, America, and good night, China.”
Chapter 7
“NOTHING BUT TWISTED STICKS”
For most of the hot, suffocating day of June 5, 1941, there were no bombers above Chungking. There were no alarms. There were no screams. There was simply the background chatter of a busy Thursday.
Crews work to douse flames after an air raid in Chungking, China. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby.
But beginning at about 6:00 P.M. that night, the city’s soundscape shifted. Alarms rang. Storefront shutters clattered closed.
Within an hour, eight Japanese planes roared overhead. Their crews opened bomb bay doors and showered Chungking with devices packed with kerosene and gasoline. Flaring across the sky, the bombs ignited the papery buildings that packed much of the dense city, replacing Chungking’s daily noise with the crackle of flames.
“Fires lit the city and the sky above glowed pink and red,” Mel wrote two days later in one of his first reports to David Hulburd, his new editor at Time, describing one of Chungking’s most catastrophic nights yet. He had been on the south bank of the Yangtze during the attack.
When the first alert went up that evening, nearly 5,000 people had packed into the city’s largest dugout, nearly a mile and a half long.
At first the city’s air raid warning system indicated that the enemy was gone. But half an hour later, the warning signal returned. More planes were coming. Police shouted for people to return to the shelters. Most had noticed the signal themselves and were already running back toward the gates.
“In one giant shove they crammed, jammed their way back through the monster dugout’s three entrances,” Mel wrote. The weakest in the crowds stumbled, and the panicked crowds shoved forward over them even as more fell beneath their feet.
“The sweltering crowd grew restless after the bombs had fallen,” Mel wrote. “Hundreds of them shoved towards one of the three entranceways for fresh air and a look-see.”
However, the shelter’s gates were locked, and guards wouldn’t reopen them. A few minutes passed, and the crowds began crashing against the main gate. Its guard relented, and the crowds streamed out to watch their city burn.
Now the city heard bones and flesh crumple as people ran in every possible direction. They bellowed. They cried. They sobbed. They gasped for air in the choked tunnels and howled in pain as they clawed and bit at one another as they tried to break free.
“There was shouting and cursing as only China knows it,” Mel wrote. “Women beating against those in front, children trying to find air. Scores went down to their death. As the sound of Japanese planes droning overhead came to their ears the shoving became even more intense and the bodies along the floor of the passageway more numerous. The excitement spread through the dugout like a swift breeze.”
As the next round of bombs fell, those inside the dugout again panicked and surged back against the entrances. Waves of frightened residents rushed both into and out of the shelter, each stampede crushing the other. The guards were so overwhelmed that they locked the entrance gates again, trapping the frightened masses inside, leaving those within to claw, scratch, and shove at one another.
Two more waves of bombers attacked, drawing the crisis out for hours. As ever more people were crushed and asphyxiated, bodies piled higher. “Whole families went down into the damp, dirt floor tearing at each other,” Mel wrote. “Body packed against body, walls of flesh grew.”
Finally, by midnight, the raids were over. Elsewhere in Chungking people emerged from the dugouts with their children in their arms. Exhausted, but alive, they headed home and tried to get to sleep.
“Cars honked along the streets again, government people and big merchants came out of their better-made dugouts only half tired, half joking about being kept awake all night,” Mel wrote.
But in the city center another two hours passed before the public shelter’s gates were opened. Its guards had fled. Once the gates finally were unlocked, few people emerged.
A museum exhibit at the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, China, re-creates desperate Chinese citizens caught in a stampede inside an air raid shelter during an attack on June 5, 1941. Photo by Bill Lascher.
“There were only a few faint cries heard inside,” Mel wrote.
First local police and other authorities arrived, followed by Red Cross workers. They found bodies everywhere, some unmoving,
a few still writhing.
“Most were dead,” Mel wrote. “Like piles of leering, gasping sardines in a cannery, they were twisted and piled here and there along the dirt-floored dugout. A few arms and legs were twitching.”
More than 4,000 people are thought to have died in the catastrophe. Blame for the disaster was spread widely. Starting within a day of the attack, air defense commanders were fired, foreign engineers decried shelter designs that limited air circulation and lacked ventilation, doctors excoriated soldiers for not properly removing the bodies, and politicians called for the heads of the municipal officials who cut corners while building the structure.
The night after the attack, Mel and the United Press’s Mac Fisher crossed the Yangtze River from the foreign district on the south bank to observe the recovery. On the sampan crossing the river, the reporters met survivors, one of whom had lost two brothers in the disaster. He claimed he saw Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek burst into tears when he visited the dugout at 4:00 A.M., a scene that was widely reported elsewhere.
Once Mel reached the dugout, he pulled out his camera. At the main entrance, seeing dozens of masked Chinese soldiers carrying dead bodies from the shelter’s black maw, he snapped a picture. On a nearby staircase he saw the dead still piled and sprawled where they had fallen an entire day before. He clicked the shutter again. Nearby, Red Cross workers threw the victims’ corpses into a truck, and Mel took another picture. He saw a lifeless child crushed by the stampede and took one more picture.
Along with a multipage dispatch describing the catastrophe in excruciating detail, Mel sent the negatives of these ghastly images to his editor, who passed them on to Time’s sister publication, Life magazine. Life let Mel’s photos do the talking and offered only a few paragraphs of explanatory text to contextualize the tragic images, which were accompanied in the magazine by a final, full-page print of a dead boy sprawled backward over a step, a little girl splayed nearby, both surrounded by dozens of other bodies.* Many of the bodies were half-naked, their clothes having been torn off in the frenzy to escape the stampede.