Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  The story—Mel’s first published contribution to Life—was a departure from the propaganda he had written for Holly Tong the previous summer. At a time when the Kuomintang struggled to keep control of this horrifying story, the report Mel sent with his photo negatives described the terrible scene he witnessed in far more vivid language than was usual for him and threaded a narrative reconstruction of the night’s attack that re-created its horror without straying into hyperbole. Whereas in his master’s thesis two years earlier he’d decried the “horror angle” in newspaper reports about the war’s first days in Peiping, he was now witnessing and reporting a horror that was far too real.

  The images also caused a stir among Life’s readers. One subscriber wrote to the magazine to decry its lack of “editorial discretion,” saying no publication should print pictures that “degrade the human body.” Another anticipated that his peers would take offense at Mel’s pictures, and that was why he welcomed the decision to print them. “It COULD happen here,” he wrote. Charles Kreiner, a reader from Baltimore, was altogether disbelieving. He claimed that Mel’s shots were provided by China’s publicity department and were the “fanciest piece of artificial nonsense” he’d ever seen. Kreiner wrote that he thought they were part of an elaborate propaganda scheme reliant on mannequins and sandbags for gruesome effect. Life couldn’t allow such an allegation to go unchallenged.

  “Reader Kreiner, like many another American, is refusing to believe the terrible facts of war,” the editor responded, noting that Mel was there and saw the bodies. “LIFE vouches for the authenticity of the pictures.”

  In weeks to come, Mel’s follow-up reporting only underscored how serious the situation was. The dispatches Mel sent David Hulburd were dense with accounts of the missteps and corrupt actions that worsened the catastrophe, story threads that were far too troubling for the Nationalists to contain. Much of that follow-up reporting would never see its way into print, but at this moment Mel was doing exactly what he’d set out to do when he first left for Shanghai after completing his thesis: he was documenting a nation and a city enduring a moment too important for the world to ignore. Now, as Mel began his career at Time Inc., he might be able to get the world’s attention.

  All summer long, Mel sent dispatches to Time. Fortunately, he had Teddy White in the magazine’s New York offices both to help interpret the significance of his reporting to the publication’s editors and to relay their messages and requests to Mel in a way he would understand. Already close friends, Mel and Teddy had established a sort of language between themselves common to people who work together in high-intensity environments. For example, shortly before the catastrophic raid on the downtown Chungking shelter, Mel began one letter with a note that indicated to Teddy that his message might be interrupted.

  “Well, my friend, the ball just climbed to its place, and you know what that means,” Mel wrote, referring to Chungking’s system of visual warnings to alert the city to imminent air raids.

  Writing to Teddy also allowed Mel to vent in a way that he couldn’t with his mother and stepfather. He could talk about the minutiae of his work and his experiences in Chungking with Teddy because Teddy understood the city and China.

  But even with Teddy’s advocacy, Mel wasn’t completely comfortable in his new position. He knew he could have had a secure job back in Sacramento, so far from the bombs. He could have been a bureau chief for the United Press, filtering the war’s news through the quiet of the Golden State’s capital. But Chungking, where the “full weight of being a Time correspondent” was suddenly crashing down upon him, was anything but quiet.

  “I must admit I haven’t had the confidence in the moment I thought I had,” he told his parents. “The job has me a bit worried. There is so much to do; and Teddy White did such a good job before me.”

  By the summer of 1941, America’s neutrality in the China-Japan conflict had become little more than a charade, and a halfhearted one at that. That spring the United States had finalized its long-negotiated lend-lease program, which would provide economic and material support to China, Great Britain, and, eventually, the Soviet Union for their war efforts. Now goods and supplies were beginning to pour into China. President Roosevelt’s handpicked advisor to the Chinese, Owen Lattimore, had just arrived in China. Indeed, Lattimore showed up in Chungking only shortly after the magazine he edited—Asia—published the analysis of the previous fall’s Indochina crisis that Mel had written in New York that March. That story explained not only how Japan had maneuvered its way into control of the French colony but how it had set the stage for the conflict to come.

  Meanwhile, three of the American air defense strategists who had traveled on the Pan-Am Clipper with Mel had been spending weeks reviewing China’s readiness for aerial warfare, as well as Japan’s use of airpower. Their 8,000-mile tour of China was a poorly kept secret; indeed, the Japanese had chased the air mission’s plane through the country. Often airfields and other sites they had visited were attacked shortly after they departed. Once, in Chengtu (Chengdu), the officers had to jump for cover in a nearby grave mound as a Japanese plane strafed an airfield.

  Flown around China on a camouflaged CNAC DC-3 piloted by Chiang’s personal pilot, Royal Leonard, the airmen were impressed by how their counterparts in China coped with such overmatched air forces. As Mel reported, they believed that if China had access to modern American planes or worked closely with the United States against a “common enemy”—which the strategists expected to happen—they could easily challenge Japan.

  Combined with Lattimore’s arrival, the airmen’s visit made it clear to Mel that geopolitical circumstances were changing quickly.

  “U.S. is pretty active here now in a big way,” Mel wrote. “Really sending the stuff in. No fooling around this time.”

