Eve of a Hundred Midnights (25 page)

China's leaders not only sent the pandas as gifts to the United States but also made luxurious offerings to the Jacobys upon their wedding. Annalee's and Mel's friends and contacts in China sent a bevy of luxurious and stately gifts. These included gold and silver spoons, an “exquisite” red satin blanket from Madame Kung, elaborate vases, and piles of greetings from all the journalists at Chungking's Press Hostel.

Hollington Tong sent a gift of gold worth hundreds of dollars because he hadn't been able to arrange the “Red Sedan” wedding he and Madame Chiang had hoped to throw for Mel and Annalee in the Chinese capital. Such a traditional ceremony would have involved drummers, fine clothing, and an elaborate palanquin for the spouses. Alas, war made such a celebration impossible. Mel was embarrassed by the gift anyhow, and his conscience couldn't let him keep it.

Despite the panda-related annoyances, the intermittent services at the cabin, and a persistent rainstorm, the Jacobys were not dismayed.

“The running water worked only at intervals, the electricity blinked on and off all one evening, and it poured, but it was still the most wonderful honeymoon anyone ever had,” Annalee wrote.

T
housands of miles from Manila, as Mel and Annalee exchanged vows, a fleet of Japanese ships gathered in a harbor in the southern Kuril Islands. Around this time, an order from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto circulated among the ships collecting in Tankan Bay, and on November 26—two days after the wedding—the armada left the bay, bound for Hawaii.

The next day, the U.S. War Department informed General Douglas MacArthur that negotiations with Japan were crumbling. When the general ordered the forces under his command to full alert in preparation for an invasion, Mel and Annalee were forced to return to Manila from Lake Taal.

The SS
President Coolidge
was docked at Manila's enormous Pier 7, preparing to sail to the United States. With all the signs of war, civilians from all over Asia had been clamoring for space on the
Coolidge
. Among Mel and Annalee's friends headed back to the United States on the ship were CNAC's Royal Leonard,
Time
's Allan Michie, Dennis McEvoy—a writer who had been a friend of Annalee's before she went to Chungking, where Mel met him—and John Tee-Van, who had spent so much time coordinating with the couple about the pandas that Mel and Annalee had grown incredibly fond of him. Tee-Van carried
his special cargo aboard the
Coolidge
. Finally, after worrying about the bears for so many months, Mel and Annalee watched as the pandas were loaded into specially constructed steel cages on the ship's deck.

“We saw the boat off and took a long, relieved breath to see the pandas actually leaving, after all we've both gone through with them,” Annalee wrote.

In a saccharine coda to the panda saga, United China Relief arranged a naming contest for the bears after they arrived at the Bronx Zoo in 1942. It was another piece of the panda diplomacy effort, as publicity about the pandas was used to garner sympathy for United China Relief in the United States. Specifically, in a calculated effort to get donors to support the campaign's projects related to war orphans, the pandas were presented as a gift to America's children. Newspapers around the United States asked their readers' children to suggest names for the pandas. The daughter of a Columbus, Indiana, newspaper editor submitted the rather uninspired winning entries: “Pan-dah” and “Pan-Dee.”

While the Jacobys were relieved not to be responsible for the pandas any longer, they hardly had an opportunity to relax. Manila teemed with anxiety. Though the Americans didn't know the Japanese fleet was steaming toward Hawaii, everyone paying attention knew that war was likely any day.

MacArthur's press aide, Lieutenant Colonel LeGrande “Pick” Diller, organized a small party for Mel, Annalee, Carl, and Shelley at the Manila Hotel on December 5. Though it was clear that Diller valued his friendship with Manila's press corps, he also wanted to prep them for the chaos many expected any hour, let alone any day.

“We did have such a good time, and they were such fine people,” Diller later wrote of the meal.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that Diller, fellow press officer Lieutenant Colonel Sidney Huff, or other military leaders coddled the press. Still, it's clear that MacArthur's staff wanted to cultivate relationships with the writers and photographers of
Time
and
Life
. The right “optics” would be crucial for maintaining public support in what could be a long, grueling commitment in the Pacific, and Luce's empire had the era's most accessible lens. Regardless, Diller and Huff didn't have to convince reporters why war seemed inevitable. By this point, anyone could easily trace the line that had led to the current crisis.

