Eve of a Hundred Midnights (29 page)

“It is a matter of fact phrase but it means a world turned upside down,” Annalee told her readers in
Liberty
magazine, “a world where a chocolate bar is more unusual than death; where quiet is only a prelude to explosion; where the United States is 8,000 miles away; where Manila, just across the water, is enemy territory.”

They call it “Pacific,” Clark Lee would later pointedly note, but he and his companions quickly realized this place was anything but.

For now, Corregidor was the reporters' home. Cleared to stay on the island and given accreditation from the military, the trio were little fettered in their work as they set out to report firsthand the U.S. entry into the war. Accreditation opened the door to many opportunities for them, including the chance to ride along on supply trips from the North Docks to the Bataan Peninsula, where the couple would see the kinds of horrors that had transformed Bataan into what Annalee called a “subdivision of hell.”

According to a War Department field manual issued later that month (though no doubt never distributed to Corregidor), accredited reporters were permitted to accompany fighting forces into the field and report on the spot. Their reports were subject to wartime censorship, military law, and other restrictions, but they also had wide freedom to talk to soldiers, travel aboard military vessels that had extra space, and use available
radio or other transmission facilities (with some restrictions). Accredited reporters would receive the same medical treatment as soldiers if injured, and if they were captured, they could expect Geneva Conventions protections as prisoners of war, provided they carried appropriate certification. They were differentiated from “visiting” correspondents, who were given permission to visit only on specifically outlined itineraries and to publish their reporting only after their visits.

“Pressmen are allowed to visit any front or headquarters at will, writing mainly feature color, background, personal experiences stories,” Mel reported for the journalism news weekly
Editor and Publisher
. “Most of the correspondents have done everything with the troops except fire guns or fly planes.”

Newly outfitted with army-style uniforms whose arms featured an embroidered
C,
for “correspondent,” Mel resumed his work for
Time
and
Life
.

“In Bataan the troops fight with their backs to the sea-wall and no longer wear clean shirts but have learned to eat the thick Bataan dust, lick gritty teeth and take blood,” Mel wrote in a dispatch to
Life
that was reprinted in the
Field Artillery Journal
. Such evocative details and candid accounts of the soldiers' desperate resistance—Mel relayed firsthand narratives from Bataan and Corregidor that appeared regularly in
Life
on top of his own reporting—shocked the American public. As a result of Mel's work, Americans already demoralized by Pearl Harbor now saw the mess unfolding in the Pacific.

“The pictures of Bataan wounded were wonderful in timeliness to really give people the jolt and realization of suffering that is being endured over there by our boys, Americans and Filipinos, and those valiant women, our nurse corps,” read one letter to the editor that appeared in
Life
.

As Mel had envisioned before the war began, he and Annalee worked as a team much as the Mydanses had done in China,
the Philippines, and elsewhere. Annalee helped compile Mel's dispatches to Luce's magazines, but she also wrote some of her own and continued an assignment she had arranged in Manila: writing highly descriptive features about the war for
Liberty,
a five-cent weekly magazine that competed with the popular
Saturday Evening Post
. In one blow-by-blow of the first days after the outbreak of war, subscribers read Annalee's visceral descriptions of air raids, closed schools, desperate evacuees, and bloody attacks on railroads. In another, she described new recruits, among whom were former doormen as well as Harvard Business School grads.

“Now they've gone through weeks of constant attack,” she wrote.

And constant attack is an empty phrase that conveys nothing of the hellishness of shrieking, blasting shells and shattered bodies, of dive bombing, of strafing machine-gun fire. Those words mean more when you've discovered what just the whistle of shells overhead or the boom of bombs can do to a most durable stomach, or seen how a machine-gun bullet changes a human leg.

The Rock offered scant refuge from the pummeling air raids. Corregidor was a bomb-blasted island prison for an American and Filipino force with nowhere to turn. Civilian and soldier alike suffered Corregidor's dangers and discomforts. No one was spared the threat of the enemy's constant bombardments, and everyone shared the fetid conditions of the dark, moldy, stinking network of tunnels just east of the dock where
La Florecita
had landed.

