Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Nearly every villager seemed to have a story to share with the traveling reporters, harrowing accounts of looted villages and farms, townspeople forced into hard labor, and sisters, mothers, and daughters raped by the invaders. One town’s residents told of Japanese neighbors who lived quietly in the community for years, then vanished when the war started, as if they had been preparing for an invasion since they arrived.

  In another village, the reporters heard, hundreds of people who had never seen an airplane came out to watch a squadron’s approach and were killed by bombs. Filipinos on the island of Masbate described how American miners had been rounded up, tied to poles, and carried off by the occupiers. The Filipinos often implored their powerless visitors to send them arms so they could carry out guerrilla raids on the Japanese. All the boatload of journalists could do was promise to tell their story.

  Filipina villagers entertain Annalee Jacoby during her escape from Corregidor. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby.

  On the third day of their trip, the group came ashore at Estancia, a small village on the northeast corner of the island of Panay. Clark wrote that he, Van Landingham, and Lew Carson hired a local driver to take them to the city of Capiz (present-day Roxas City). The three were amazed that they could buy Coca-Cola and chewing gum and newspapers there, and that one of the two girls they offered rides to along the way had just won a beauty contest.

  “We had forgotten there were such things as beauty contests and beauty parlors,” Clark wrote.

  But fear returned that night. First, two Japanese planes flew low over Clark and the others as they returned from their expedition to Capiz. Then, at dusk, as the Princesa prepared to leave Estancia, Mel noticed a German priest taking note of them as they left port. While Clark and Van Landingham worried about bombers, Mel worried about signal fires.

  As soon as the Princesa pushed off, a huge fire erupted on the hill behind the ship. Suddenly, the sky lit up as another fire ignited in a straight line across the bay. Everyone had been certain they were signal fires similar to what collaborators working with Japan had used early in the war to guide Japanese planes to American airfields and other targets. This would be their tensest night yet.

  “Fine. Travelling. Love. Annalee.”

  On February 27, this concise telegram showed up in Bethesda, Maryland, where Annalee’s parents now lived. The overjoyed Whitmores dashed off a letter to Elza and Manfred Meyberg, their new son-in-law’s parents.

  “I’m so happy and grateful I can hardly write,” Anne Whitmore wrote. “Won’t it be wonderful when we get our next cable telling where they’re going? I do hope it’s home.”

  In Los Angeles, just after 10:30 that morning, the Meybergs received a similar note from Mel. All either family had known up until then was that their children were safe, that they had made it to Corregidor, and that they were somehow able to get word through the State Department to Henry Luce, who had passed word on to the Meybergs through David Hulburd.

  The telegram had been radioed from a place called “Cebu.” On the sheet the Meybergs received, someone had penciled “Below Luzon,” as if that person had just looked up where Cebu was located. That same day, four days after leaving The Rock, the Princesa arrived at Barili, a small port on the west side of the twenty-two-mile-wide island about 350 miles southeast of Corregidor. No bomber had seen the German priest’s signal fire and attacked the Princesa. No enemy destroyer had intercepted the ship as it crept around the island of Negros toward Barili, roughly 100 miles away from Estancia.

  Filipino men look out to sea from the shore of one of the islands visited by Melville and Annalee Jacoby during their escape from the Philippines. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby. Courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Cebu was still under American control. In Barili, after disappointing the mayor with the news that they weren’t reinforcements, Mel, Annalee, and Clark found someone to drive them over the mountain spine that ran along the length of the island, then north along its eastern shore. They drove past cattle, rich farmland, and even stocked food stores. It was difficult to believe what they were seeing after six weeks of deprivation and violence on Corregidor and Bataan.

  “With its sugar plantations and fruit trees and homes with bright-colored roofs, the island looked like the most beautiful place we had ever seen, and the most peaceful,” Clark wrote. Finally they reached Cebu City, the provincial capital, where they found a small American garrison and some sense of normalcy.

