Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  And constant attack is an empty phrase that conveys nothing of the hellishness of shrieking, blasting shells and shattered bodies, of dive bombing, of strafing machine-gun fire. Those words mean more when you’ve discovered what just the whistle of shells overhead or the boom of bombs can do to a most durable stomach, or seen how a machine-gun bullet changes a human leg.

  The Rock offered scant refuge from the pummeling air raids. Corregidor was a bomb-blasted island prison for an American and Filipino force with nowhere to turn. Civilian and soldier alike suffered Corregidor’s dangers and discomforts. No one was spared the threat of the enemy’s constant bombardments, and everyone shared the fetid conditions of the dark, moldy, stinking network of tunnels just east of the dock where La Florecita had landed.

  In this war of aerial terror, these tunnels carved 300 feet beneath the limestone of Malinta Hill were the island’s most important facility. There was a central 1,400-foot-long, concrete-reinforced tunnel with dozens of parallel spurs off either side, plus additional U.S. Navy and hospital tunnels. During the war, these tunnels housed General MacArthur’s command center, overworked medics and nurses, stores of ammunition and equipment, mess halls, and living quarters.

  For the better part of the 1930s, Filipino laborers in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built the complex, digging through a hillside knotted with jungles. The trees dripped with moisture from the tropical humidity, and countless leeches crawled across their damp, tangled branches. A day’s labor left the workers covered with the parasites. Cursing the leeches, they howled, “Malinta,” a Filipino term that roughly translates as “many leeches.” The term attached itself to the project, and by the time it was finished the tunnel and the mountain above were both known as Malinta. The soldiers who arrived on Corregidor also discovered the leeches, as well as the bats, bullfrogs, and skittering hermit crabs that infested the tunnels.

  Now that MacArthur’s forces had retreated from Manila, Malinta had become the military’s nerve center in the Philippines. The general and his commanders were forced to prosecute the war in this underground maze, surrounded by frightened civilian families and hundreds of sick, wounded soldiers.

  The same morning that the American reporters arrived at Corregidor, a Filipino counterpart and friend, Carlos Romulo, showed up on the steamer Hyde. Romulo had won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Southeast Asia, which, much like Mel’s, had warned of the coming war. The two identified with one another for their shared insight on Japan’s ambitions. After war broke out, MacArthur tapped Romulo to coordinate the “Voice of Freedom,” a pro-American radio program broadcast from Bataan’s jungles. On Corregidor, Romulo would grow even closer to Mel and Annalee.

  When Romulo reported for duty at Malinta, he was shocked by the tunnel’s putrid odor and its desperate conditions. Soldiers found anywhere they could to sleep and squeezed into corners of the concrete floors, between ammunition cases and one another’s boots. Romulo took note of their exhaustion, of how the soldiers slept through the noise and shaking of bombs and other activity. Instead of scantily clad women, Romulo wrote, these soldiers pinned pictures of American fighters and bombers to their makeshift bunks.

  “They were the sweethearts these fellows wanted to see!” Romulo later recalled.

  These soldiers desperate for even a few minutes’ sleep and perhaps a dream of B-17s and P-40s flying over the horizon were joined underneath Malinta by dozens of government officials and VIPs, including the Philippines’ president, Manuel Quezon. And many of the officials who had been evacuated to Malinta were not there alone; some had brought their wives and children with them to the fortress. How long anyone would remain—civilian or military—remained unforeseeable.

  “We were of all ages, and of differing tastes and habits,” wrote Amea Willoughby, one of seventeen occupants of the “ladies’ lateral,” a spartan dwelling that housed at least seventeen women and children who had been evacuated from Manila.

  Amea was married to Colonel Charles Willoughby. He would soon become MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer, but at the time he was an assistant to Francis B. Sayre, the U.S. high commissioner in the Philippines. In 1943, with the war still waging, Amea Willoughby would describe how life in the lateral flattened its inhabitants’ social divisions.

  “In a design for living that afforded no privacy, or even the luxury of modesty, we could not hide from each other the little faults and traits of a lifetime,” Willoughby wrote. “We were stripped of social artificialities along with the outer props of prestige and material acquisitions.”

