Eve of a Hundred Midnights (30 page)

“The patch of sea spanning outward from the bay is the path by which they will see their convoy steaming in with planes, food and guns,” Mel wrote of how desperately the Bataan defenders wanted to believe that help was indeed steaming in.

In reality, no convoy was coming, and Japan's blockade limited shipping of ammunition, food, and medical equipment from other Philippine islands. Still, in one dispatch to
Time,
Mel tried to speak for the soldiers he met on Bataan.

“Since the troops at Bataan are unable to send mail now, they ask that the following, adopted as typical, be sent: Dear Mr. Roosevelt; our P-40 is full of holes,” Mel wrote, using a description for the plane that Annalee would later use to headline a magazine article about Bataan. “Please send us a new one.”

Meanwhile, the blockade confined Mel, Annalee, and Clark to Corregidor's cramped, increasingly wretched conditions.

Mel and Annalee tried to make the best of the situation. Corregidor was “not the best place in the world for a honeymoon,” Annalee conceded, “but we were so glad to be alive and still free that it didn't matter.”

Almost everywhere Mel and Annalee went on Corregidor they were surrounded by soldiers, officers, medics, and the small group of civilian VIPs and support staff who had been evacuated to the island. The couple stuck together as much as they possibly could, but there were usually twenty or so other people around at all times. During their first week on Corregidor, Annalee said, they only had two minutes alone together,
and that moment of privacy was rudely interrupted by a Japanese bomb that forced them to find cover with the masses.

Another time, on Bataan, a large formation of Japanese bombers flew overhead, prompting what Annalee later called her favorite memory of Bataan. Her daughter Anne Fadiman would recall the incident as told to her by Annalee:

Both threw themselves on the ground, Mel on top of Annalee. As the bombs began to fall, Mel, who was known for his dry sense of humor, said, “Remember, dear, it's all in your head.” (Though Mel was Jewish and Annalee was descended from Mormons, both had been raised by mothers who had converted to Christian Science.) Annalee remembered the two of them shaking with laughter as the ground around them shook from the bombing.

While newspapers would soon print stories about the honeymooning reporters dodging bombs on Corregidor, the second day they were there they made news for another reason. When the United States was less than a month into its showdown against Japan, Hollywood gossip columnists announced in blaring letters that MGM had begun production on a new film, with Ruth Hussey attached. In their January 2, 1942, column, Louella Parsons and Ronald Reagan, then a gossip columnist, announced plans for the film, dubbed
War Brides
and based on the screenplay that Mel and Annalee had written that past spring. Parsons and Reagan were sufficiently impressed with the project that their item about
War Brides
got top billing in the column, edging out news about an adaptation being made of a stage play called
Casablanca
. As it turned out,
War Brides
was never filmed.

Crowded and embattled conditions like those on Corregidor were not unfamiliar to the Jacobys. So strong was their
memory of Chungking that the couple almost found comfort amid Malinta's dank, stale-aired tunnels shuddering with every bomb blast. As horrible as this war had become, it had been on the bomb-ravaged streets above the Yangtze that the romance Mel and Annalee began in California flourished into love. Now here, on the hills overlooking the Bataan Channel, the drone of approaching planes, the wail of air raid sirens, the ensuing thunder of bomb upon bomb, and the staccato of anti-aircraft cannon responses provided the sound track of a deepening love.

Mel and Annalee's connection was strengthening, but for others Bataan and Corregidor felt ever more separated from the rest of the world. For most soldiers in the moldy tunnels and bloodied dust of the Philippines, day-to-day survival was more important than grand strategy. In 1942 few felt as alone as U.S. soldiers felt on those islands in the Pacific, and there was no relief in sight. On Corregidor and Bataan, “there could be no Dunkirk,” as Annalee wrote.

“In this war there's no sending back to the rear for replacements or supplies—this is war without a rear, with Japanese on all sides, long-range guns in all directions, planes overhead everywhere,” she wrote. “Ten thousand refugees have poured down from Bataan's mountains. They can't escape bombs and shells—there's nowhere to go.”

Radio was the one technology that kept Corregidor from total isolation. The navy's high-power wireless system linked the island with Washington, D.C. The reporters' accredited status allowed them to cable dispatches to their publications through the system, but they couldn't use it to send personal communications. However, they were able to transmit and receive a few select messages through high-ranking personnel authorized
to access the radio system. In mid-January, for example, U.S. High Commissioner Francis Sayre sent a secret message to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on Mel's behalf.

In a message that was to be passed on confidentially to his employers at Time Inc., Mel asked Luce to get the War Department to authorize the army to pay him $500 to cover expenses for what might become a long absence. Through Sayre, Mel also asked Hull to have Luce inform his family that he and Annalee were safe. Four and a half years after Hull had been compelled to assure the mother of a friend of Mel's that her son and Mel were not in danger in Peiping as it came under siege, the statesman again became the messenger for reassurances about Mel.

Mel's radio message also informed Luce and his deputies that the Mydanses had remained behind in Manila. Mel's successful escape was stunning news in New York, but his editors weren't allowed to publicize his location. They could only say that he was “with the United States Armed Forces in the Far East.” A week later, David Hulburd sent a coded message back through Hull, to Sayre, for Mel.

“We have informed your families and are delighted that you are well and in good hands,” Hulburd said. Hulburd added that Mel's most recent two cables were “magnificent.” He also asked Mel for firsthand reporting of the fighting to provide to
Life
.

