by Bill Lascher
“The whole thing has busted here like one bombshell, though, as previous cables showed, the military has been alert over the week,” Mel wrote.
As the realization of what had begun set in, Manila residents rushed through the city, withdrew cash from banks, stocked up on food, and bought as much fuel as they could before rationing was ordered. Businesses quickly transformed basements into bomb shelters. Sandbags became scarce. As would happen all over the United States, local military rounded up anyone of Japanese descent, whether they were Japanese nationals or not. The Philippines waited for war.
Mel and Carl had little choice but to file blindly. Unable to contact wire service offices in either Asia or the United States to ask what material their editors wanted or needed, they were on their own.
“Manila had been a city of hell the first fortnight of war,” Mel wrote. “If it wasn’t planes overhead in the day, it was the flare shooters at night whose rockets struck panic.”
But neither Mel, Annalee, nor Carl succumbed to that panic. During the run-up to the attacks, Mel had rewarded Time’s confidence with ceaseless reports on the tense atmosphere gripping Manila. After the attack, he accelerated his reporting, setting to work on round-the-clock summaries of the war’s progression. His reports were shaped by observations of conditions in Manila, regular press conferences at MacArthur’s headquarters, and visits to the war’s front lines to witness the fighting himself.
Shortly after the war began, Mel and Carl drove three and a half miles southeast of the Bay View to Nielson Field, the headquarters of the Far East Air Force. There, Mel got his initial in-person glimpse of how chaotic the Philippines’ air defenses were.
“The hopeless confusion and the gestures when reports of enemy planes came over were depressing,” Mel wrote. “No one could do anything about them.”
During his visit, Major Reginald Vance asked Mel if he would like to ride along in a reconnaissance plane. Of course he would. Mel loved flying, and he knew his editors in New York would love a firsthand report of flying over the war zone.
Vance grabbed a .30-30 rifle and threw it at Mel.
“You’re the gunner,” Vance told Mel.
Mel wasn’t going up in some state-of-the-art plane. He was about to fly in a puddle jumper that couldn’t go faster than 150 miles per hour.
Just as Mel was about to sit down in the two-seater recon aircraft, Japanese fighter planes swooped overhead.
“And I was saved of the experience of being a gunner,” Mel wrote. “The puddle jumper was what we had left to fight the war with.”
On December 21, Japan began landing tens of thousands of troops at beaches along Lingayen Gulf, on the northwest side of Luzon. The next day, after an unexpected air raid, Mel drove with Joaquin Canuto, a Red Cross doctor, to northern Luzon to witness what was happening on the front lines.
At first Manila was chaotic. Mel wrote that he passed residents pouring out of buildings following the raid as young, boyish cadets marched into the streets for new assignments. As soon as he and Canuto passed the city limits, the chaos vanished.
“The Manila countryside suddenly looked peaceful, field after field of rice being harvested by farming peasants still unconcerned with the [Japanese] approximately a hundred miles distant by air and only rarely straightening their bent backs to glance casually at the planes flying over,” Mel reported to David Hulburd. Daily life appeared to proceed as usual in the villages and farms they passed except for when military cars sped by up the highway and planes flew overhead.
Soon the road passed through thick patches of jungle. The farther north they drove, the more signs of war appeared. People were camouflaging their cars with palm fronds. Men were riding atop buses as airplane spotters. There were military checkpoints. Villages even competed for the business of passing troops at their gas stations and repair shops.
“The strangest sight was the big colorful billboards enroute showing pretty girls beauteously advertising perfumes, cigarettes, etc., like any American highway,” Mel wrote.
After visiting the army’s staging area for the Luzon front, Mel headed west to Lingayen. Low-flying Japanese reconnaissance planes frequently passed overhead, and Mel had to stop and hide by the side of the road, unsure whether strafing fighters might follow. By the time he reached the city of Dagupan, Mel could feel the ground shake as Japanese ships shelled American positions farther north. The shelling had scared away almost everyone in the city except for a few of its police and nurses and its mayor. Though Dagupan’s residents had abandoned the city, those who remained were committed to their positions; each time a plane flew above the city center, the remaining police tried to shoot it down with their .38-caliber revolvers.
