The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  “And how long were you there?” someone asked. “Till the end of the war,” he replied. “Four years.”

  On Bataan Annalee Whitmore and Mel Jacoby thought of their friends, whom they knew to be at Santo Tomas, and wondered who had after all made the better choice. Some 83,000 American and Filipino soldiers, plus 26,000 civilians, were crowded on the peninsula. All were on half rations; by mid-March, when on President Roosevelt’s orders General MacArthur left for Australia, the garrison was down to one-third rations.

  At least she had a job to do, Whitmore thought, although only a few of the stories she and the other five reporters wrote passed censorship for transmission. The military situation was dire, the isolation total, the prospect of reinforcements every day more bleak. There could be no Dunkirk here, she noted. Where would the boats sail to? There was no rear to send to for supplies. It was a war without a rear. It was a war “with Japanese on all sides, long-range guns in all directions, planes overhead everywhere.” No relief. No escape.

  In an article for Liberty, Whitmore compared the world of the USAFFE on Bataan and Corregidor to “a subdivision of hell.” At night she was assigned to a bed in the navy tunnel on Corregidor; by day she visited the wounded in the hospital tunnel, or crossed over to Bataan with Jacoby. The soldiers on the front line had gone through weeks of constant attack — dive bombings, machine-gun strafings, and shrieking, blasting shells that shattered bodies. One had to see it to understand what a machine-gun bullet could do to a human leg, she wrote. The men she talked to had not taken off their shoes for fifteen days. “All night they hope for daylight because of snipers; all day they hope for night so the waves of enemy planes will stop.” But they were holding, and they thought they could continue to hold “until help comes.” Annalee did not say when, or how, they learned that help would not be coming.

  One day she and Mel drove along a bumpy dirt road to Bataan Hospital #2. They found “admissions” under an old bus roof supported by four bamboo poles. Bombs landed close enough to shake the tent operating room. Annalee spent a lot of time with the medical teams; with wounded constantly coming in and malaria and dysentery rampant, they were always understaffed. She selected several nurse’s reports and edited them for Life, heartbreaking accounts of shrapnel wounds, gas gangrene, and malaria, with all anti-gas gangrene serum gone months before and no more quinine for malaria either. Then the Japanese bombed the hospitals themselves, leaving the nurses with their own share of shrapnel wounds.

  The “subdivision of hell” became a little more bearable after the bombing let up and the Jacobys moved with Clark Lee into a little house on Corregidor. At night they would sit in the blackness, watching the flash of artillery on Bataan and debating how to get out. By mid-February it was clear there were no plans to relieve the Philippines, but it occurred to them that if they — reporters who had been on the scene — could just get their story out, perhaps they could persuade those in power otherwise. Chances of survival for those who remained looked slim.

  Again it was Mel who found a boat and made arrangements. On an afternoon late in February he and Annalee sat in an army vehicle on a Bataan road, waiting. Through the omnipresent film of fine dust they could see the great Mariveles Mountain, the last line of defense. At the arranged time they moved toward the shore, passing the clearing in the trees where caribau mules were slaughtered for meat for the troops and a bakery was turning out the next day’s supply of bread. They drove slowly through a civilian refugee camp where thousands of Filipinos lived out in the open. At dusk Clark Lee joined them. Their boat appeared out of the gloom and they boarded, carrying light packs and wishing they needn’t to take anything from hard-pressed Bataan. At a bridge they picked up several Englishmen. Then they moved off, slipping through the minefields, out into open sea.

  The journey was in two parts. The first boat traveled almost entirely at night, lying to by day in whatever sheltering inlet could be found. It took them only as far as the island of Cebu, where for days they awaited the arrival of another craft. They took turns standing watch; Mel and Annalee would share each other’s at night, long hours during which they could sit close, feel the soft breeze through their hair, and whisper their hopes and feelings to each other. At last a second, much larger boat appeared which to the little group seemed their only hope. The Dona Nati only barely evaded a Japanese warship as it hurriedly put to sea, and several times detoured to avoid distant vessels feared to be Japanese. The run through the Surigao Strait was the most dangerous part of the trip. “There was always a tight feeling in our stomachs,” Annalee said, recalling how she sat on deck filing her nails over and over again. Twenty-two days after leaving Cebu, the waters were at last safe, and the little crew sighted the port of Brisbane ahead.

  14

  Women Behind Walls: Manila, Siena, Shanghai

  For women the prospect of capture by an invading force is unnerving at best. Gwen Dew, a freelance reporter for the Detroit News, who was in Hong Kong in December 1941 when it was taken by the Japanese, acknowledged knowing the danger she faced, but said she had thought only in terms of being injured or killed. Had she seriously considered capture, she might not have remained. Hong Kong and other points accessible to the Japanese army in China bore the brunt of the violence— rape, torture, general slaughter — that marked the initial onslaught against British and American enclaves. The forces that invaded Manila three weeks later came directly from Japan. Hoping to win the Filipinos to their side, they were more orderly and controlled.

