Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Soon the soldiers would return to battle, and the reporters would go back to covering the war, but this moment of warmth imprinted itself in Romulo’s mind, as it probably did for the other reporters. These were the kind of friendships forged only in chaos. Their bonds were solidified amid rock-hewn tunnels, bomb blasts, and blood-soaked jungles. Just for one night, the war was a million miles away. The party continued until all hours. For the moment, every reporter in that room was safe, home, and full of love.

  Still, darkness hovered just outside the frame.

  “We heard of unspeakable mass cruelties and individual cases of torture,” Romulo wrote in his diary. They were aware of reports of hundreds of Filipino soldiers dying each day as they were marched from Bataan and of “sick and ragged” Americans marched through Manila to a prison camp. When Corregidor finally fell a few weeks later, Romulo wouldn’t be able to bear the news, especially about what might have happened to the seventy Filipina and American nurses remaining at the fortress.

  “We tried in headquarters not to wonder what happened to those girls,” Romulo wrote. “I have seen the faces of our greatest soldiers grow white when they speak of Corregidor.”

  And then there were Carl and Shelley.

  Two thousand miles away, Mel knew that they were still alive but that, like their fellow captives, they were hungry. As Mel and his friends celebrated, the Mydanses witnessed horrors in captivity yet unimagined by those who escaped the Philippines.

  “I hope something is being done regarding the exchange of correspondents,” Mel wrote. “We cannot eat or drink without thinking of them.”

  The next morning Mel set out for his trip north with General George. Annalee accompanied Mel to the airfield. On the tarmac, Colonel Ind, George’s intelligence chief—who carried an almost romantic appreciation of the war, his superior officer, and the year that had transpired since he and Pursuit Hal left the United States on a special assignment to the Philippines—filmed the departure preparations with a 16-millimeter movie camera. Ind continued to record Mel and Annalee as the child of Hollywood and the MGM screenwriter embraced and kissed good-bye.

  Shortly after the couple’s lips parted, Mel walked to the nearby Lockheed C-47 and boarded with George and Ind. Across the plane Ind noted the “manly, handsome and virile features of Mel Jacoby, alight with the prospect of an action assignment.”

  At 11:16 A.M. on April 27, 1942, the C-47 took off.

  April 29, 1942, was Emperor Hirohito’s birthday, and a Japanese national holiday. Two thousand miles north of Darwin, the guards of the Santo Tomas prison camp in Manila forced their captives into a humiliating celebration. Carl Mydans recorded the day’s events in the tiny journal he kept.

  Across the bay from Santo Tomas, Japan’s pilots paid tribute to their emperor with a punishing attack on Corregidor. The day was “especially dark” on the island, Second Lieutenant William Hook and Juanita Redmond, an army nurse, later told Annalee after their own escape from Bataan and Corregidor.

  The first wave of bombers appeared over Corregidor at 7:30 A.M. and then they “never stopped,” Hook and Redmond told Annalee. Wave after wave of bombers arrived, some diving to attack the gun positions atop Malinta, the rest going for other targets. The Malinta hospital’s occupants could feel the mountain’s walls shuddering in the concussions. At one point, spotters counted as many as 100 explosions per minute.

  That same day, two days after leaving Melbourne, George, Ind, and Mel approached Batchelor Airfield, a small base just south of Darwin. They had picked up a fourth passenger the day before, a British officer headed to Darwin.

  Hastily constructed Batchelor offered just two runways and arid fields of scrub brush.

  This stop wasn’t on the mission’s itinerary, and Ind asked George—who had relieved pilot Joseph Moore so he could have a spin at the controls—why he was landing. George reminded Ind that he needed to let off the British “hitchhiker,” but the Brit interjected, saying he wanted to go to Darwin, not Batchelor.

  “All right, fine, it’s one on me,” George said. “But as long as we’re here, let’s have a quick look around the station before we push on.”

  To Mel, Batchelor Field was another detour in an itinerary full of them: Corregidor, then Cebu, and now this. And here he was alone for the first time in months; Annalee was 2,000 miles away in Melbourne, waiting for her husband to finish his trip with Pursuit Hal.