“Dagupan looked like a ghost city, everything alive yet no inhabitants,” Mel wrote. “I could see food on the plates in the houses, overturned chairs and tables.”
Mel continued to Lingayen’s coast. He passed huts with still-open doors and clothes-strewn streets clearly abandoned in a hurry.
“I found some dungaree-clad Filipino soldiers and was giving them cigarettes and chocolate when suddenly two big silver Japanese seaplanes flew over, circling low,” Mel reported. “I took cover with the soldiers, who were overjoyed that an American should visit them, saying: ‘You Americans are very good to us.’”
The soldiers were eager to meet Mel and curious about his press pass. After the officer in charge brought Mel to an overlook from which he could see a cluster of Japanese transports and other ships, Mel returned to his car. Before he left, Mel watched as the soldiers shook their rifles at the enemy seaplanes, which continued to circle “like hawks, slowly hunting prey.”
Mel cabled straightforward daily updates as well as flowing, literary dispatches describing the Filipinos’ resistance and the dramatic acts of heroism he witnessed every day, but regardless of what form his reports took, one message persisted and amplified over time: the Philippines needed America’s support, and the U.S. forces stationed there needed reinforcements. As Mel wrote to Hulburd:
The story of the battle of the Philippines, someday told fully, will be a story of American indecision in the Pacific. Another few weeks’ leeway and we would have been strong enough in the air to face the present odds. The Japanese had the most complete dress rehearsal of the Philippines attack. . . . The hue and cry from the front is to hell with cheery words from home and give us some planes which’ll enable us to stop the enemy cold.
As the attacks dragged through their first and then second week, nerves frayed throughout Manila.
“The same sunrise is glowing, and the sun sets over Manila Bay after a fortnight, but everything else is changed,” Mel wrote in an evening dispatch after the combined disruptions of Daylight Savings Time, nightly blackouts, and war-weariness had caused palpable changes in the Philippine capital’s atmosphere.
“Manila no longer appears like a Florida resort, the men in white sharkskin, the women gaily decked,” he reported in the December 18 dispatch. “The men are in checked suits, the women dressing in slacks with uncoiffured hair. Correspondents have long since shed coats and ties. Uniforms are now commonplace.”
A “people’s army” of sorts was forming, with shop owners arming themselves with .45s, women donning Red Cross uniforms, and everyone carrying gas masks. Fear had prevailed the first few days of the war, but it dissipated in favor of more “professional” conversations about day-to-day preparations. Women and children began moving into hotels and other large buildings known to have shelters. Horse-drawn carriages carried evacuees into the country. Profiteering leveled off.
With prospects unraveling in the capital, the idea of remaining became ever less attractive to Mel and Annalee. Bombers loomed by day. At night, every sound and light sparked panic, especially among Filipino guards and soldiers armed for the first time in their lives. The city’s residents were nervous, but, as Mel captured in one report, they still held out hope that the United States would come to their rescue:
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sp; Manila nights were like the battlefield; a thousand shadow fights raged. An electric sign would mysteriously beam out in the blackout and a hundred bullets would sing by it . . . You couldn’t go on the streets at night without a half dozen bullets splattering nearby. And all the time from the little groups at the bars, or working 24 hours a day in the Red Cross, or guarding bridges, came the same thoughts—the convoy will get here soon. The American navy was on the way—South.
But because of the “Europe First” strategy—and in the Pacific, a focus on defending Australia—no salvation approached from over the horizon. On December 8, Japan hadn’t just attacked Hawaii and the Philippines; it had bombed Hong Kong and Singapore and invaded Malaya and Thailand. In Shanghai, the illusion of a free city-state ended as Japanese forces occupied the International Settlement.
