Eve of a Hundred Midnights
Page 22
Prior to Pearl Harbor, Mel had befriended representatives of the Dee Chuan Lumber Company. The company had been founded by a recently deceased Chinese Filipino business tycoon who used his riches to help support the Kuomintang in its fight against Japan. After the outbreak of war between China and Japan, Dee Chuan helped organize a boycott of Japanese goods in the Philippines and other resistance efforts. After his death, his sons took over the company but kept his name.
Three weeks into the war, Mel got in touch with representatives of Dee Chuan Lumber. Together they scoured Manila’s waterfront and the Pasig River for a craft Mel could use to get out of the Philippines. They identified a freighter that was then moored in the Pasig, which spilled into Manila Bay just up Dewey Boulevard to the north, past a foreigners’ golf course and the old walled city. The freighter might be able to make the 2,000-mile journey between Manila and Australia. The shippers outfitted the vessel with enough food and diesel fuel to take a crew and passengers, including Mel and Annalee, the entire way.
“I was scared then—afraid of getting caught, and afraid of trying to sail through the Japanese Navy outside Manila,” Mel told his editor at Time. “I told Carl and Shelley but they didn’t want to come with us.”
Carl and Shelley were the closest thing to family the Jacobys had in Manila. Just as Mel looked up to Carl, the couple inspired Annalee. But neither the Jacobys nor the Mydanses realized the full extent of the massive realignment of American and Filipino forces to Corregidor and Bataan. A week after Mel had arranged for the tug to be left in the Pasig, he and Annalee made their decision to escape. But then Mel discovered that the tug had been taken by members of the retreating U.S. Army. Without a boat available, it appeared almost certain that the reporters would be stuck in Manila.
Escape by sea would be treacherous enough, but given the U.S. Navy’s widespread mining of the harbor, any boat without an expert navigator familiar with the mines’ locations was doomed. The waters were also crowded with the hulks of bombed or sabotaged ships that had sunk just beneath the waves or still smoldered on the harbor surface. Escape by land was no more promising.
“None of us knew about the Bataan maneuver until New Year’s Eve,” Annalee later told CBS’s Bill Dunn, adding that bridges were being blown up on every side of the city that night as Japanese patrols neared.
With their options for escape slim, most of the Manila-based reporters resolved to remain in the city despite the looming possibility of Japanese conquest. For many, the prospect of internment was more appealing than attempting to survive treacherous seas or jungles rife with snipers, booby traps, and other hazards. Some reporters even believed that if the press remained, the Japanese might keep them under house arrest at the Bay View for the duration of the conflict.
Others, however, didn’t trust Japan to act humanely if they rounded up the reporters. Four years earlier, when Japanese troops captured Nanking, they unleashed savagery shocking even compared to all the other horrors of World War II. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and raped during three weeks of terror in Nanking. The perceptions of Japanese brutality held by the close-knit foreign press corps were shaped in part by accounts from their close friends in Chungking who had witnessed the “Rape of Nanking.”
The Jacobys, the Mydanses, and many of the other reporters at the Bay View were friends of Tillman Durdin, the New York Times reporter who had been in Nanking, and they didn’t want to find out whether the Japanese would behave in Manila as they had in that city.
New Year’s Eve 1941 arrived with Japanese troops “just a stone’s throw” south of Manila. U.S. General Hugh Casey’s engineers were among the last in the city. They were tasked with destroying anything of value behind the retreating American forces, beginning with RCA’s radio transmission facilities.
“The same thing happened in a thousand places in and around Manila that morning,” Mel wrote. “Bridges, radios, warehouses, everything went up with a noise that sounded to the people like bombing and sent them jittering into the street.”
With their fate uncertain, Manila’s press corps gathered in Mel and Annalee’s sixth-floor room at the Bay View. Thirty-two reporters packed into the tiny space to debate the merits of an escape and discuss what might happen if they were to be captured or placed under house arrest.