  But bad news arrived in Cebu as well. George Rivers, one of the businessmen on the Princesa, had fallen ill with dengue fever and was getting worse. Lew Carson and the British passengers who had joined from Bataan took Rivers straight to Cebu’s hospital. At first, the medical attention seemed to make a difference. Rivers’s illness began to turn, and he left the hospital. But he had been weakened by the disease. On March 5, less than a week after they arrived at Cebu, the Brighton, England–born Rivers succumbed to a sudden heart attack. He was thirty-three years old.

  While Rivers’s friends said farewell to their companion, the Jacobys and Clark Lee got back to work. Thanks to the letter of introduction that MacArthur wrote before the reporters left Corregidor, military officials on Cebu granted the reporters access to the island’s wireless transmitters. They were able to use these to assure their families that they were okay. But lest they tip off the Japanese to the blockade-running operation if their messages were intercepted, they couldn’t provide many details. The messages carried location stamps that said they were on Cebu, but they couldn’t describe the details of how they made it off Corregidor, which islands they’d stopped at on the way, how long they might be on Cebu, or where they might go next. Such details might also risk the lives of hospitable islanders like the ones who’d welcomed them in Pola and on other islands.

  At first, the war felt distant in Cebu City.

  “Cebu brought back memories of Manila just before the invasion,” Van Landingham wrote.

  Whereas Corregidor’s Topside cinema had been bombed out, Cebu’s movie theater was still functional, though the two films it showed were months old. There was one bar still open in the city, though only a few cases of whiskey and yet more San Miguel beer remained on hand.

  These businesses were closed from 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., when air raids were most likely. The scattered customers who came to them lived in the canyons surrounding Cebu. About seventy American civilians—mostly businessmen—had abandoned their jobs as representatives of Western concerns based around the island and escaped to the relative safety of the city’s canyons.

  “There was an air of impending disaster,” Van Landingham wrote. There had already been air raids of strategic targets on nearby islands. Two enemy cruisers were known to be prowling the waters of the Visayan island group. It was only a matter of time before Japan invaded Cebu.

  Cebu’s American residents left behind golf courses and beach clubs and made spartan new homes out of makeshift hillside shacks. Some of them joined the soldiers stationed on the island, as civilians from Manila had done on Bataan, but the rest rarely left the hills. The city’s streets felt ghostly and were mostly deserted, with the exception of the few people who slipped into town for supplies or drinks.

  “It is amazing to see Americans having cocktails before dinner so close to Bataan and Corregidor where we had been, yet feeling that the [Japanese] would come in momentarily,” Mel wrote.

  Wedged between beaches and the island’s hills, Cebu might have been called a sleepy town under different circumstances. Despite the town’s somnolent character and mostly empty streets, after all the thatch-roofed villages and nipa huts, not to mention bamboo hospitals, dust, and tunnels, Cebu City seemed, to Clark, “as big as New York, even though it [has] only one five-story ‘skyscraper.’”

  That “skyscraper” would briefly house Mel and Annalee. Major Cornelius Byrd of the U.S. Army Transportation Service lived in the building’s penthouse apartment. Byrd had organized the blockade-running effort that sent the Princ
esa to Corregidor. He invited Mel and Annalee to stay in his apartment for the first few nights after the Princesa arrived. This gave Mel and Annalee some semblance of a return to the honeymoon that had been cut short by the war’s arrival.

  Annalee transformed one of her outfits into a makeshift bikini to use while fleeing Corregidor. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby.

  From a base known as Camp X, Colonel Irving C. Scudder commanded U.S. forces on the island, such as they were. Scudder gained command of the island in January, after General William F. Sharp departed for Mindanao. Scudder was left in charge of a garrison known as the Cebu Brigade, which consisted primarily of incompletely trained Filipino troops and a cobble of antiquated defenses, the most prominent of which was Fuerte de San Pedro, a triangular stone fort built 200 years earlier by the Spanish to repel Dutch pirates and other attackers.

  Aside from the fort’s rusty guns, there were few other defenses to speak of. As threatening as Cebu’s defenses may have seemed half a century earlier, they would now likely be inconsequential for the modern Japanese ships sailing somewhere beyond the horizon. Soldiers and civilians alike knew this, and any approaching boat rattled Cebu residents, who were as “jittery as race colts.”