Nineteen forty-one marked the third straight Christmas that Mel spent separated from his family. But at least this year he had Annalee and their adopted family of fellow reporters to share what semblance of a celebration they could muster.
The holiday began quietly. That morning, Carl and Shelley visited the Jacobys in their room at the Bay View. Around a small tree on the room’s desk, the foursome opened presents together.
That night all four went up the street to the opulent Manila Hotel, where Clark Lee was staying. Until the previous night, MacArthur had been staying there as well. In its lobby, the Jacobys and the Mydanses met Clark and other members of the press corps for a subdued holiday dinner of turkey and champagne.
Clark had just returned from a four-day journey to Luzon’s front lines, where he had continued on his own after Mel returned from Lingayen. During that trip, both reporters had to dive in ditches to avoid dive bombers. Later, Clark found himself stuck in the middle of a firefight. As the bullets flew, he had abandoned his car. He then hiked along steep cliffs and hid overnight with indigenous Igorot populations, barely avoiding land mines as he negotiated tree-knotted jungle trails. Now Clark was planning another dangerous journey.
After Christmas dinner, as his Associated Press colleague Russell Brines shared a dance with Annalee, Clark pulled Mel aside and warned him that they should flee Manila. The Japanese were drawing ever closer, and Clark knew the Philippine capital would not be safe for the reporters when they arrived.
U.S. forces were already shifting their operations to Bataan—the jungle-blanketed peninsula to the northwest—and Corregidor, the fortified island at the mouth of Manila Bay where the military had moved its command center. And the Japanese were drawing ever closer to the capital.
Mel may have thrived amid Chungking’s wartime excitement, but he was also conscious of the dangers of war. In China, he often wrote his mother to assuage her worries for his safety. But now Mel faced more acute risks. In Chungking, danger approached mostly from the skies. That threat, as horrible as it was, was fairly predictable, given the Chinese capital’s ingenious system of lamps and human spotters, as well as the regularity of the bombings. Although many bombs had now also fallen on Manila, and would continue to fall, the greatest fear came not from the skies but from the specter of Japanese troops marching through the city’s streets any day now. This threat was something different.
“The ugliness of war rained down in great sheets like it had in China and Indochina, and the Americans learned for the first time to take it—and not as neutrals,” Mel wrote.
A day after the holiday, MacArthur, unable to hold the capital, declared Manila an “Open City,” leaving it undefended. MacArthur hoped this move might spare the city the kind of destruction and brutality that urban warfare had already brought to China and Europe. The general crafted the Open City declaration to limit civilian casualties by signaling—through radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and banners strung between buildings—that the Americans would no longer fight to control the capital. But the Japanese either missed the signals or consciously refused to heed them, and bombs continued to fall on Manila from planes emblazoned with the Rising Sun.
“There are no uniforms on the streets, no rush of tanks, army trucks, no military police guards at night,” Mel wrote. “The [Japanese] bombers flying over are not meeting a single anti-aircraft burst and are calmly circling and crisscrossing over the city, picking objectives as if in practice flights similar to Chungking.”
Morale in the city plummeted, but Filipino citizens wore much braver faces than their American counterparts. Many Filipinos resented their capital’s abandonment and wanted to fight, Mel reported. But as the Japanese grip on Luzon tightened, nearly three million Filipino civilians fled from their country’s cities and towns in search of safety amid the thick jungles that covered Luzon’s hills and mountains.
Meanwhile, thousands of Western civilians who worked for American businesses and government offices were left behind in Manila. The country was ultimately overseen by High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre, not its recently reelected president, Manuel Quezon. Both Sayre and Quezon, as well as their families, were evacuated to Corregidor, leaving Claude Buss the only representative of the high commissioner’s office left in the city.
In angry meetings with Buss, American men demanded that their wives and children be evacuated to Corregidor but were told that the fortress island lacked sufficient beds and provisions. The more vociferous among the civilians insisted that they’d arm themselves and resist the Japanese occupation without the army’s help, but each time Buss told them to go home, pack bags of supplies for possible internment in concentration camps, and “just wait.”