  Like their male counterparts, the women crammed into the hot, stifling tunnel slept on double-decker cots and ate in a noisy, stinking dining hall shared with officers and wounded soldiers recovering at the underground hospital. The women were married to men who before the war had been the Philippines’ power brokers—the lateral’s residents included Quezon’s wife and teenage daughter—and most were ill prepared for the island’s tough conditions.

  Many of the women, Willoughby noted, needed time to shake off their shyness amid the “overwhelmingly masculine” environment on Corregidor. However, there was one ladies’ lateral resident who barely flinched at the conditions, thus earning Amea Willoughby’s admiration: Annalee Jacoby.

  Annalee had no interest in waiting around helplessly while Mel went about his work. She wanted to report too. But Corregidor officials first assigned Annalee to a cot in the ladies’ lateral with the other civilian women. She strenuously objected; she wanted to live with Mel and Clark, who were given cots on the porch of Commissioner Sayre’s house, located on Tailside. (Sayre and his family had relocated to a space inside Malinta.) In order to remain officially accredited, however, she had to accept the assignment.

  Annalee, despite her slight, 100-pound frame, adapted quickly to conditions on the island and made only one token nod to femininity while on Corregidor: she still pinned her dark brown hair up in bobby pins after a shower to set it into a wave.

  “That was her only concession to doing anything feminine and time consuming,” her daughter, the author Anne Fadiman, relayed decades later. “Particularly during the war, she looked down on women who were fussing about.”

  To Willoughby, Annalee may have been small, but she was “eloquent of self-reliance and capability,” not just some loyal bride tagging along on Mel’s adventures across Asia. She was an independent woman who drew upon her own memories of the Depression to figure out how to survive despite Corregidor’s scant resources. As Anne Fadiman later recounted, Annalee had no patience for “frilly, helpless” women.

  On Corregidor, Annalee, like the island’s four other accredited reporters, wore an army-issued khaki uniform. She wanted to be seen by the rest of Corregidor and Bataan’s otherwise all-male press corps, as well as by the military and government officials there, as just another reporter.

  “We were impressed, and some of us were envious, of her arm band which said PRESS and by the fact that she went everywhere on The Rock with her husband,” Willoughby wrote.

  She went nearly everywhere Mel went, but not because she was anxiously tagging along with him. She was working, taking trips with Mel across the channel to Bataan to visit field hospitals or going to the gun batteries on Topside to meet the men operating the artillery. She faced many of the same dangers these men faced and wasn’t any more afraid of bombs or artillery than anyone else on the island. In fact, she looked forward to excitement her entire life, but she wasn’t observing the war for the thrill of it: Annalee had a job to do, and she couldn’t do it if she was shrinking away in a stinking, noisy tunnel. More often than not, that job involved writing about the “little things” that were this war’s most depressing elements, like “the soldier who comes up asking if anybody’s heard about his wife and baby in Manila.”

  Food wasn’t all Bataan lacked. U.S. policymakers had declined to reinforce the Philippines’ air combat capabilities, leaving Bataan’s skies defended by a patchwork of twenty pl
anes in various states of disrepair after the raids on U.S. air bases early in the war. Some of them were old Filipino army trainers. Some were converted puddle jumpers. There were four beat-up P-40 fighters and a few P-35s.

  Led by Brigadier General Harold H. George, a forty-nine-year-old former World War I ace, this “Bataan Air Force” nevertheless helped provide breathing room for the American and Filipino soldiers fighting in the jungles beneath. Known as “Pursuit Hal” to differentiate him from another general with the same name—Harold L. George, or “Bomber Hal,” who led the Air Transport Command during the war—George had been promoted on Christmas Eve, when he took over the 5th Interceptor Command and was given responsibility for Bataan’s air defenses. This included the approximately 5,000 U.S. Army Air Forces personnel and 600 or so Filipinos under George’s command, most of whom, lacking planes to fly or service, were given rifles and turned into infantrymen.

