Eve of a Hundred Midnights

I
nside a Los Angeles living room, a woman in her late seventies held court. She wore a black sweater-vest with an embroidered Christmas tree and sat on a couch with her back to the windows. She held a glass of white wine and was gesturing with her other hand as she told a story.

This was my grandmother, Peggy Cole, the matriarch of a clan that stretched back for five generations of our Los Angeles family. She clung to few traditions, but did believe that whenever the family assembled, a “cocktail hour,” with wine and cheese, was essential. And though her family consisted mostly of assimilated Jews, she thought Christmas was as good a time as any for us to gather.

Recently, Peggy and her husband, Curt Darling, had given up one of their homes, and she had been going through the oddities she'd accumulated over half a century. Peggy gave most of it away, but she kept one item aside that she wanted me to have.

As our family began opening gifts, my grandmother directed my attention to a weathered, brown, hard-sided rectangular case under the tree. It had two metal latches and a fraying leather handle, wasn't wrapped, and was heavy for its size. With two resonant clicks, I sprang the latches and opened up the case. Its insides smelled of the back corners of bookshelves, of old army footlockers, of history, of adventure.

Inside there was a small, elegant typewriter. Four banks of round, cream-colored keys rose from its low-profile, black metal frame. A gold leaf panel decorated either side of the machine. Its plunging neckline revealed rows of long, gray type bars. At the center of this décolletage, gold lettering on the frame spelled out “C-O-R-O-N-A” like a necklace charm.

My grandmother told me that the typewriter—a Corona 4 portable, manufactured in 1930—had once belonged to her cousin. He had been a newspaper, magazine, and radio correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, she said, and before that he had lived in China as an exchange student. She
knew I had long dreamed of being a reporter myself, and she thought I was the one in the family who would most appreciate this typewriter.

I was dumbstruck. How had I never heard of this cousin and of all the adventure and romance surrounding him? His name was Melville Jacoby, but everyone knew him as Mel. Fantasies I'd long had of becoming a foreign correspondent were realities he'd lived. I had to know more.

When Mel bought the typewriter, he was roughly the same age I was that Christmas. Within a year of that holiday, I started working as a reporter at a coastal business journal, a job as sleepy as Mel's work was exciting. He had set out to help his generation come to know a distant land that most Americans still don't understand. He then tried to help them comprehend a war that circled the globe. But as glamorous as Mel's life seemed from the outside, he had struggled for a long time to find his career footing.

Shortly after that Christmas, I went to see my grandmother for the first of many visits. During each visit, after our wine and cheese, she pulled out a banker's box full of manila file folders that she'd rediscovered in her move. The files had titles like “Madame Chiang,” “Burma Road,” and “Philippine Clippings.” There were a half-dozen brown photo albums whose pages had begun to stick together, but inside their protective cellophane sleeves were pristine photos of soldiers sharing cigarettes in a jungle, twenty-somethings in Oxford shirts with rolled-up sleeves laughing at desks piled high with newspapers, and world-weary Chinese men in sandals and robes sitting on piles of rubble in front of half-destroyed homes.

The closet also held other envelopes full of negatives, pamphlets from aid organizations, even a cookie tin containing 16-millimeter film canisters with fading ink labels. Across the top of a shallow green cardboard box someone had used a black
marker to write “WWII Letters.” Inside were typewritten reports from battlefields in sweltering corners of China, copies of cabled dispatches dashed off from places like French Indochina to United Press bureau chiefs, and letters addressed to editors at
Time
magazine.

One letter was a carbon copy of a cable Mel had sent to David Hulburd, a news editor at
Time
. The letter described a fiery New Year's Eve in the city of Manila, its roads blocked and its harbor full of boats that had been destroyed by Japanese planes or scuttled by retreating American soldiers.

“There were no other ships and even if there were, the Japanese Navy was sitting outside Manila Bay—waiting,” Mel wrote. “The Japanese forces were closing toward Manila from north and south Luzon in such force, with so many dive bombers, that it hardly seemed Bataan could hold a week.”

Towers of flame and a waxing sliver of moon lit Manila as 1941 neared its violent close. Japanese troops were expected in the Philippine capital by morning. Every few minutes, explosions echoed throughout the city, heralding the new year that was just a few hours away. That night a scene of utter chaos spread along the waterfront, with the most activity concentrated around its warehouses and piers.

Across the street from the waterfront, nearly three dozen journalists were crammed into room 620 of the Bay View Hotel. Peeking through the room's blackout curtains, they could see retreating bands of American soldiers blowing up munitions dumps, setting fire to fuel reserves, and dynamiting radio installations. Only a few hours earlier that day, a hospital ship had been painted with the red and white markings of the Red Cross; now, just thirty minutes before midnight, the reporters
watched as the ship—the
Mactan
—cautiously threaded its way through the mines that had been planted all over the bay.

For days, members of the U.S. Army Transportation Service had been frantically trying to move merchant ships from Manila's piers and the mouth of the Pasig River. Those ships that the ATS couldn't move had been scuttled. Bombed and sabotaged vessels littered the harbor; according to historians E. Kay Gibson and Charles Dana Gibson, at least twenty large ships had sunk in the harbor by December 29.

That New Year's Eve the streets were filled with nervous Manila residents trying to get out of town before the Japanese arrived. As some fled, others tore through waterfront storage facilities. Some looted valuables, fuel, and food; others unhurriedly sifted through warehouses as local police either looked the other way or grabbed their own loot.