  Nineteen forty-two began a period of internment for American civilians on a scale never before envisioned. In Japanese-occupied Asia — the Philippines, Indochina, and large areas of the Chinese mainland — thousands of American men, women, and children, who had no common denominator except their citizenship, were incarcerated. In the United States later that same year, other men, women, and children — legal immigrants and their American-born offspring — were also confined to camps for the duration; the common denominator there was that all were of Japanese extraction. Their internment was billed as a “military necessity” against potential sabotage, no instance of which was ever proved. Rather, it was a misdirected act of retribution against a people from a land whose leaders had outwitted the Americans at Pearl Harbor and evicted them from the Philippines. Then, too, internment allowed their neighbors to acquire cheap the farmlands these immigrants had made so productive. The physical hardship of American civilians in Japanese camps was undeniably worse, but the mental anguish of the hundred-thousand-plus internees in America —branded “Japs” when they had thought themselves loyal Americans, and forced to abandon thriving careers and flourishing farms to live in crowded shelters behind barbed wire for the war’s duration — was arguably greater.

  The Japanese storming through southeast Asia designated English, Dutch, and American civilians living there “enemy aliens.” In much of the West there was another category, “friendly enemy aliens,” which allowed journalists, businessmen, professors, and the like, to be held in “polite confinement” until an exchange with their opposite numbers could be arranged. No tradition of “polite confinement” existed in the East. Other camps were far worse than Santo Tomas, where except in the sleeping quarters the men were not separated from the women and children and there was little overt violence. But never did the experience resemble “polite confinement.”

  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 e
licits. Both loved their husbands deeply.

  If there was anything Shelley and Carl Mydans found to be grateful for at Santo Tomas, it was that from the beginning the presence of their Japanese captors was minimal. The internees were left to organize their own lives. Structurally the buildings were in serious disrepair, but little by little plumbing was fixed, lighting improved, and schools arranged for the children. A communal kitchen was organized to prepare meals for three thousand. Medical facilities, including dentistry, were set up, and religious services scheduled. An executive committee was created to deal with infractions of the rules and interpersonal problems, and to mediate with the Japanese hierarchy. That hierarchy cared little about what went on inside as long as no one escaped outside. One night three young British seamen went over the wall. They were captured, returned to camp, beaten within hearing of all, and carried off to be executed. A few selected prisoners, taken along to witness the event, returned to spread the word that, should anyone else escape in the future, his roommates would be held responsible.

  After the first few weeks, life settled down to a contest between tedium and nerves. Hunger was not yet the problem it would be later. Sometimes the women would amuse themselves by writing out the recipes of wonderful concoctions they (or their cooks) had once made. There was little opportunity for creative cooking at Santo Tomas. Shelley worked in the kitchen picking weevils out of the cracked wheat, which was breakfast, and shavings out of the rice, which along with perhaps a little stew, sometimes sardines or duck eggs, and occasionally a spinachlike vegetable called “peachi” was dinner. Only children and pregnant women got three meals a day. Shelley also worked in the hospital, as did Carl, but even after they had done their jobs and their laundry, there were hours left to fill. Classes in French, Spanish, mathematics, and music appreciation were arranged. Mydans taught a course in photography, without camera or film, and wrote for the camp newspaper Internews. In the evening a baseball game might be organized, or there would be phonograph music on the front lawn. The best time-filler was stories. Somebody would tell a good one, and then you could think about that when you were trying to go to sleep. But for Shelley and Carl, accustomed to moving about at will in their job, there was no forgetting the walls and the shut-in feeling. They often walked around the compound together at dusk, Carl in his khaki shorts and open-neck shirt, Shelley in her gathered skirt and white shirt, bobby socks, and blue tennis shoes. It was their time to talk privately together.

  Not surprisingly, illness was frequent at Santo Tomas. Toothache. Itchy skin rash. Dysentery. Dengue. Mosquito-borne dengue fever swept the camp. Dengue was also called breakbone fever, because that was how you felt when you had it, your bones ached so, Shelley said. In an effort to shield the smaller children from such afflictions, they and their mothers were assigned their own building with a private kitchen and screens on the windows. The hospital, another priority, occupied the building that had been the geology lab, with missionary doctors and nurses for staff and untrained people for aides. There was not much in the way of drugs, but there were real beds, cots anyway, instead of just mats on the floor. When Shelley came down with appendicitis, she was allowed to go out of the compound for surgery at Philippine General Hospital with a good Filipino doctor. There was no general anesthesia available, but there was still novocaine, which worked very well, she recalled.

  Plain old nerves were another problem, especially for the women. One doctor, a good listener with a reassuring manner, served as a kind of lay therapist. A woman could go to the hospital (if there was a bed free) for a little rest cure — a few days of not sharing a room with thirty other women, of bathing more privately than standing under a spigot shower with up to six other women in the communal bathroom. A quiet breakfast. Some women were rocks of Gibraltar, but others were needier.