After Japan expanded its influence in Indochina—as Mel had witnessed while stringing for the United Press—it set its sights on Thailand, Britain's colonies in Southeast Asia, and the Dutch East Indies. Nervous about Japan's growing dominance of Asia, the United States slapped a series of embargoes on the empire. By July 1941, MacArthur had been called out of retirement to command newly combined American and Filipino armed forces, the latter of which were undertrained and lacked modern weapons.

Over the course of the first few months of 1941, the United States—then still officially neutral—and Britain had developed a “Europe First” strategy focused on defeating Germany while limiting their efforts against Japan. Rather than send new resources to strengthen the forces under MacArthur's command, the nearly bankrupt Philippines had been left to defend itself even though it wasn't independent and the country couldn't afford to equip and train its own soldiers. As the historian Eric Morris described it, “That was a polite way of saying that the Philippines would be abandoned to the enemy.”

As war neared, the Philippines' newly reelected but largely
powerless president, Manuel Quezon, and other officials complained to Washington about their vulnerabilities, but little changed. MacArthur secured thirty-three new long-range B-17 bombers, but that was far from enough; in any event, their late acquisition would soon prove moot.

War was a near-certainty, but Thailand, not the Philippines, emitted the “surest scent of action, after which comes Burma,” Mel believed, and it was in Burma that General Claire Chennault's group of mercenary pilots—the Flying Tigers—were finishing training. Fresh with news from newly arrived sources in Manila, Mel urged his editors to be prepared to break the fighting group's story.

Something was coming, and Mel knew it.

On December 6, Mel informed David Hulburd that he was going to start sending reports by cable rather than over radio broadcasts. The latter were too easily intercepted, and Mel's messages contained confidential information. Mel understood how dangerous conditions were becoming in the Pacific. His notice to Hulburd about the cables might have been the last message he sent before war began.

Communication lines with Hong Kong were silent.

Radios tuned to Bangkok broadcasts received dead air.

Wireless communications with the United States carried only static.

The streets outside the Bay View were empty.

The morning of December 8, 1941, was deceptively quiet.

Then the phone rang.

It was Carl. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. A newspaper slipped under Carl's door declared the news in bold headlines. Mel didn't believe his colleague, so he looked at his own paper
and “saw some screwy headline that had nothing to do with Honolulu.”

Still doubtful about what Carl had told him, Mel returned to bed, but he couldn't fall back asleep.

He called Clark Lee, who confirmed the news.

There had been ever-more-frequent Japanese flybys of the Philippines in the preceding days, but still, the news was a shock. “We'd known about the Japanese flights, all the other signs, but we didn't quite believe it even out there,” Mel wrote.

While Mel was on the phone with Clark there was a knock at his door. He hung up and heard another knock, heavy and insistent. Mel found Carl standing outside the hotel room door, already dressed and ready to head into the city.

That World War II would be fought, and won, in the skies was clear early in the conflict. Though Japan delivered its first blows at Pearl Harbor, more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific from the Philippines, it followed its opening act with devastating raids on two airfields—Clark and Nichols Fields—in the Philippines. Two squadrons of B-17 bombers, dozens of P-40 fighters, and other planes were destroyed, eliminating much of the matériel that had been sent at MacArthur's request.

Despite the news of the attacks in Hawaii nine hours earlier, the planes had been left in the open while their pilots ate lunch nearby. Flyers didn't receive warnings of the approaching Japanese planes until they were almost overhead.

“By noon the first day, pilots were waiting impatiently on Clark field for take-off orders to bomb Formosa,” Annalee wrote, referring to the Japanese-occupied island now known as Taiwan. “Our first offensive action had to wait for word from Washington—definite declaration of war. Engines were
warmed up; pilots leaned against the few planes and ate hot dogs.”

Twenty minutes later, without warning, Annalee wrote, fifty-four enemy bombers arrived, delivering a brazen, devastating raid on Clark Field that crippled an already underprepared American garrison.

These raids sparked a decades-long debate about who was responsible for the blunder, but whoever should be blamed, the United States lost fully half of its air capacity in the Philippines in this one devastating first day of the war.

“MacArthur's men wanted to fight—but most of all they wanted something to fight with,” Mel wrote in a flurry of cables he sent
Time
following the war's commencement and the airfields' decimation. Unfounded rumors of convoys and flights of P-40s coming to join the fight began almost as soon as the attacks subsided. They would not cease for months.