  Thus constrained, Pursuit Hal orchestrated a campaign of “courage and ingenuity” from secret airfields hidden by Bataan’s ubiquitous foliage. Taking off from airfields that stood out “like water in the desert against the jungles” when fellow soldiers saw them, each flight was “almost a suicide mission.” Were there but more planes available to the pilots on Bataan, Mel wrote, he was certain, given what George had done with the few available to his command, that the flyers could hold off the Japanese long enough to reinforce Bataan and Corregidor. Like most of his sources, Mel believed that wresting back control of the Philippines would give the United States a base from which it could “bomb the living daylights out of Formosa” [present-day Taiwan], which the Japanese empire had transformed into a major stepping-stone of its own for control of the Pacific. The dream of reinforcements sailing for Bataan, about to arrive any day, was the fantasy that kept the forces fighting despite their pitched battle.

  “The patch of sea spanning outward from the bay is the path by which they will see their convoy steaming in with planes, food and guns,” Mel wrote of how desperately the Bataan defenders wanted to believe that help was indeed steaming in.

  In reality, no convoy was coming, and Japan’s blockade limited shipping of ammunition, food, and medical equipment from other Philippine islands. Still, in one dispatch to Time, Mel tried to speak for the soldiers he met on Bataan.

  “Since the troops at Bataan are unable to send mail now, they ask that the following, adopted as typical, be sent: Dear Mr. Roosevelt; our P-40 is full of holes,” Mel wrote, using a description for the plane that Annalee would later use to headline a magazine article about Bataan. “Please send us a new one.”

  Meanwhile, the blockade confined Mel, Annalee, and Clark to Corregidor’s cramped, increasingly wretched conditions.

  Mel and Annalee tried to make the best of the situation. Corregidor was “not the best place in the world for a honeymoon,” Annalee conceded, “but we were so glad to be alive and still free that it didn’t matter.”

  Almost everywhere Mel and Annalee went on Corregidor they were surrounded by soldiers, officers, medics, and the small group of civilian VIPs and support staff who had been evacuated to the island. The couple stuck together as much as they possibly could, but there were usually twenty or so other people around at all times. During their first week on Corregidor, Annalee said, they only had two minutes alone together, and that moment of privacy was rudely interrupted by a Japanese bomb that forced them to find cover with the masses.

  Another time, on Bataan, a large formation of Japanese bombers flew overhead, prompting what Annalee later called her favorite memory of Bataan. Her daughter Anne Fadiman would recall the incident as told to her by Annalee:

  Both threw themselves on the ground, Mel on top of Annalee. As the bombs began to fall, Mel, who was known for his dry sense of humor, said, “Remember, dear, it’s all in your head.” (Though Mel was Jewish and Annalee was descended from Mormons, both had been raised by mothers who had converted to Christian Science.) Annalee remembered the two of them shaking with laughter as the ground around them shook from the bombing.

  While newspapers would soon print stories about the honeymooning reporters dodging bombs on Corregidor, the second day they were there they made news for another reason. When the United States was less than a month into its showdown against Japan, Hollywood gossip columnists announced in blaring letters that MGM had begun production on a new film, with Ruth Hussey attached. In their January 2, 1942, column, Louella Parsons and Ronald Reagan, then a gossip columnist, announced plans for the film, dubbed War Brides and based on the screenplay that Mel and Annalee had written that past spring. Parsons and Reagan were sufficiently impressed with the project that their item about War Brides got top billing in the column, edging out news about an adaptation being made of a stage play called Casablanca. As it turned out, War Brides was never filmed.

  Crowded and embattled conditions like those on Corregidor were not unfamiliar to the Jacobys. So strong was their memory of Chungking that the couple almost found comfort amid Malinta’s dank, stale-aired tunnels shuddering with every bomb blast. As horrible as this war had become, it had been on the bomb-ravaged streets above the Yangtze that the romance Mel and Annalee began in California flourished into love. Now here, on the hills overlooking the Bataan Channel, the drone of approaching planes, the wail of air raid sirens, the ensuing thunder of bomb upon bomb, and the staccato of anti-aircraft cannon responses provided the sound track of a deepening love.

