Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Mel and Annalee had no way to know it yet, but Luce’s deputies in New York had already transformed some of the reports they had sent from Corregidor into published stories. One was a narrative describing scenes from the Battle of Bataan—“Our launch works slowly into Mariveles landing and everyone quickly scrambles out,” read one of its lines. Another was a first-person account dictated to Annalee by Captain John Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry regiment of Filipino scouts and Americans that fought a delaying action during MacArthur’s retreat to the embattled peninsula. Then there was the epic “Corregidor Cable No. 79,” which was published by the Field Artillery Journal through a special arrangement with Time Inc. It described many of the characters fighting on Corregidor and told their stories, including an account of three “boys” from Salinas, California, whose tanks were ambushed the day after Christmas and who then spent five days hiking through enemy territory back to Manila, one with a rivet from his destroyed tank lodged in his throat.

  “All kinds of men make up MacArthur’s Army—all John Does and Juan de la Cruzes who have learned to improvise, adopt [Japanese] tricks, and stick it out,” Mel had written.

  Other memories remained vivid without notes or Annalee’s memory. Manila. The people they’d left behind. Two people in particular haunted the couple: their imprisoned friends, Carl and Shelley Mydans. Mel and Annalee still only knew what they’d learned on Corregidor. They knew that the Mydanses were alive and safe, but they also knew from intelligence reports that reached MacArthur’s staff that many of the prisoners didn’t have enough food.

  “We keep thinking about them now,” Annalee wrote. “If only they’d come!”

  A week into March, a 5,500-ton cargo ship with blue masts and a gray hull docked in Corregidor. Its arrival was a shock, but a welcome one. The vessel, the Doña Nati, had brought food, small arms ammunition, and medical supplies all the way from Australia. It took two days for work crews to unload the ship. Built by the De La Rama shipping line, the Doña Nati was one of three ships that had successfully slipped through Japanese blockades from outside of the Philippines to deliver much-needed supplies to the islands.

  “Some of the most courageous and ingenious people of this whole era were the blockade runners,” Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley wrote of the Doña Nati’s crew and their counterparts on other smuggling ships.

  At first, Cebu was to be the logistical hub for supplying bases around the Philippines, using resources from nearby islands. But then, as the Japanese blockade tightened, U.S. strategists had to look beyond the Philippines for supplies. The closest Allied territory with any kind of resources that could be made available was Australia; Cebu became a base for processing shipments from there before they were sent to Corregidor, Bataan, or islands in the Visayas that the Japanese hadn’t yet occupied. But getting from Australia to Cebu involved traversing enemy waters.

  The United States therefore needed to entice into service ship captains with vessels capable of making the long, dangerous journey past Japanese-controlled islands and shipping lanes, not to mention patrolling ships. In February 1942, two officers who had been staked with $10 million to disperse among any merchant sailors willing to attempt a trip arrived in Australia. Only ten ship captains answered the call. Of these, seven crews mutinied and forced their captains to turn back before entering dangerous waters. Just three made it all the way, one of which was the Doña Nati, captained by Ramon Pons.

  Pons had led the Doña Nati from Manila on December 8, the day the war started. Colonel Alexander Johnson of the U.S. Army had requisitioned the ship that January and offered Pons four months’ salary for him and his crew just to attempt the journey to Cebu, with a bonus of nine months’ salary if they returned safely. Pons, who had been blacklisted by a Spanish social club in Manila with pro-Franco sympathies, gladly agreed.

  At 4:00 A.M. on March 10, 1942, just three days after the Doña Nati arrived, Lew Carson was on watch when he saw a group of soldiers race past the Liloan Beach Club with .30-caliber rifles at the ready. Beyond the soldiers, Carson saw the faint outline of a ship turning toward shore at the mouth of Liloan Bay.

  Carson woke everyone else up. Within minutes, a car arrived from the city. An army officer got out and warned the group that they had better pack up immediately and come back to the city. Fifteen minutes later, the group arrived in Cebu and went to Major Byrd’s “penthouse.”