In this war of aerial terror, these tunnels carved 300 feet beneath the limestone of Malinta Hill were the island's most important facility. There was a central 1,400-foot-long, concrete-reinforced
tunnel with dozens of parallel spurs off either side, plus additional U.S. Navy and hospital tunnels. During the war, these tunnels housed General MacArthur's command center, overworked medics and nurses, stores of ammunition and equipment, mess halls, and living quarters.

For the better part of the 1930s, Filipino laborers in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built the complex, digging through a hillside knotted with jungles. The trees dripped with moisture from the tropical humidity, and countless leeches crawled across their damp, tangled branches. A day's labor left the workers covered with the parasites. Cursing the leeches, they howled, “
Malinta,
” a Filipino term that roughly translates as “many leeches.” The term attached itself to the project, and by the time it was finished the tunnel and the mountain above were both known as Malinta. The soldiers who arrived on Corregidor also discovered the leeches, as well as the bats, bullfrogs, and skittering hermit crabs that infested the tunnels.

Now that MacArthur's forces had retreated from Manila, Malinta had become the military's nerve center in the Philippines. The general and his commanders were forced to prosecute the war in this underground maze, surrounded by frightened civilian families and hundreds of sick, wounded soldiers.

The same morning that the American reporters arrived at Corregidor, a Filipino counterpart and friend, Carlos Romulo, showed up on the steamer
Hyde
. Romulo had won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Southeast Asia, which, much like Mel's, had warned of the coming war. The two identified with one another for their shared insight on Japan's ambitions. After war broke out, MacArthur tapped Romulo to coordinate the “Voice of Freedom,” a pro-American radio program broadcast from Bataan's jungles. On Corregidor, Romulo would grow even closer to Mel and Annalee.

When Romulo reported for duty at Malinta, he was shocked by the tunnel's putrid odor and its desperate conditions. Soldiers found anywhere they could to sleep and squeezed into corners of the concrete floors, between ammunition cases and one another's boots. Romulo took note of their exhaustion, of how the soldiers slept through the noise and shaking of bombs and other activity. Instead of scantily clad women, Romulo wrote, these soldiers pinned pictures of American fighters and bombers to their makeshift bunks.

“They were the sweethearts these fellows wanted to see!” Romulo later recalled.

These soldiers desperate for even a few minutes' sleep and perhaps a dream of B-17s and P-40s flying over the horizon were joined underneath Malinta by dozens of government officials and VIPs, including the Philippines' president, Manuel Quezon. And many of the officials who had been evacuated to Malinta were not there alone; some had brought their wives and children with them to the fortress. How long anyone would remain—civilian or military—remained unforeseeable.

“We were of all ages, and of differing tastes and habits,” wrote Amea Willoughby, one of seventeen occupants of the “ladies' lateral,” a spartan dwelling that housed at least seventeen women and children who had been evacuated from Manila.

Amea was married to Colonel Charles Willoughby. He would soon become MacArthur's chief intelligence officer, but at the time he was an assistant to Francis B. Sayre, the U.S. high commissioner in the Philippines. In 1943, with the war still waging, Amea Willoughby would describe how life in the lateral flattened its inhabitants' social divisions.

“In a design for living that afforded no privacy, or even the luxury of modesty, we could not hide from each other the little faults and traits of a lifetime,” Willoughby wrote. “We were
stripped of social artificialities along with the outer props of prestige and material acquisitions.”

Like their male counterparts, the women crammed into the hot, stifling tunnel slept on double-decker cots and ate in a noisy, stinking dining hall shared with officers and wounded soldiers recovering at the underground hospital. The women were married to men who before the war had been the Philippines' power brokers—the lateral's residents included Quezon's wife and teenage daughter—and most were ill prepared for the island's tough conditions.

Many of the women, Willoughby noted, needed time to shake off their shyness amid the “overwhelmingly masculine” environment on Corregidor. However, there was one ladies' lateral resident who barely flinched at the conditions, thus earning Amea Willoughby's admiration: Annalee Jacoby.