  Mel and Annalee’s connection was strengthening, but for others Bataan and Corregidor felt ever more separated from the rest of the world. For most soldiers in the moldy tunnels and bloodied dust of the Philippines, day-to-day survival was more important than grand strategy. In 1942 few felt as alone as U.S. soldiers felt on those islands in the Pacific, and there was no relief in sight. On Corregidor and Bataan, “there could be no Dunkirk,” as Annalee wrote.

  “In this war there’s no sending back to the rear for replacements or supplies—this is war without a rear, with Japanese on all sides, long-range guns in all directions, planes overhead everywhere,” she wrote. “Ten thousand refugees have poured down from Bataan’s mountains. They can’t escape bombs and shells—there’s nowhere to go.”

  Radio was the one technology that kept Corregidor from total isolation. The navy’s high-power wireless system linked the island with Washington, D.C. The reporters’ accredited status allowed them to cable dispatches to their publications through the system, but they couldn’t use it to send personal communications. However, they were able to transmit and receive a few select messages through high-ranking personnel authorized to access the radio system. In mid-January, for example, U.S. High Commissioner Francis Sayre sent a secret message to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on Mel’s behalf.

  In a message that was to be passed on confidentially to his employers at Time Inc., Mel asked Luce to get the War Department to authorize the army to pay him $500 to cover expenses for what might become a long absence. Through Sayre, Mel also asked Hull to have Luce inform his family that he and Annalee were safe. Four and a half years after Hull had been compelled to assure the mother of a friend of Mel’s that her son and Mel were not in danger in Peiping as it came under siege, the statesman again became the messenger for reassurances about Mel.

  Mel’s radio message also informed Luce and his deputies that the Mydanses had remained behind in Manila. Mel’s successful escape was stunning news in New York, but his editors weren’t allowed to publicize his location. They could only say that he was “with the United States Armed Forces in the Far East.” A week later, David Hulburd sent a coded message back through Hull, to Sayre, for Mel.

  “We have informed your families and are delighted that you are well and in good hands,” Hulburd said. Hulburd added that Mel’s most recent two cables were “magnificent.” He also asked Mel for firsthand reporting of the fighting to provide to Life.

  The first of Mel’s cables to Hulburd, sent on January 18, described a typical day of bombing for the Luzon f
orces. Despite Mel’s tremendous access to Corregidor’s generals and high-profile politicos, the report focused on the Filipinos working as nurses, barbers, and cooks on The Rock. While on the island, much of Mel’s reporting depicted the everyday Filipino laborers who endured the conditions there and on nearby Bataan as steadfastly as the infantrymen, pilots, and sailors more commonly thought of as heroes. Mel’s second “magnificent” dispatch told a darker story. It told of conditions in Manila, which must have haunted the Jacobys, who knew their friends were there, somewhere.

  Exhausted nurses take a brief moment of respite to bathe while serving on the besieged Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. Photo by Annalee Jacoby.

  It was a working honeymoon of sorts for a man and woman who loved their work as much as one another. Together the Jacobys compiled hundreds of reports chronicling everything they’d seen so far of the war. Some reports described surgical techniques in open-air hospitals, profiled Bataan’s nurses, and introduced the various pets adopted by soldiers stationed on Corregidor, among other subjects. Others described the tiny, cobbled-together air force led by General George. A few discussed the couple’s own adventures.

  Most of the reports made their way to Mel’s editors at Time. Others became the grist for Annalee’s stories in Liberty. A few shaped contributions from both for Life. Many would end up unpublished.

  “On Bataan, Mel soon began to realize all of the aspirations the Time editors had had for him,” a biographical pamphlet from Stanford would later recall. “He was the first reporter to go behind the Japanese lines. He got the story of the American and Filipino men and boys who were doing the fighting and he told it well.”

  Because both Life and Time were owned by Henry Luce (as was Fortune), Mel’s work ended up in both publications. Given the probability that Carl and Shelley had been captured, Mel was now the only source in the Philippines that Life could count on for its photo spreads. For Americans at home, Life provided many of the most powerful images of World War II, and it is no exaggeration to say that Melville Jacoby was responsible for many Americans’ first glimpse of the savagery on Bataan.