  Over breakfast, Byrd told Mel, Clark, Annalee, Carson, and Van Landingham that word had reached Cebu that a Japanese destroyer was spotted on its way toward the island. The spotters estimated it would be in range of the port by noon. It was 10:15 A.M. when Byrd delivered the news. Crews were still unloading the Doña Nati when the ship was seen, but now Pons was preparing to leave.

  The approaching cruiser could have been a lone ship on patrol that just happened to pass near Cebu, but it was just as likely that reports had reached Japanese officials that a boatload of Americans had slipped out of Corregidor and were sailing south, calling on the tiny villages peppered across the islands. Perhaps the cruiser now steaming toward the island had been sent expressly to look for those escaped Americans. Or the many Japanese recon planes that crossed the Philippine skies may have spotted the Doña Nati and alerted its base about the plump target. And there was one more possibility that was just as frightening: the incoming ship might have been the vanguard of a Japanese invasion force preparing to capture Cebu.

  Whatever the reason the ship was on its way toward Cebu, none of the former passengers of the Princesa wanted to stay to find out why. It seemed as though the Doña Nati would be the last viable transport the Americans could trust before the invaders arrived. But sailing aboard the vessel carried enormous risk; the De La Rama Steamship Company originally built the Doña Nati for transpacific shipping. At 423 feet long, it was the largest vessel around—and thus an easy target for ship-to-ship shelling, as well as any bombers that might also be bound for Cebu.

  Another report came saying that the Japanese ship was now just an hour away. There was no more time to wait. As if echoing their New Year’s Eve escape from Manila, Mel, Annalee, and Clark ran from Byrd’s building and across the park that separated it from Cebu’s waterfront to reach the Doña Nati as it prepared to cast off. The ship’s engines were already churning the water and about to push the ship away from its dock. Because the ship had been in port for only a short time, its crew hadn’t had a chance to fill the ship’s hold with ballast water to replace the unloaded cargo. Without the ballast, it would be an unsteady ride, especially at high speeds.

  Mel, Annalee, and Clark knew that remaining on Cebu was a dangerous prospect, but some of the officers at the docks shouted, as the group ran for the vessel, that with the tall, spindly cargo masts on its foredeck and a three-deck-high superstructure topped with a large smokestack, the Doña Nati was too big a target for a safe escape. The vessel would not only have to maneuver out of port quickly but thread the narrow channel that separated Cebu from Mactan Island and the shallow submerged marshes surrounding it.

  “Don’t be damn fools,” an officer yelled, insisting that they’d never make it out of the bay alive. Mel, Clark, and Annalee hesitated as Carson and Van Landingham ran aboard the Doña Nati.

  “Come on, Mel,” Clark pleaded. “This could be our only chance.”

  The Japanese cruiser was no more than an hour away from Cebu by that point.

  Captain Pons argued with one of the dockside officers about his orders. If he reversed course and headed back to Australia unannounced, any American ship he encountered might not recognize the Doña Nati as a friendly ship and sink it on sight. But his vessel would be Cebu’s biggest target if he stayed. His only defenses were two 50-millimeter cannons and a small deck gun that the army had installed and manned with six soldiers.

  Pons’s argument with the land-side officers bought time for Mel, Clark, and Annalee. Byrd told them that he would send a motorboat out with the ship; if the Japanese cruiser arrived before the Doña Nati
made it a safe distance from Cebu, they could jump and the boat would pick them up, but for now, the reporters couldn’t dither any longer. It was time to go. Now. They ran toward the ship just as Pons ordered his crew to cast off the ship’s moorings and pull up its gangplank.

  Doña Nati’s crew still hadn’t pulled up its cargo nets. As the ship pushed away from the docks, Mel, Clark, and Annalee grabbed the nets and began climbing aboard. With its cargo hold empty, the ship bobbed and lurched. The reporters clung to the nets as the crew pushed the Doña Nati into full steam. The ropes swaying in their hands, they finally climbed up the side of the ship as it pushed into the waves and away from Cebu.