  It was strange for them to be apart after such a long and intense shared experience, but Mel couldn’t ignore a golden assignment like this, and she wouldn’t have wanted him to. After all, he had witnessed the fall of the Philippines, felt the thud of Japanese bombs ceaselessly pounding above the dank depths of Chungking’s air raid shelters, and spent his first years of adulthood in a war-ravaged landscape far across the sea from his California home.

  As the C-47 landed, two officers from the base drove a Jeep across the tarmac to meet the visitors. Late afternoon sun baked the plane as it taxied toward a round parking space alongside the airstrip. Its passengers, eager for fresh air and a chance to stretch their legs, stepped out and walked toward the Jeep.

  Across the runway, two pilots—a veteran of the Philippines campaign, Lieutenant Jack Dale, and Lieutenant J. W. Tyler, a newly transferred recent flight school graduate—prepared two Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk fighters for twilight maneuvers. Dale and Tyler taxied their planes onto the runway, turned, and lined up alongside one another. It was standard procedure to take off in pairs. Dale’s plane was on the right, Tyler’s on the left. The pilots pushed their throttles. Engines roared. The P-40s raced west down the gravel runway.

  Next to the C-47, Mel stopped to light a cigarette. So did the general. He was a fan of the Kittyhawks and had seen what his pilots could do with the few ramshackle, earlier model P-40s they’d had access to in the Philippines. George was eager to champion them. Mel had first learned to fly in Hong Kong during his Lingnan years and had considered joining the U.S. Army as a pilot after his first freelancing stint, so he ate up the chance to discuss aviation with the general.

  The 49th Fighter Group had only just received its Kittyhawks a month earlier. Though it would soon be surpassed by the P-51 Mustang in wartime mythology, at the time the Kittyhawk was the latest iteration of what was then the most advanced American fighting machine. Thirty-one feet two inches long, with a thirty-seven-foot, four-inch wingspan, the plane could reach speeds of 354 miles per hour. It was a powerful plane made famous in China by Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers.

  Dale’s and Hazard’s planes sped toward takeoff alongside one another. They quickly neared the end of the runway. Tyler’s P-40 slipped slightly behind Dale’s. Suddenly, the aircraft wobbled as it crossed into the slipstream of Dale’s fighter. Tyler strained at the flight stick but could do nothing. His fighter lurched out of control, then careened off the runway. It shot across the airfield, barreling toward the plane that Mel and George had landed in.

  Chaos erupted.

  Everyone who had just deplaned from the C-47 leapt out of the P-40’s path. In one instant of torn steel and twisted machinery, the smaller plane slammed into the C-47. The impact’s force knocked two of the larger plane’s engines from its wings and sheered its cockpit from the fuselage. Shrapnel and various aircraft parts flew into the sky and rained across the landing strip.

  One witness saw bodies thrown as far as twenty yards away, landing among the reeds growing around the transport’s parking spot.

  Meanwhile, the impact flung the still-powered propeller of Tyler’s fighter off the plane’s nose. Continuing to spin, it raced straight toward Mel. He tried to leap away, but the air blade sliced through his thigh, across his upper body, and into the base of his head, severing his femoral artery and snapping his cervical vertebrae.

  As Mel collapsed, one of the fighter’s wings slammed into the landing party, which included Lieutenant Robert Jasper, one of the base officers who’d come out to welcome General George. Chunks of metal flew from th
e wing’s landing gear and shattered Jasper’s skull. Then Colonel Ind saw the general. He lay crumpled on the tarmac a few feet away. The general was breathing and could speak, but he would succumb to his injuries within a day.

  Jasper ultimately survived, but there was no hope for Mel. In an instant he was gone.

  Colonel Ind recounted the event later:

  Mercifully blinded by the limitations of our human vision to the future of even a few seconds, we could not know that upon this seemingly unimportant point the fates of all of us were spinning down faster and faster on a fine pivot that would shatter with the impact and fling the debris into an eternity of separation during mortal time.

  Without a doubt, that pivot delivered a sudden, senseless conclusion to five months of nonstop adventure and drama. It was a decidedly meaningless end to a life quickly becoming monumental, even in its brief twenty-five years.