Clark Lee had no interest in waiting for a Japanese roundup. He was determined to attempt escape.
“Anything to stay out of their hands, even if it’s only for a few hours longer,” Clark said.
For days, Clark and Mel had been poring over maps of the Philippines and assessing updates on Japanese positions while they proposed, and subsequently rejected, dozens of potential escape plans. Now as midnight—and the Japanese occupation—drew ever nearer, Mel began forming a new plan.
Most of the American forces—and their vehicles—were converging on Bataan; perhaps the Jacobys could make their way there, then try to find another boat that they and anyone who wanted to join them could take for a perilous journey from the Philippines to Allied territory.
“By the time we’e [sic] finally decided to get to Bataan there was almost no way of getting there,” Annalee wrote. “We thought there might be a small chance of watching for a dark night and getting away before the end came.”
While the meeting at the hotel went on, Mel left to scour the nearby waterfront for any boat somehow left behind. Disorder reigned at the docks. Looters were clearing out warehouses while the few remaining American army and navy forces sabotaged oil tanks and other key facilities. The Japanese were still a morning away, though Mel was certain that he saw some of their scouts in plainclothes bicycling amid the crowds. He did his best to ignore the mayhem while he searched for anyone willing to risk a trip through the mine-laden bay with reporters on board.
Sifting through the masses, Mel found Captains William Hastings and Chet Judah, two American merchants he’d met previously. Their small inter-island ship, La Florecita, was nearby. The U.S. Army Transportation Service (ATS) had been using it for days to tug ships out of the Pasig River to draw bombers away from the city. Now, laden with ammunition and other supplies intended for Bataan, the vessel—also owned by Dee Chuan Lumber—was the last boat left afloat in Manila besides the hospital ship Mactan.
Mel told Hastings that neither he, his wife, nor Clark Lee thought it was safe to stay in Manila. Hastings and Judah were preparing to run the tightening Japanese blockade after delivering their cargo to Bataan; they might be able to bring others with them. Hastings told Mel to stay close to a phone. He’d call when it was time to go.
Leaving the dock, Mel raced away from the port, along Dewey Boulevard and back to the Bay View to deliver the news. The correspondents crammed into his hotel room were still debating whether they should try to escape. Some still held tightly to the belief that if the press remained together as a group, they’d be treated fairly by the Japanese. Or they could go to Bataan.
But nobody knew how much resistance the American and Filipino soldiers were putting up against the Japanese on that peninsula. Many of the reporters thought it was needlessly dangerous to try to reach Bataan. Some guessed that total defeat—on Bataan and throughout the Philippines—might come within the week, while others believed the country might hold for a short time longer than that.
“It still seemed better to have that week than to sit still and do nothing, especially with the blacklist hanging over our heads,” Mel wrote. But few thought the U.S. would last much longer on the Bataan Peninsula. That meant a risky escape there could amount to nothing.
Back in the hotel room, Mel told his companions about La Florecita.
“We’re going to run the blockade,” he told his colleagues. “Annalee, Clark and myself.”
Nobody accepted their invitation to join. Not even Carl and Shelley Mydans, who had also rejected earlier plans to escape by boat. The Mydanses wavered at first, but the Jacobys weren’t able to change their minds.
“Carl and Shelley decided to
stay, hoping to be alive after two or three years of concentration camps,” Annalee wrote, noting a few lines later that the Mydanses continued to try to convince the Jacobys to stay, “thinking we’d surely be killed, but we were sure Mel would be killed anyway.”
Nobody in the Jacobys’ Bay View Hotel room came to their decisions easily, and the choices the couples made to either escape or stay behind would forever haunt both the Mydanses and the Jacobys. In an exhaustive history of women journalists who covered World War II, the author Nancy Caldwell Sorel provided a compelling analysis of what all four may have thought that fearful night:
It is often the case that when danger threatens, even when the risks are apparent, people do not heed and leave while they still can. Journalists are a special case: the story, and the glory, belong to those who stay. Neither Carl Mydans nor Mel Jacoby gave serious thought to quitting Manila until the choice had narrowed to hazardous escape or internment, and although the Smith and Whitmore families may have urged their daughters, both in their mid-twenties, to return home while they still could, those daughters, reporters themselves as well as wives, did not consider that option. Both experienced the intensified romantic feeling and marital connectedness that danger elicits. Both loved their husbands deeply.