  The Doña Nati shuddered as it steamed ahead. The engineer was pushing the ship to try to pick up more speed without the cargo or the ballast. With the Japanese cruiser getting closer, the Doña Nati had no time to spare if it was going to escape. The Japanese ship was approaching from the south. If the Doña Nati sailed north it could gain time, but that wasn’t a guaranteed escape. Even if the Japanese ship didn’t shell the Doña Nati, it was feasible that enemy bombers might also be on their way. Only clouds could keep such a large ship hidden, but the heartbreaking blue of the clear wartime skies spread as far as the reporters could see.

  Catching their breath, and bruised from the climb up the Doña Nati’s sides, the reporters donned life belts that they would keep on the entire day. Clark sat “cross-legged, cross-fingered and cross-armed again.” For the third time in as many months, he, Mel, and Annalee set sail toward unknown waters.

  Unbeknownst to Captain Pons and his passengers, while the Doña Nati left port, a quick-thinking reserve navy officer in Cebu sent a wireless message to headquarters in Corregidor. The message described the ship, its passengers, and its course. With any luck, Rear Admiral Frank Rockwell, who commanded the remaining naval forces in the Philippines, could warn the rest of the Pacific Fleet that the ship was bound for Brisbane and shouldn’t be attacked by American vessels patrolling the South Seas.

  While the rest of the American officers garrisoned on Cebu fled the docks in case the approaching Japanese cruiser shelled the island, Captain Pons steered the Doña Nati straight across the channel, then struggled to turn the ship north around nearby Mactan Island. Pons threaded the ocean liner first through the barely half-mile distance between Cebu and Mactan, then around the reefs and mangrove forests along the latter’s north shore.

  Mel checked his watch. It was 11:30. Spotters had estimated that the Japanese ship they had seen would arrive by noon.

  By then the Doña Nati had received no further word of the cruiser, and the reporters ate lunch as their ship steamed east around the island of Bohol. At 3:00 P.M. their radio picked up a broadcast from Cebu reporting that a ship had shelled the city, hitting several smaller vessels at the port, then departed for the southeast—the same direction the Doña Nati needed to head to get out of the Philippines. They hoped that they were in the clear, since the cruiser and the Doña Nati had first gone in separate directions.

  Every little fishing boat the Doña Nati passed on the journey stood out “like a brick chimney, giving us a chill.” That afternoon, after the ship passed the north side of the island of Bohol, someone spotted a camouflaged ship near the Canigao Channel. The Doña Nati needed to pass this ship as it steered around the island of Leyte and out of the Philippines. The other ship looked to be anchored, but Pons was unwilling to get close enough to identify the vessel. Then, as the sky darkened, a Japanese recon plane circled above and sped off.

  All the fear of bombers and destroyers returned. No planes came, but that probably meant that a cruiser was waiting to catch the Doña Nati if it tried to sail through the Surigao Strait, on the other side of Leyte. So Pons steered his vessel farther north to hide in an inlet along the coast of Leyte, near the village of Inopacan.

  As he searched for shelter, Pons dispatched one of his officers to shore in a motorboat to investigate the ship that had been spotted. About an hour later, the officer returned with word that it was not an enemy craft but the Anhui, another blockade runner. It had foundered on a reef in the night. The ship carried a Chinese crew and a shipment from Australia of guns, ammunition, mortars, and pepper to make rotting meat palatable.

  The next morning another recon plane flew above the Doña Nati—Pons later said they had been “circling like buzzards”—then sped off. Gambling that by appearing to head north he could draw the enemy cruiser from Surigao to another strait north of Leyte, Pons continued in that direction at first, then turned back southward. When the Doña Nati again reached the Anhui, a launch arrived from the other ship asking Pons to help tow her off the reef, and Pons agreed. But it was getting dark, and they had to wait until dawn, when the tide would be high enough.

  That morning small craft arrived from Cebu City to help unload the Anhui and update Captain Pons on the route he was to take once in the Pacific. Finally they could get under way, but Pons waited until sunset before directing the Doña Nati between Leyte and Mindanao, then turned north to continue through the Surigao Strait.