The reporters were less restive, but they were anxious.
On the day MacArthur’s forces began withdrawing from Manila, Mel was among five reporters—one from each of the major news outlets operating in the city—who were invited to Corregidor to continue covering the fighting with the American forces’ blessing. But the military wouldn’t allow them to bring their families. None of the reporters could agree to abandon spouses and children they’d brought to the Philippines—least of all Mel, who wouldn’t leave Annalee behind again. They needed another plan.
Before the war, both sides of the Pasig River had been lined with watercraft that could have served as escape vessels. But in the weeks following December 8, most of the boats had been bombed by the enemy; the rest had either been sabotaged or commandeered by the U.S. military.
“The last two weeks in Manila were the worst,” Annalee wrote. “The Japanese were getting closer; we knew Mel would probably be killed if they got him; and every way of getting out failed as soon as we thought of it.”
That the Japanese knew about Mel’s previous work with the Chinese government he was certain. They no doubt also knew that his earlier reporting hadn’t portrayed Japan favorably. Mel’s many graphic photo essays and narrative accounts had revealed the ghastly toll that the empire’s bombs had exacted on Chungking. His arrest in Haiphong a year earlier had briefly stirred the pot already simmering between Japan and the United States. And in early 1941 Mel had followed up his arrest with a damning report in Asia magazine outlining Japan’s occupation of Indochina and anticipating the country’s designs on the rest of the continent.
If the Japanese had a blacklist—and Mel was confident they did—there were many reasons his name was surely on it. Annalee’s likely was as well, given her work as a speechwriter for Madame Chiang, not to mention her connection to Mel. Like other American civilians remaining in Manila, the Jacobys couldn’t count on protection from the American government. They were also certain that if they were captured, they would be killed immediately.
“China days had taught us the meaning of Japanese blacklists,” Mel wrote.
Rumors of such blacklists ran rampant among the journalists. Neither Mel nor Annalee trusted that the enemy would grant them any lenience just because they were reporters. In fact, before the attacks at Pearl Harbor, Mel had received ominous warnings about his reporting from Japanese diplomats in the Philippines.
Whenever Mel, Annalee, Clark Lee, and the rest of
Manila’s press corps were not reporting on the battle for the Philippines, they were dissecting possible escape options. At one point, Mel and Clark plotted an overland journey to Bataan, but it soon became clear that such a trip would be impossible. Every bus in Manila had been requisitioned by the army to handle its massive realignment of forces, which were congesting every road to Bataan. As soon as these roads were cleared, the army blew up the bridges leading from Manila.
For a time, it looked like the Jacobys would be able to leave Manila aboard a British freighter bound for the East Indies, but the freighter was bombed the night they planned to leave. (Japan’s quick conquest of the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and Singapore after Pearl Harbor may have rendered such a trip pointless anyhow.)
Then it looked like Annalee and Mel would be able to escape with Carl and Shelley Mydans via another ship. General MacArthur granted permission for all four to board the Mactan, a hospital ship bound for Australia, but after the reporters’ bags were packed and in a car, the U.S. State Department telegrammed to say civilians could not be allowed to board. If they were, the Mactan would lose the protected status guaranteed by the Hague Convention. Shortly before it set sail, a consul from neutral Switzerland even inspected the Mactan to make sure the Red Cross had kept to these international guidelines. The Mydanses and the Jacobys were stuck.
Time, of course, was also invested in their escape, and Henry Luce weighed in on the foursome’s decision-making. On the day after Christmas, Luce cabled Mel to tell him that Time (read: Luce) wanted the reporters out of Manila if possible, but before deciding one course of action or another, Luce instructed, they should consider their own safety and ability to continue reporting in the future.
“Congratulations to all for magnificent work,” Luce closed his December 26 message. “We look forward more big jobs in Pacific all regards.”