  Money, equipment, diplomats, and young journalists from L.A. weren’t the only American arrivals in Asia in 1941. An elite force of American mercenary pilots was also beginning to pour into Rangoon, Burma, to train for escorting CNAC planes over the “hump” of the Himalayas. These pilots were the Flying Tigers, the mercenaries Mel had discussed with Madame Chiang before he last left Hong Kong. With the Flying Tigers’ arrival, increasingly favorable opinions of the United States circulated through Chungking, Mel noted. These new pilots would be a boon for China, especially since chatter about them also included rumors that they were bringing new planes. But that was all they were—rumors.

  There was, however, one report to which Mel paid close attention. Two more people were on their way to Chungking: Carl and Shelley Mydans. After many delays in their flights, they finally arrived on June 13 aboard a DC-3 with an extra wing strapped to its belly. Mel, who’d rented a room from Shelley’s mother during his last year at Stanford and received early photography advice from Carl, was eager to see them.

  Two days after the Mydanses arrived, Mel took them to the south bank of the Yangtze River, where many foreign embassies and businesses were built on the hillsides with sweeping views of central Chungking. One of these buildings was the soon-to-be-vacated German embassy. (Having recently recognized Japan’s puppet government in Chinese territory under its control, the Nazis were moving their embassy to Nanking.) To avoid being bombed by their Japanese allies, Nazi officials had draped a gigantic swastika atop the embassy. It was a relatively safe place to be during a raid, and Mel—who had first met German ambassador Baron Leopold von Plessen in Indochina—brought the Mydanses to its roof to watch the raid with a few other reporters who had come along.

  “They got the view and a fair shaking, too,” Mel wrote.

  Some of Carl’s pictures from the afternoon show the moment bombs blasted across the Chungking cityscape. Another shows smoke surrounding the Tutuila, a U.S. Navy gunboat moored in the Yangtze close to where an errant bomb hit. Other bombs fell near the U.S. embassy.

  “Now that the shelter catastrophe has been forgotten,” Mel noted wryly, “bombing talk in Chungking revolves around the question: Di
d the Japanese bomb the Tutuila on purpose.”

  Whether they had was up for debate, but Mel’s comment acknowledged a sadder reality: Chungking gossip had already moved on from the June 5 tragedy, even as another forty people died in a poorly constructed dugout near the U.S. military attaché’s office the same day the Tutuila was hit.

  It wasn’t just American facilities that suddenly seemed at risk. In early July, a bomb destroyed an annex to the Press Hostel that the reporters used as a mess. It also rendered the rooms of Till Durdin and some other reporters uninhabitable and blasted the roof off the main building.

  “But aside from living conditions, correspondents found themselves battling something worse than a hard bed and no whiskey,” Mel reported to Hulburd after he and the Mydans had returned from a trip. “The censorship since the end of last year gradually tightened until messages were always hacked to pieces, their guts gone, by the time they reached the cable offices.”

  Other branches of government were interfering with Hollington Tong, making it hard for the reporters to get a consistent message from the government. Inexperienced censors were cutting each reporter’s messages in different ways. For example, the press conferences of the National Military Council’s spokesman about recent battles were more than a week out of date.

  Chungking’s community of foreign correspondents had met that May to write a four-page bill of grievances to Chiang Kai-shek. That complaint covered censorship, government interference and confiscated mail, limited press permits, and other problems that made conditions for reporters worse than “press elsewhere in the world.” They also ripped into the widespread surveillance of reporters by secret police and other officials.

  By June, Chiang responded to the reporters through Hollington Tong, assuring them that a resolution would come soon and that censorship would be loosened. The reporters, Mel said, were “not entirely satisfied with the answer.” At first the censors loosened up considerably and government ministries appeared to be looking for better spokespeople, but the reporters adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Their gripes would continue throughout the course of the war and lead to the formation in 1943 of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, an organization now based in Hong Kong.

  Following Japan’s signing of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union that April, it stepped up its campaigns across China. With the risk of war against the Soviets quieted, Japan could expend more energy against China in the hope of breaking that country’s resistance before America’s volunteer air force got set up. Mel reported that most of the fighting was concentrated in China’s northwest, where Japan had established positions along the Yellow River, near T’ung-Kuan. Henry Luce, having visited the front lines himself, was eager for more on-the-ground material from there.

  Mel also had to take into account the aftermath of the New Fourth Army incident. Mel’s Kuomintang sources were publicly claiming that the 18th Group Army (another name for the Communists’ 8th Route Army) was not contributing to the anti-Japanese campaign, even though his sources privately admitted they didn’t have enough information about what the Communists were up to. There were no correspondents in Communist-controlled areas. It took visits to the party’s headquarters in Chungking to get its side of the story.

  “Correspondents take the Pirate brand cigarettes Communists offer, sip tea, and listen to [Communist Party] grievances which still follow the same patterns,” Mel wrote. These grievances amounted to the absence of pay, munitions, credit, and direct communication from the central government.

  In early June, Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai), Mao’s second-in-command and the Communists’ liaison in Chungking, penned an editorial that he had a subordinate slip under the doors of each Press Hostel resident. The piece denounced Kuomintang censors for burying six different reports about the 18th Group Army’s contributions along the Northern Front. Censors even tried to kill the official version of the piece, but now that Chou had printed enough separate copies for the correspondents to see, there was no way to actually do so.