  Two days after the Princesa arrived at Cebu, Mel saw that they had good reason to be so jittery. Early on the morning of March 1, spotters saw two large, dark shapes unexpectedly appear off Cebu’s harbor. It immediately became clear that these were the two Japanese ships that patrolled the inter-island waters of the Philippines. Converging on Cebu on their way south toward an operation off the island of Mindanao, the ships—the 532-foot light cruiser Kuma and the 290-foot Ōtori-class torpedo boat Kiji—detoured toward Cebu and opened fire on the city’s docks. The shelling destroyed three inter-island transports docked at Cebu, the Regulus, the Lepus, and the Legazpi. According to various histories, more than 300 people died in the attack. No doubt as a result of censorship concerns, neither Mel, Annalee, nor Clark made any mention of the attack; Carson would later mention it briefly in a private letter. Van Landingham would include the attack in a story about his trip through the Philippines, but he sanitized the attack’s damage.

  “One [shell] struck the old Spanish fort,” Van Landingham wrote. “Others fell harmlessly into the bay.”

  As in Manila Bay, scuttled ships littered the seafloor off Cebu, while the ruins of sabotaged oil facilities stretched smoldering across the marshy expanse of flatland just north of the port. All the bridges into town had already been demolished, leaving the lightly undulating road between Liloan and Cebu City one of the capital’s few access points. On the island’s only airfield, the Americans had intentionally torched the remaining airplanes to keep any resources out of Japanese hands.

  Cebu was the end of the line for the Princesa, which would continue its operation smuggling supplies to Corregidor and Bataan. Its passengers would need to find another way off the island. Thus, their energies turned to brainstorming yet again how they might flee to safety. As the Jacobys settled into their “honeymoon suite” in downtown Cebu, Byrd provided a car and a driver to Clark, Van Landingham, and Lew Carson. The trio drove fifteen miles northeast of the city, past a series of lagoons, to the Liloan Beach Club. There they made a home for themselves as they waited for another ship to visit the island. After a few days on their own, Mel and Annalee joined their traveling companions at the clubhouse.

  The beach club’s “postcard beauty” comprised a sliver of sandy beach lined with swaying palm trees hugging a crescent-shaped bay. In front of the club, silt deposited by the Jubay River created a six-meter-deep shelf that turned the water a dusty but turquoise-tinged brown. About 500 meters from the shore the waters darkened to sapphire right where the seafloor dropped 600 meters beneath the surface.

  Roughly in the center of the crescent, the plaster-coated clubhouse looked whiter than possible in the March sun. The blazing lightness of the club’s walls stood out above the tropical waters, the building’s Spanish-colonial-inspired balustrades too elegant for the harsh conditions of this war and its arched windows an indication of a time now vanished. The club’s sprawling patio and second-floor deck provided deceptively idyllic vantage points overlooking Liloan Bay. The club felt as if it sat on the edge of the world, but its view was hardly relaxing: the same shelf that stretched placidly under the surface of the bay made the cove a perfect landing spot for potential invaders, whose ships could anchor right at the nearby drop-off.

  The danger was so great that the island’s defense also required vigilance from the Liloan Club’s new inhabitants. Each of the people staying at the club volunteered for two-hour shifts to stand watch over the bay. Should a vessel approach, they’d not only be able to alert a nearby contingent of Filipino scouts, they might also get a jump-start on an escape before word circulated that Cebu’s tranquillity was nearing its end.

  Given as much privacy for their “honeymoon” as the group’s constant vigilance could afford, Mel and Annalee combined their watch shifts once they finally joined the others at the club. Clark, Van Landingham, and Carson slept on the beach club’s porch, while Mel and Annalee slept in the main building. When they were on watch, Mel and Annalee stayed up together for hours. Savoring the chance to be together alone after six weeks of cramped confines on Corregidor and the frightening journey aboard the Princesa, Mel was reminded by the warm breezes of his mother’s home in Southern California and her prizewinning gardens. As he had done when the raids on Corregidor were at their worst, Mel described Elza’s gardens to Annalee. He didn’t spare a detail. The descriptions were as vivid as Mel could make them, and Annalee felt like she was walking in the gardens with him as he talked.