  For the first time in its history, Time lost a reporter in the line of duty. Stanford University lost a treasured alumnus. The people of China and the Philippines lost a friend. A family in California lost a beloved son and cousin.

  And a young woman waiting at a Melbourne hotel for her new husband learned that he wasn’t coming home.

  Chapter 13

  SOLDIER OF THE PRESS

  Wreckage of the C-47 and P-40 aircraft involved in the crash at Batchelor Airfield that killed Melville Jacoby. Australian War Memorial.

  Early in the morning of April 30, an urgent message arrived for Elza Meyberg at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, where she and Manfred were staying during the Oakland Flower Show. It contained forty-seven words of all-caps brevity:

  MEL FLEW DARWIN MONDAY WITH GENERAL GEORGE STOP PLEASE BE AWFULLY BRAVE TOLD TODAY BOTH KILLED WHEN SECOND PLANE OUT OF CONTROL CRASHED INTO THEIRS STOP KEEP HOPING AGAINST HOPE LATER REPORT WILL DENY BUT NO CHANCE STOP WILL CABLE ANY MORE DETAILS ALL MY DEEPEST LOVE

  ANNALEE JACOBY

  Annalee’s note seared beneath the Pacific along the telegraph lines from Australia to California, its words finally burning into the heart of her mother-in-law of all of five months. It carried the message Elza had feared for half a decade.

  The message was perhaps more debilitating than the already unimaginable impact of news of her only child’s death because Elza received it so soon after she was told Mel and Annalee had made it safely through so many trials. With the news just a few weeks earlier of the Doña Nati’s arrival in Brisbane, Elza had thought she no longer had to worry about receiving the kind of horrific message now burned into the brown, flimsy sheet in her hands.

  Mel—her one and only son—had traveled 2,000 miles under the cover of darkness to avoid capture. He had braved the front lines of this horrible war in order to tell other mothers about their sons’ bravery. He had survived scores of bombings and weeks under siege on a claustrophobic island so his country wouldn’t ignore this distant battle as it had ignored so many others. But now he lay mangled and lifeless in some outback hospital.

  A day later, word of Mel’s death made its way through Mel’s family. Peggy Stern and her sister Jackee, Mel’s cousins, learned about the tragedy when they met their father after school. Like their four other cousins, they were understandably crushed by their older hero’s death and the strikingly unfamiliar sight of their father crying openly. They would always remember Mel and the day they learned he was gone.

  The next day an army transport flew Mel’s body back to Melbourne, where Annalee waited at the airport, a twisted reflection of the moment Mel had stood at the Cavite shoreline five months earlier, that beautiful day when he swept her from the Clipper and took her to the wedding chapel.

  Base personnel back at Batchelor Field had rearranged Mel’s gruesomely mutilated body. But Annalee was furious about the doily-like covering that had been placed over her dead husband’s head to obscure his ghastly wounds. She was furious about the dressing, furious that his body had been disturbed or altered in any manner. She wanted him to appear as he did when he took his final breath, however horrific the sight might have been.

  “She just wanted to see him,” her daughter Anne Fadiman later said. Annalee hated that Mel had been made up unnaturally, as if she was too fragile to see him simply because she was a woman, especially after surviving so much danger and witnessing so much horror without flinching.

  That morning, a day after Mel’s death, business was unexpectedly brisk at Adrian’s florist shop. All day American military officers—General Douglas MacArthur’s staff included—foreign correspondents, and diplomats crowded the florist’s shop at No. 3 Australia Arcade. Dozens and dozens of flower arrangements were sent to Annalee, who was grieving at the nearby Australia Hotel.

  Mel’s service, held at B. Matthews Funeral home on May 1, resembled a military funeral. His coffin was draped in a flag, and officers attended in uniform. After the funeral, Mel’s body was brought to Springvale Crematorium and incinerated. Teddy took his ashes. Flown in a plane by a friend Mel had made on Bataan, Colonel Joseph Moore—the pilot who had taken Mel and General George to Batchelor Field—Teddy scattered Mel’s ashes over the waters of Melbourne’s harbor.