  Mel summarized for David Hulburd a series of guerrilla raids that the 18th Group Army was making against Japanese positions in northern China. This “heckling” was a big part of the Communists’ strategy, but the Kuomintang had been suppressing reports about it.

  When he was in Chungking that May, Henry Luce had learned for himself that the war seemed to be focusing on China’s northwestern frontier, and he wanted the Mydanses to head there to shoot pictures and collect background for Life and Time. He also wanted Mel to go with them to supplement Carl’s photos and Shelley’s captions with his own writing and background.

  Shortly after Carl and Shelley arrived in Chungking, they and Mel flew to Lanchow (Lanzhou), a city in northern China on the banks of the Yellow River. It was the Chinese terminus of a highway connecting the Soviet Union with China. The Japanese were dug in outside of the city.

  Lanchow was dry. The outpost’s adobe buildings and the broad straw hats of its residents reminded Carl of Mexico, an impression similar to Mel’s when he visited Sian in 1937. Despite its strategic importance, Lanchow was a quiet, neglected-seeming place. Mel was surprised by its emptiness.

  “The streets are drab and dusty looking and have for color only the occasional donkey rider, or a vendor displaying brilliant rows of big apricots, melons, peaches and pears,” he wrote in a twenty-nine-page background report he provided to Time after the trip.

  They arrived on June 19, Carl and Shelley’s anniversary. After visiting the Lanchow front, they spent two hours looking for a bus to Sian. Finally a six-cylinder jalopy with a Russian-built chassis and Chinese-constructed body sputtered up to the bus station. It was falling apart and dirty, its upholstery torn up. Sixteen riders got on besides the reporters and Warren Lee, a government fixer who had been sent with them. Atop the rickety bus, ropes stretched willy-nilly across a mountain of canvas bags and other parcels. A license plate reading “3087” in large black letters hung crookedly from the rear bumper.

  Lee had told curious fellow passengers that Mel and Carl were American “aviators,” while he said that Shelley was a nurse. He had hoped to gain better treatment for his charges.

  “What it did gain was constant request and expectation for Mel and me to repair their dreadful bus every time something went wrong,” Carl noted. Assuming that if the “aviators” could fly a plane they were also skilled mechanics, the bus’s driver—whose conveyance frequently malfunctioned—left Mel and Carl doing the bulk of the spark plug replacements and other repairs.

  “Several times we successfully helped and each time the driver would start up and drive on before we had finished. To twist in a spark plug by hand and pound on it a few times with a hunk of iron was enough for him.”

  During the trip, the trio got shelled multiple times and stayed in a division commander’s cave when they visited the front lines. During one multiday journey to Chengtu, Mel had to ride on the roof of a Red Cross ambulance, unprotected from the sun.

  “My trip with Carl and Shelley to the northwest was exceptionally enjoyable although a bit rough and tumble,” Mel wrote to his mother.

  Four years after Mel had traveled with Harry Caulfield to Sian at the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan, he was back in the country’s interior. It was a completely different place. But it wasn’t all hellish. Mel was particularly fond of working with Carl, whose stark, high-contrast photography captured moments of subtle human emotion, scenes full of action and activity, and grand landscapes with equal care.

  One early Sunday morning, after a tire blew on their bus, Mel, Shelley, and Carl wandered up a hillside together to shoot pictures of the countryside. There were terraced hillsides, ancient forts in all directions, and shepherds with their flocks. Mel shot primarily in color, while Mydans, for the most part, stuck to black-and-white.

  “Maybe I’m getting soft but I’ll admit that the trip tired me for a while,” Mel said. Still, he said, the Mydanses were “swell people to travel with,” a
nd he liked having an opportunity to learn about what it was like to work for Time Inc.

  Two years earlier, when the Mydanses paid a visit to Shelley’s mother at the same time Mel was living in the Smith household, he and Carl spent much time talking shop. Mel remained interested in photography even though he was primarily working as a writer. Life had used Mel’s photos from the June 5 air raid shelter catastrophe, but only because the Mydanses weren’t in Chungking yet. However, even though Carl was Life’s photographer on the trip, he generously helped Mel improve his photography and discussed his techniques and equipment with the younger reporter.

  “Working with pictures helping Carl Mydans has taught me more than a photo class,” Mel said. “I really picked up some valuable tips, and fortunately he uses exactly the same equipment that I do. We shall be together for many months.”

  Carl told Mel that he had a good eye for shots but his technical skills could use some work. He also said that he’d benefit from more equipment, but since Mel used the same kind of camera as Carl, it wouldn’t be as expensive as it would be to start from scratch building the $5,000 (in 1941 dollars) worth of equipment Carl used. Mel even was equipped to take color shots.

  “Carl spends a lot of time coaching me on my pictures, which is quite a break since he is considered about the world’s A-1 [photographer],” Mel told his mother in one later letter. The trio shared an office at the Press Hostel, and Mel found Carl and Shelley to be “really swell people and fun to work with.”