The reporters in the hotel fretted, bickered, and made wild guesses about their future. Manila had until this point been nominally protected by the United States, but with the U.S. military pulling out, the city would be abandoned by daybreak. The New Year would bring new rulers—the Japanese—who had closed in on the city after a fast drive across Luzon, the largest of the Philippines' more than 7,000 islands.

General Douglas MacArthur's U.S. Army Forces in the Far East had begun abandoning Manila on Christmas Day, and shortly after that MacArthur declared the capital an “Open City.” It was an invocation of international law intended to limit damage to the city. It turned out to have been taken in vain: Japan continued and intensified its bombing of Manila after the declaration.

Meanwhile, MacArthur prepared for a last-ditch defense of the Philippines. Even as the country's capital burned, most of those under MacArthur's command—about 12,000 Americans
and 63,000 Filipinos—dug into positions at the base of Mariveles Mountain on the Bataan Peninsula, a jungle-choked outcropping around Manila Bay to the west.

Most forces that had not been sent to Bataan—including MacArthur and his headquarters staff—ended up on Corregidor, a heavily fortified, tadpole-shaped island two miles south of Bataan that stood sentinel over the entrance to the bay. Known as “The Rock” to most of MacArthur's forces, Corregidor bristled with anti-aircraft batteries and artillery installations, while a nest of tunnels and storerooms burrowed beneath the island's surface housed command centers, hospitals, and residences for officers and other VIPs. But as the Japanese approached the island began to feel more like a prison as supplies dwindled, the attacks worsened, and the possibility of reinforcements evaporated.

The journalists at the Bay View were deadlocked, and they began weighing their different options. They could search for a ship captain willing to navigate the mine-strewn bay and attempt to run a tightening Japanese blockade, or they could try to flee by land on routes that were either blocked by firefights or plugged up by slow-moving caravans of withdrawing troops and civilian refugees. Another option was one that thousands of other American and British civilians in Manila would take: remain in the city and hope to weather the enemy occupation.

Most of the reporters were veterans of a nearly five-year-old war between Japan and China. They had survived the air raids, occupations, and massacres in other cities across East Asia, but this time their own country was at war. If they were captured, they might be executed if Japan deemed their reporting too critical or their past ties to Chinese or American officials too tight.

This wasn't just Manila's last night of freedom. This was the last night the thirty-two reporters packed into the Bay View would spend together. A group bonded as tightly as any army platoon in the heat of battle—many of them had served alongside one another for years in the heat and stink and drama of China's wartime capital, Chungking (Chongqing; Chungking was how Westerners of the era wrote it), where they were once so young, so eager, and so ready to take on the world—would soon fracture.

Hosting the press corps in their room was a young couple who had been married only a month earlier: a fair-skinned but dark-featured twenty-five-year-old
Time
correspondent named Melville Jacoby, and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, a former MGM scriptwriter, also twenty-five years old. Mel had already spent a number of years in China reporting on the Second Sino-Japanese War, which had merged with World War II, while Annalee had given up her Hollywood career to go to China and write about what she saw as the true epic of her time. They'd fallen in love in Chungking, only to follow the story that had brought them to Manila. Both had realized that if they stayed in Manila, they would almost certainly be killed, and yet escape was a gamble as well.

“The last two weeks in Manila were the worst,” Annalee wrote later. “The Japanese were getting closer; we knew Mel would probably be killed if they got him; and every way of getting out failed as soon as we thought of it.”

The Jacobys were not the only married journalists in the Bay View. Carl Mydans and Shelley Smith were both
Life
magazine contributors; as fellow Time Inc. hands, they had worked closely with Mel since the summer. Carl was a photojournalist who had shot the Russo-Finnish War of 1940 and documented the Great Depression, while Shelley was a writer who also meticulously cataloged and captioned her husband's photos.

When Mel and Annalee wed, Carl had been Mel's best man and Shelley—who had attended Stanford with both of the Jacobys—was Annalee's matron of honor. Besides one other
Time
reporter, they had been the only witnesses at the wedding. The Mydanses were more than colleagues: they were the Jacobys' closest friends in the Philippines. But at this crucial moment the friends disagreed about what they should do. Mel and Annalee wanted to flee Manila, while Carl and Shelley leaned toward weathering an occupation.

In Chungking, all four had been members of a tight-knit community of foreign correspondents, most of whom even lived together. Their friends had seen what Japanese soldiers did when they conquered other Chinese cities, most notoriously the former capital of Nanking (Nanjing). The possibility of similar atrocities in Manila loomed, but this night was also about survival and the ability to continue telling the war's story.

Mel also suspected there might be a mark on his head given his past encounters with the Japanese and the fact that he'd once worked for the Chinese government. A year earlier, after Mel photographed Japanese officers at a warehouse in Haiphong, Indochina (present-day Vietnam), they had chased and arrested him and the U.S. diplomat he was traveling with, prompting a brief diplomatic dustup. A month before the attacks at Pearl Harbor, Japanese diplomats had also warned Mel not to print anything negative about the Japanese officials passing through Manila.

Nobody in the room yet knew just how many thousands of American troops had gathered in Bataan or on Corregidor. As far as the reporters understood, MacArthur's troops would be lucky to last another week. Escape to either of these last-ditch positions might only mean delaying the inevitable. The frequent blasts persisting outside the hotel signaled how urgent
the reporters' situation was. On the streets below, the army was finishing its withdrawal while continuing to sabotage anything potentially of value to the Japanese.