On that morning, Manila's Ermita neighborhood was quiet. Mel arranged a car for the
Time
employees to share. Together they raced up Dewey Boulevard, to Intramuros, the walled old-town district that had been Spain's stronghold during its 300-year occupation. When they reached the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) headquarters at 1 Calle Victoria, they found MacArthur's driver, who had arrived early in the morning, asleep in his car.

“Headquarters was alive and asleep at the same time,” Mel wrote. MacArthur's staff was weary-eyed but busy as they girded for war. Within hours, helmeted officers carrying gas masks on their hips raced back and forth across the stone-walled headquarters, stopping only briefly to gulp down coffee and sandwiches. The general himself was his usual bounding self, striding through the headquarters as staff and other witnesses
confirmed reports of attacks throughout the Philippines. Mel and Carl were concerned about their jobs. Would wartime censorship clamp down on their reporting?

“The whole picture seemed about as unreal to USAFFE men as it did to us,” Mel later wrote. “We couldn't believe it, and MacArthur's staff had hoped the Japanese would hold off at least another month or so, giving us time to get another convoy or two in with the rest of the stuff on order.”

This hesitation, of course, was partly to blame for the devastation that occurred that day and the unsettled footing with which American forces fought during the brutal months to come.

Meanwhile, deep-seated racial prejudices kept many Americans from believing that Japan was capable of carrying out the attacks.

“Those days were eye-openers to many an American who had read Japanese threats in the newspapers with too many grains of salt tossed in,” Mel wrote. “They still couldn't believe the yellow man could be that good. It must be Germans; that was all everyone kept saying. We were just beginning to pay for years of unpreparedness. The shout ‘It's Chinese propaganda' had suddenly lost all traces of plausibility.”

Regardless of who was to blame, U.S. forces reeled.

Manila was quiet even as chaos engulfed the headquarters, where a scrum of reporters waited for updates. Rumors flew beneath the shady trees of Dewey Boulevard, rippled up the Pasig River, and raced past the storefronts along the Escolta.

“The whole thing has busted here like one bombshell, though, as previous cables showed, the military has been alert over the week,” Mel wrote.

As the realization of what had begun set in, Manila residents rushed through the city, withdrew cash from banks, stocked up on food, and bought as much fuel as they could before rationing
was ordered. Businesses quickly transformed basements into bomb shelters. Sandbags became scarce. As would happen all over the United States, local military rounded up anyone of Japanese descent, whether they were Japanese nationals or not. The Philippines waited for war.

Mel and Carl had little choice but to file blindly. Unable to contact wire service offices in either Asia or the United States to ask what material their editors wanted or needed, they were on their own.

“Manila had been a city of hell the first fortnight of war,” Mel wrote. “If it wasn't planes overhead in the day, it was the flare shooters at night whose rockets struck panic.”

But neither Mel, Annalee, nor Carl succumbed to that panic. During the run-up to the attacks, Mel had rewarded
Time
's confidence with ceaseless reports on the tense atmosphere gripping Manila. After the attack, he accelerated his reporting, setting to work on round-the-clock summaries of the war's progression. His reports were shaped by observations of conditions in Manila, regular press conferences at MacArthur's headquarters, and visits to the war's front lines to witness the fighting himself.

Shortly after the war began, Mel and Carl drove three and a half miles southeast of the Bay View to Nielson Field, the headquarters of the Far East Air Force. There, Mel got his initial in-person glimpse of how chaotic the Philippines' air defenses were.

“The hopeless confusion and the gestures when reports of enemy planes came over were depressing,” Mel wrote. “No one could do anything about them.”

During his visit, Major Reginald Vance asked Mel if he would like to ride along in a reconnaissance plane. Of course he would. Mel loved flying, and he knew his editors in
New York would love a firsthand report of flying over the war zone.

Vance grabbed a .30-30 rifle and threw it at Mel.

“You're the gunner,” Vance told Mel.

Mel wasn't going up in some state-of-the-art plane. He was about to fly in a puddle jumper that couldn't go faster than 150 miles per hour.

Just as Mel was about to sit down in the two-seater recon aircraft, Japanese fighter planes swooped overhead.

“And I was saved of the experience of being a gunner,” Mel wrote. “The puddle jumper was what we had left to fight the war with.”

On December 21, Japan began landing tens of thousands of troops at beaches along Lingayen Gulf, on the northwest side of Luzon. The next day, after an unexpected air raid, Mel drove with Joaquin Canuto, a Red Cross doctor, to northern Luzon to witness what was happening on the front lines.