  During the day, the Jacobys joined their traveling companions in swimming, playing golf on a vacant course nearby, and talking to the locals. One afternoon, the Jacobys, Clark Lee, Lew Carson, and Charles Van Landingham were the guests of honor at a feast in the Liloan Beach Club’s dining room. After the meal, dozens of local Filipinos crowded around the lunch table, laughing and telling stories with the reporters and one another. It was during boisterous moments like these that Mel felt a sense of camaraderie and kinship with the Filipino people that reminded him of how he had felt in Chungking.

  Residents of Cebu, in the Philippines, share a feast at the Liloan Beach Club with Annalee Jacoby and other passengers from the Princesa de Cebu. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby.

  Along the beach in front of the shuttered, arching windows of the beach club’s faux-Spanish facade, the night was both welcome and feared. On the one hand, it held Mel and Annalee together. The night, the sand, and the quiet rumble of the ever-crashing sea felt like their own private world. The ocean’s murmur matched the murmur in their chests. After so many months of racing beneath foreboding skies, they absorbed the quiet and one another’s presence, for once sharing words not with the rest of the world but only between themselves.

  On the other hand, danger surrounded them. The moon was too bright for comfort, and their eyes forever scanned the sea for the hunters sure to come.

  “The moon rising, shadows, lights, everything kept us on edge,” Mel wrote.

  In New York, Mel’s editors knew little more than what his family had heard after he arrived on Cebu. Annalee had also sent David Hulburd a brief message on Mel’s behalf saying that they were “progressing as rapidly as possible” and asking whether they wanted Mel to prepare a report for Life on his trip (they did). Mel sent one more brief message two days later, but then there was nothing. Even when the reporters were on Corregidor, Hulburd and his staff had usually had a vague sense of what Mel and Annalee were up to. Now there was only silence.

  Meanwhile, on Cebu, Mel, Annalee, and their friends attempted to repair a captured Japanese fishing boat, imagining that they could use it for an escape in case another friendly vessel didn’t arrive. If they couldn’t fix the fishing boat and the situation became dire, their only choice besides trying to hide on Cebu—which didn’t seem realistic—woul
d be to take their borrowed car to the other side of the island, convince a local to row them away in a tiny, rickety banca, and gamble on surviving the vast Pacific, now an enormous war zone.

  Mel and Annalee continued to gather notes for their reporting, but they couldn’t send any dispatches from Cebu. (The wireless station on the island was only capable of sending brief messages.) Hundreds, thousands of words remained unwritten. Dozens of rolls of film remained undeveloped. Countless letters and cables remained unsent. There was so much to say that they couldn’t put on the page, and there had been so much more lost to the fires of the Bay View’s furnace back in Manila.

  While he was in Cebu City, Mel bought a secondhand typewriter so that he and Annalee would have one to use. Mel’s “new” typewriter was a Corona Four manufactured in 1930, its black metal frame emblazoned with gold-colored DuCo lacquer. With little to do besides wait for an opportunity to escape and keep watch for the Japanese, and with Annalee there to help and collaborate, Mel began writing a book. First he wrote a long dispatch about what they had experienced since leaving MacArthur’s bunker nearly two weeks earlier. Then he started writing about what Manila had been like on the day of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field, the events immediately preceding them, and the way those events played out in the Philippines. He also wanted to go further back, to situate the current battle in the broader conflict he’d watched emerge since he was at Lingnan five years earlier. He wanted to illustrate the thread that led from the Marco Polo Bridge incident through to the Pacific war, but with three years of notes in the Bay View’s furnace, Mel had to write from his and Annalee’s recollections. Nevertheless, he was grateful he had Annalee’s photographic memory to help him reconstruct later events.

  In the dispatches Mel wrote for Time and Life while he worked on the book, he reported the conditions he had witnessed on Corregidor and Bataan, as well as the accounts he’d gathered from villagers on the many stops between The Rock and Cebu. He hoped to describe the situation well enough to convince the American public to insist on aid for the Philippines, and his dispatches described the Filipinos’ eagerness to fight the Japanese.