Annalee had no interest in waiting around helplessly while Mel went about his work. She wanted to report too. But Corregidor officials first assigned Annalee to a cot in the ladies' lateral with the other civilian women. She strenuously objected; she wanted to live with Mel and Clark, who were given cots on the porch of Commissioner Sayre's house, located on Tailside. (Sayre and his family had relocated to a space inside Malinta.) In order to remain officially accredited, however, she had to accept the assignment.

Annalee, despite her slight, 100-pound frame, adapted quickly to conditions on the island and made only one token nod to femininity while on Corregidor: she still pinned her dark brown hair up in bobby pins after a shower to set it into a wave.

“That was her only concession to doing anything feminine and time consuming,” her daughter, the author Anne Fadiman
, relayed decades later. “Particularly during the war, she looked down on women who were fussing about.”

To Willoughby, Annalee may have been small, but she was “eloquent of self-reliance and capability,” not just some loyal bride tagging along on Mel's adventures across Asia. She was an independent woman who drew upon her own memories of the Depression to figure out how to survive despite Corregidor's scant resources. As Anne Fadiman later recounted, Annalee had no patience for “frilly, helpless” women.

On Corregidor, Annalee, like the island's four other accredited reporters, wore an army-issued khaki uniform. She wanted to be seen by the rest of Corregidor and Bataan's otherwise all-male press corps, as well as by the military and government officials there, as just another reporter.

“We were impressed, and some of us were envious, of her arm band which said PRESS and by the fact that she went everywhere on The Rock with her husband,” Willoughby wrote.

She went nearly everywhere Mel went, but not because she was anxiously tagging along with him. She was working, taking trips with Mel across the channel to Bataan to visit field hospitals or going to the gun batteries on Topside to meet the men operating the artillery. She faced many of the same dangers these men faced and wasn't any more afraid of bombs or artillery than anyone else on the island. In fact, she looked forward to excitement her entire life, but she wasn't observing the war for the thrill of it: Annalee had a job to do, and she couldn't do it if she was shrinking away in a stinking, noisy tunnel. More often than not, that job involved writing about the “little things” that were this war's most depressing elements, like “the soldier who comes up asking if anybody's heard about his wife and baby in Manila.”

Food wasn't all Bataan lacked. U.S. policymakers had declined to reinforce the Philippines' air combat capabilities, leaving Bataan's skies defended by a patchwork of twenty planes in various states of disrepair after the raids on U.S. air bases early in the war. Some of them were old Filipino army trainers. Some were converted puddle jumpers. There were four beat-up P-40 fighters and a few P-35s.

Led by Brigadier General Harold H. George, a forty-nine-year-old former World War I ace, this “Bataan Air Force” nevertheless helped provide breathing room for the American and Filipino soldiers fighting in the jungles beneath. Known as “Pursuit Hal” to differentiate him from another general with the same name—Harold L. George, or “Bomber Hal,” who led the Air Transport Command during the war—George had been promoted on Christmas Eve, when he took over the 5th Interceptor Command and was given responsibility for Bataan's air defenses. This included the approximately 5,000 U.S. Army Air Forces personnel and 600 or so Filipinos under George's command, most of whom, lacking planes to fly or service, were given rifles and turned into infantrymen.

Thus constrained, Pursuit Hal orchestrated a campaign of “courage and ingenuity” from secret airfields hidden by Bataan's ubiquitous foliage. Taking off from airfields that stood out “like water in the desert against the jungles” when fellow soldiers saw them, each flight was “almost a suicide mission.” Were there but more planes available to the pilots on Bataan, Mel wrote, he was certain, given what George had done with the few available to his command, that the flyers could hold off the Japanese long enough to reinforce Bataan and Corregidor. Like most of his sources, Mel believed that wresting back control of the Philippines would give the United States a base from which it could “bomb the living daylights out of Formosa” [present-day Taiwan], which the Japanese empire had transformed
into a major stepping-stone of its own for control of the Pacific. The dream of reinforcements sailing for Bataan, about to arrive any day, was the fantasy that kept the forces fighting despite their pitched battle.