Mel hated the thought of leaving the Mydanses behind after everything they’d survived together, but, he realized, “I guess that’s in the game now.”
Ultimately, of the thirty-two journalists gathered in the Jacobys’ room, all except Mel, Annalee, and Clark Lee opted to stay. (Later that night, the United Press’s Frank Hewlett found a Chevrolet and drove to Bataan with Nat Floyd of the New York Times and Curtis Hindson of Reuters; they barely made it past a series of bridges before U.S. Army engineers demolished them.) The rest left to gather their families. They would return later that night to set up cots in the Jacobys’ room and exactly one floor below in 520, the Mydanses’ room.
That afternoon, when Mel left for the docks to look for a boat, Clark Lee rather absurdly returned to the Manila Hotel and its barbershop for one last haircut. He also stopped at a lackluster New Year’s Eve dinner hosted by relatives and went to the USAFFE’s now nearly vacant headquarters to confer with remaining officers about whether any alternative possibilities for escape had emerged.
While Clark was gone, Mel and Annalee made their own preparations. As early as Christmas Day, the Jacobys had packed a knapsack to be ready if they had to make a quick departure. There was room in it only for a camera and some plain, sturdy outfits. Preparing the bag was heartbreaking. They had to leave behind their lavish wedding gifts and tributes from Madame Chiang, her sisters, and other Chinese elites, as well as from dear friends. Bamboo and silver vases, embroidered satin blankets—all of them were priceless, but they couldn’t spare even an inch of space.
They might be living out of their bag for months, if not years, to come, so each ounce was precious. While they waited to hear from the crew of La Florecita, Mel and Annalee finished packing the bag; with their destination uncertain, they filled unused space with canned food and a couple more pieces of clothing.
Besides most of Mel’s photography equipment, they also abandoned hundreds of dollars they had deposited in a Manila bank, much of which family had given them as wedding gifts.
Then there were the notes. Six hundred typewritten pages’ worth. Mel’s notes were a voluminous record of three years of reporting: they traced his path—and the war’s—through China, to Southeast Asia, and finally on to the apocalyptic scene unfolding outside his hotel room in Manila. They were proof—documentary evidence of everywhere Mel had been, every detail he had recorded when he dissected China’s political and economic climate, every analysis of military strategy he’d prepared, all the sources he’d met, even all the intimate, confidential reflections on the U.S. and Filipino preparedness for war he’d gleaned in the weeks preceding Pearl Harbor. Much of his documentation underscored how woefully unready the American forces were for battle in the Philippines.
The notes had to go.
Mel and Annalee went to their hotel room’s tiny bathroom. Its curtained window cast a greenish light on the couple as they tried to burn their notes in the toilet and sink. The room filled with smoke.
One floor below, Carl and Shelley Mydans were doing the same. The rumors about approaching Japanese troops were becoming more urgent. The latest had the enemy just two hours away, in the town where Mel and Annalee had celebrated their brief honeymoon a month earlier.
Mel came down to Carl’s room. After they continued to struggle with flushing their notes, they decided to try the hotel’s furnace. Another journalist in Manila, Royal Arch Gunnison, later wrote that this might have been a dangerous decision: anyone seen burning documents just before an occupation might be suspected of being a spy destroying evidence. Nevertheless, Carl and Mel decided to take that risk. Mel went upstairs, where he and Annalee stuffed their notes into a pillowcase. Then he raced back down to Carl’s room and together the two wordlessly ran to the basement.