  For journalists, one of the hardest aspects of internment was knowing nothing of what was going on in the outside world. Every few days rumors about the war surfaced and were batted about the compound. At first they concerned the imminent landing of Allied troops, although it soon became obvious that that was wishful thinking. All through January and February, Shelley and Carl watched Japanese bombers heading for Bataan and wondered about the Jacobys. Was it really only three months since their wedding, since the four of them stood together, young and purposeful Americans in a friendly land, free, carefree even? When Bataan fell, families from there were brought to Santo Tomas, but Mel and Annalee were not among them. The new arrivals said that MacArthur had left by boat for Australia and American troops had retreated to Corregidor. From the camp you could hear the guns on Corregidor, strong for a while, and then every day less until there were no more guns, and word circulated that the Allies had surrendered. Almost everyone in the camp had a husband or fiance or brother or friend on Corregidor.

  Then along would come a new rumor — good, bad, indifferent. The same people were usually the carriers of such nuggets of information; it allowed them a measure of importance for a few days. One morning later that spring, on his way to “the fence” on the chance that a Filipino friend might have sent some food, Mydans was stopped by one of the regular rumormongers. Had he heard the news? the man asked. Carl tried to ignore him, but the man was insistent. “Have you heard the news? That Time and Life photographer, Carl Mydans, was killed in Australia. Killed in a plane crash with General George. Spanish friend of mine down at the fence just told me. Got away from the Japs and made it to Australia and then went and got himself killed there.”

  Mydans hated this man, the way men in prison can come to hate one another. “That’s one you’re wrong on,” he heard himself saying with a kind of vicious triumph in his voice. The man erupted in a furious shouting — what did he know about it anyway? — and Carl was about to tell him, cut him down to size, when he stopped. It came to him in a rush what had happened; he and Jacoby had been confused before. He must find Shelley and tell her. Mel and Annalee had gotten out, had made it to Australia, but now Mel was dead.

  So little real news seeped into Santo Tomas that its inhabitants had no idea if there were other camps for other civilians in other parts of the world, and whether other American reporters were incarcerated there. They assumed that in European countries Allied correspondents were promptly and politely exchanged for their counterparts on the Axis side. Certainly Eleanor and Reynolds Packard had never worried much about remaining in an Italy soon to be their enemy. Their Rome was a civilized place, a city sure to preface the term “enemy alien” with “friendly,” and on the night they dashed for cover into the American embassy, they were almost embarrassed to find that none of their fellow reporters felt such action necessary. The Italian police arrested all seven of them, but promptly sent Eleanor home, and although Reynolds and the others spent some hours in jail, they were soon transferred to a former brothel for safekeeping. By New Year’s 1942 the seven — joined by Teddy Lynch, J. Paul Getty’s wife, who had been studying singing in Italy — were taken north to Siena and installed in the Excelsior Hotel.

  This was truly “polite confinement.” The Americans took their pick of available rooms and an extra one for a “club room.” They were loosely guarded when they left the hotel to go to a restaurant or the movies, or to shop in the little antique stores in town. They ate as well as other inhabitants of Siena, better after they began bicycling about the countryside, buying contraband eggs and butter from the farmers. Visits to the zebra-striped cathedral and the art galleries inspired a craze for charcoal and crayon drawing. In the evening there were billiards in a nearby cafe and Ping-Pong. When weather permitted, they played tennis. Their appearance on the court with brand new tennis balls sent up from the embassy caused a sensation — Italians had not seen a new tennis ball in years.

  Their constant preoccupation was bridge. They all played; one or more games occurred nightly in the club room, often for high stakes. Enforced leisure was not easy, and the concentration required by bridge helped keep shaky interpersonal relations from de
teriorating further. Except for Eleanor and Reynolds, who suited each other very well, none of the remaining correspondents had really been friendly before. Confinement did not improve matters, but bridge helped keep them bearable.

  For Americans in Italy in 1942, news from the outside world was depressing. The Italian papers were full of Japanese victories, and although Herbert Matthews of the New York Times wrote out summaries of what news he gleaned from the BBC, it was hardly more optimistic. Winter passed. Spring in Siena proved beautiful. In May the Americans learned they were to return to Rome: the exchange was on. That night they celebrated, auctioning off their crayon and charcoal drawings to each other, and applauding Dick Massock of the AP in his imitations of soon-to-come Returned War Correspondent Lectures.

  In Rome several Americans whose fate they had not known joined them. Harold Denny of the New York Times, captured in the Libyan desert the previous November and since shifted from place to place, arrived with a long white beard. Padre Woolf, rector of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal in Rome, had been arrested while discussing Thanksgiving Day hymns with his organist; he had been accused of espionage, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. The American ambassador called it an old trick for the sole purpose of making a “blue chip” of him: in the event of a trade, a number of ordinary “white chip” Italians in the United States could be traded for him. In the end Padre Woolf cost thirteen white chips. He was relieved to see his compatriots in Rome, having been told the American embassy had already gone and left him behind.