  “To me, the trip that night through the strait was the most exciting part of our voyage,” Van Landingham wrote.

  Fearing they would suddenly find themselves caught in the Japanese cruiser’s searchlights, the Doña Nati emerged from the strait around three in the morning. Suddenly, with thousands of miles of the Pacific stretching toward the horizon, the reporters had reached the open ocean. They had escaped the Philippines, but now there would be no more shelter.

  Finally free of the islands, the Doña Nati’s journey at first drifted into monotony. Despite all the excitement that had colored their last months, doldrums became common. Mel and Annalee spent their days sunbathing, writing, and reading old copies of the True Confessions and Amazing Adventures magazines that were scattered about the ship. A few crew members had ukuleles and other musical instruments. During one of their island stops before Surigao, a monkey had found its way onto the Doña Nati. Watching a crewman chase the creature around and around on the ship’s deck was a respite from the boredom.

  All the while, the thrumming of the ship’s engine provided a constant sound track to nervous days that drifted into inky nights and back again. Often, the only other sound was the low, constant gurgle of the sea bubbling in the Doña Nati’s wake.

  The ship began to feel like it was the only place in the entire world, which seemed to end just beyond the white waves churning alongside its hull. At sea in the tropics, when there is nothing more to see besides more ocean, the sun takes center stage. It becomes more than an incidental presence, one that doesn’t simply warm the body but scorches the sky and everything beneath it. It roasts the skin so deeply that it seems to bake both the soul and the mind. Everything beneath the all-encompassing blue cooks in its heat, until the portions of a ship’s steel deck shadowed beneath the vessel’s bulkheads become the only refuges.

  If a trip like Mel and Annalee’s had occurred under any other circumstances, the air might almost have been described as cozy. The Earth spun beneath the brilliant blue until its ever-present star vanished beneath one last blast of pink and orange and purple brilliance across the horizon. Night followed swiftly. In this somewhere that felt like nowhere, the March night wrapped around the body as warmly and softly as a fleece blanket.

  After so many hours at sea, however, the rolling repetition of the Doña Nati’s journey and its close quarters took a toll on the ship’s passengers. On that anxious night when the vessel passed through the Surigao Strait, Mel and Clark began bickering about something inconsequential. The debate continued into dinner. Its subject wasn’t important enough that anyone remembered it, but as Clark later wrote, it was the first time he and Mel had disagreed about anything since they left Manila.

  As Clark described the fight, their bickering turned to yelling. Soon, they were goading one another to throw the first punch. Neither wanted to be the one to hit the other.

  “Go ahead,” Clark taun
ted. “I can lick you even with one broken hand.”

  An amateur boxer since college, Mel snapped. He delivered a left hook to Clark’s jaw. The men wrestled across the deck of the ship, trading blows. They each got good hits in, but did no major damage.

  The fight lasted all of five minutes. It was as if it needed to happen just to relieve the tension. When it was over, they stood up, shook hands, and said nothing more about the scrape.

  When the Doña Nati passed through Surigao, it lost whatever sense of protection the islands had provided. Though it may have shaken one Japanese cruiser, others, perhaps even submarines, might be chasing it. And before the Doña Nati would be safe, it would have to cross Japanese-controlled shipping lanes.

  Captain Pons told Clark Lee that the Doña Nati’s journey would get more dangerous each day until March 18, give or take a day. Pons told Clark that was when he estimated that his ship would pass the convergence point for Japanese shipping lanes between the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, and a shallow lagoon known as Truk, where the Japanese had built their most important naval base in the South Pacific.

  “Hearing the captain talk about trouble on the 18th, we all began to expect it,” Clark wrote. “When the 18th finally came we stayed on deck all day, watching the sea and sky. The unbroken circle of sea around us had come to be all-important. As long as nothing appeared we were reasonably certain to stay alive.”

  The Japanese navy wasn’t the only worry. If the Doña Nati didn’t encounter an entire enemy convoy, the blockade runner might still run into an American raider mistaking it as an easy target.