The door to the furnace room was locked. Mel started ramming the door with his shoulder. Finally, both Mel and Carl kicked at it. The door crashed open, echoing in the basement. They scrambled through a cluttered storeroom and found the growling furnace. Carl grabbed its door with his pillow to protect his hand from the heat. Without speaking, both men threw their notes into the flames.
Most events in life don’t sync up with calendars. But somehow Mel’s life repeatedly returned to moments like this when history converged all too perfectly with his own doings. Now everything he and Carl had experienced was condensed into a space consisting of the six floors between their cramped, smoke-filled bathrooms and this hot basement, dark except for the furnace’s glow. A meticulous note taker throughout his life, Carl couldn’t stomach watching months’ worth of his notes burn. Mel had already started considering one day writing a book about China, but now he watched everything he’d worked toward for most of his adult life go up in flames.
Neither Mel nor Carl spoke, not even after they made sure their notes were gone and each had returned to their wives and their rooms. It was as uncomfortable a position as any of the four had found themselves in, and neither the Jacobys nor the Mydanses would verbalize why.
For the rest of their lives, this moment would haunt them and cloud their recollection. Never would they be able to flush away the memory of what they had done. Barely two years had passed since Mel first met Carl. They’d since shared an intimacy of the sort that usually only exists in foxholes and bedrooms, but that night the basement of the Bay View felt more like a crime scene.
Once back upstairs, Mel called Clark Lee and told him to get back to the Bay View in case Captains Hastings and Judah showed up. When Clark arrived, the trio once more tried to convince the Mydanses to join the escape, but their friends still refused. The argument intensified. Suddenly, as if punctuating the debate, a flash as bright as day lit the room. The windows shook tremendously. Great black columns of smoke roiled into the sky to the north. The departing American forces had just blown up the city’s central gasoline reserves across the Pasig River.
“Annalee supplied the adjectives,” Clark wrote. “‘Stupendous, terrific, colossal, terrifying, magnificent, overwhelming,’ she gasped.”
Aware that this was likely to be the last night they were together for some time, the reporters decided that a farewell toast was in order. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find any booze. Annalee and Shelley had poured all their liquor out, fearful of rumors about how “berserk” Japanese soldiers would get if they got ahold of it. Without a drink to share, the Jacobys simply sat with their colleagues in their darkened hotel room and watched Manila go up in flames. There were fires in every direction.
At 10:30 P.M., the sharp clatter of a ringing telephone cut through the hotel room’s anguished quiet. Captains Hastings and Judah were downstairs. La Florecita was ready. If the Jacobys wanted to get out of Manila, they couldn’t wait any longer.
Clark boarded La Florecita first. Mel and Annalee followed, hand in hand.
They leapt aboard the boat just before it chugged into Manila Bay. Almost as soon as the ship—a ten-year-old, 364-ton cargo boat—had pushed off, the dock exploded behind them, dynamited by the few American soldiers lingering at the pier. Sparks fell across the deck of La Florecita as it threaded its way through the bay’s hazardous waters. The reporters watched through the ensuing fire’s glow as the last fleeing Filipinos pulled whatever they could use from the warehouses of their crumbling capital.
At one minute after midnight, Mel, Annalee, and Clark stood on the ship’s deck, illuminated only by the moon and firelight from the city. The explosions and cacophony of a collapsing nation had given way to the darkened waters’ quiet. Safety remained a long way off.
Still, Clark was optimistic.
“Soon we’ll be in the Indies, eating good food,” he told his friends.
The boat bobbed in the middle of the bay, its bridge dark. The new year may have arrived, but there was no champagne to mark the occasion. The only thing the reporters could find to drink was a bottle of applejack produced by a member of the crew. Passing the bottle around, the reporters and the ship’s crew wished each other an unenthusiastic “Happy New Year.”
“We could just barely make out their faces in the reflected light from Manila’s great pier area throwing clouds of smoke and leaping flames a half-mile high behind us,” Mel wrote.