  “Mel’s career was as brilliant as it was brief,” White wrote. “When he died, he was one of the greatest of U.S. war correspondents. He was more than that, one of the most magnificent men and trustworthy friends I have met anywhere.”

  As time passed and the sting of Mel’s death faded, Annalee would remember their romance warmly and recognize how valuable their experience together had been for both of them. They were risk-loving people who would always be twenty-five in Annalee’s mind. She could remember Mel forever as her twenty-five-year-old husband who had thrived on their adventure together.

  As Annalee’s daughter Anne later reflected, “I think that those last weeks of his life were probably among the happiest.”

  “When we heard that Mel was gone there was a fog of gloom over Melbourne,” Teddy White told Mel’s mother when he finally felt able to pick up a pen to write her. “You could have ladled it out with a spoon.”

  Mel’s death was particularly hard on Teddy, whose recent years had closely tracked Mel’s. Teddy spiraled into a depression following his friend’s death. He waited weeks to write his own family, afraid that he would “infect” his letter with depression that would then spread back home to Boston. Finally, one afternoon in mid-June, Teddy, on his way to a Time assignment in India and perhaps China, was on board a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  Now attached to the U.S. armed forces as a correspondent for Time, Teddy was chasing a story about the Allies being caught off guard by the Japanese attacks when so many people—including Teddy, most journalists, and especially Mel—knew from the moment Japan moved on Indochina what its ambitions really were.

  Teddy’s depression after Mel’s death was compounded by the death of another friend in Chungking and the Mydanses’ internment. That day, however, the sea was smooth and the sky was free of clouds and enemies. As a result, he told his mother, his depression was starting to ease.

  “I know that Mel’s death must have shocked you almost as bitterly as it shocked all of us here,” Teddy told his family. “But I still haven’t got over the bitterness of it though it’s five weeks, now in the past. Mel was a very good kid, mama.”

  Teddy’s letter emphasized just how much community and friendship he had found among Melbourne’s press gang, particularly the “old gang” from Chungking, and especially Mel. The details of Mel’s death were unimportant, Teddy told his mother. “But it was the sense that we ourselves were subject to death that upset me—Till and Mel and I had been through so much muck together (Till and Mel far more than me), and we had come to believe ourselves so completely immune to mortal death that to find death choosing one of us, and not by the enemy’s hand, sobered us cold.”

  Teddy, who hadn’t ever thought hard about marriage, had been struck by Mel and Annalee’s relationship and what it had come to:

 
“Ten day honeymoon in Manila, three weeks of war and bombing, a month and a half of hell on Corregidor and Bataan, a month of escape, and then a month in a posh Melbourne hotel; and then zingo, death, and the end of it. It will be a memory to her, I suppose, and then a dream, and then nothing but an echo in her afterlife.”

  Teddy was impressed by Annalee’s resilience.

  “She didn’t cry and wasn’t messy,” he told his mother. “She was swell.”

  While Teddy, Peg Durdin, and others tried to take care of affairs for Annalee in Melbourne, Annalee corresponded with Elza about her wishes for memorial arrangements, photographs they wanted to share, what to do with Mel’s possessions, and the letters each had received with messages they hoped to show one another.

  Most importantly, Annalee and Elza wrote and telegrammed one another to process their shared loss.

  “There is nothing to say except that I want to see you and thank you for being nicer than I thought anyone could be,” Annalee told Elza from Australia. “And thank you for Mel—five months were wonderful enough to last the rest of my life.”

  In the months that followed, Annalee became much closer to Elza, her “Mom Number 2.” After both women’s wounds faded, this correspondence blossomed into a decades-long friendship. Elza would be a key source of support as Annalee returned to the United States to attempt to piece her life back together.

  Annalee may have been stoic following Mel’s death, but she wasn’t unaffected. At first, she connected with her mother-in-law as a typical bereaved wife might. That June she arrived in New York aboard the USS West Point and settled into a room at the St. Moritz Hotel. She carried the photographic negatives from her wedding and the escape through the Philippines all across the Pacific and back home to the United States, where she finally had them developed. She even had pictures from Mel’s funeral that Time Inc. photographer Wallace Kirkland had given her, unsolicited, though she was eager to dispose of those.