The first of Mel's cables to Hulburd, sent on January 18, described a typical day of bombing for the Luzon forces. Despite Mel's tremendous access to Corregidor's generals and high-profile politicos, the report focused on the Filipinos working as nurses, barbers, and cooks on The Rock. While on the island, much of Mel's reporting depicted the everyday Filipino laborers who endured the conditions there and on nearby Bataan as
steadfastly as the infantrymen, pilots, and sailors more commonly thought of as heroes. Mel's second “magnificent” dispatch told a darker story. It told of conditions in Manila, which must have haunted the Jacobys, who knew their friends were there, somewhere.

It was a working honeymoon of sorts for a man and woman who loved their work as much as one another. Together the Jacobys compiled hundreds of reports chronicling everything they'd seen so far of the war. Some reports described surgical techniques in open-air hospitals, profiled Bataan's nurses, and introduced the various pets adopted by soldiers stationed on Corregidor, among other subjects. Others described the tiny, cobbled-together air force led by General George. A few discussed the couple's own adventures.

Most of the reports made their way to Mel's editors at
Time
.
Others became the grist for Annalee's stories in
Liberty
. A few shaped contributions from both for
Life
. Many would end up unpublished.

“On Bataan, Mel soon began to realize all of the aspirations the
Time
editors had had for him,” a biographical pamphlet from Stanford would later recall. “He was the first reporter to go behind the Japanese lines. He got the story of the American and Filipino men and boys who were doing the fighting and he told it well.”

Because both
Life
and
Time
were owned by Henry Luce (as was
Fortune
), Mel's work ended up in both publications. Given the probability that Carl and Shelley had been captured, Mel was now the only source in the Philippines that
Life
could count on for its photo spreads. For Americans at home,
Life
provided many of the most powerful images of World War II, and it is no exaggeration to say that Melville Jacoby was responsible for many Americans' first glimpse of the savagery on Bataan.

Just past a workshop deep in the Bataan jungle, where a mechanic was tying twine around the engine of one of Harold George's airplanes, Mel heard static drifting through the trees. Then he heard a voice. Then, through the telltale crackle of radio waves being tuned, Mel suddenly recognized words. They weren't chattered by American boys waiting for bombs. They weren't mixed into the Tagalog-English argot a few Filipino scouts spoke nearby. They weren't the curses of an injured soldier screaming as a medic applied iodine to an infected wound.

They were . . . the sales pitch of a Jell-O commercial. What Mel was hearing was the tail end of the February 15 episode of
The Jack Benny Show
.

Even on Bataan, American forces could tune to KGEI. Set up by General Electric, this international shortwave station broadcast from Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay; its programming was meant to boost the morale of troops deployed in the Pacific. (Coincidentally, KGEI was where Shirlee Austerland, Mel's ex-girlfriend, now worked.)

It sounded like home, and it was simultaneously tantalizing and depressing. By the third week of February 1942, most of the forces on Bataan were down to half rations. Many had even less food as supply lines got cut off. The ad for Jell-O at the end of
The Jack Benny Show
was torturous.

“We hear KGEI so know what's going on at home except Jack Benny and Crosby sound funny in Bataan Jungles,” Mel wrote.

Four days after this particular broadcast, Mel was finally able to write a brief letter home to Elza and Manfred to let them know that he and Annalee were okay.

“So much to write but nothing to say except we both think of you all the time and wish we could hear from you,” Mel wrote. “But you know the rules on personal cablegrams by now I'm sure and Mr. Luce must keep you pretty well informed. In fact I'm afraid we are about the only ones out here who's [
sic
] movements are really recorded by cable back home.”

Of course, the exigencies of war meant that Mel could tell his family little of substance about the war fighting he witnessed on Corregidor and Bataan, or even where he was. Instead, he told Elza and Manfred Meyberg about the surreality of hearing popular music on the Philippines' tropical front lines, thanks to KGEI. Mel also told his family that he lamented leaving the Mydanses behind in Manila and tried to assuage his parents' fear for his safety. He assured them that he and Annalee
were well, and that on The Rock they'd even run into college friends and other acquaintances from past lives.

“Ann is fine and swell—hasn't been doing much writing on her own but helping me,” Mel wrote.

Annalee's family received a similar message, and over the next few months her mother, Anne Whitmore, and Elza Meyberg corresponded with one another to discuss what few details they had received. Meanwhile, the families put on a brave public face, often using humor to mask any anxieties.

“Annalee will be able to talk herself out of anything but a direct bomb hit,” her sister Carol Whitmore told the
Stanford Daily
.

Aside from Mel, Annalee, and Clark, there were three other journalists on Corregidor: Curtis Hindson of Reuters, the
New York Times
's Nat Floyd, and Frank Hewlett of the United Press, who would later coin the term “The Battling Bastards of Bataan” with his poem of the same name. Though the reporters didn't precisely think of each other as competitors, they continued vying for scoops from Bataan and Corregidor. They put days' worth of work into stories, in part because of the navy's word limits, and for each reporter that work paid off only “if he [could] get a daily dispatch through,” as Mel reported in a dispatch describing the reporting conditions.

“There is keenest rivalry amongst the press, particularly between the association representatives [the AP's Clark Lee and
New York Times
's Nat Floyd], who don't trust each other, both swearing they didn't have a dispatch through for weeks,” Mel wrote.

“Correspondents usually try to find out others' itinerary at the front, then beat the other one to a story.”

Some writers have claimed that MacArthur used Mel for his own ends. It's true that
Time
's and
Life
's New York–based editors
doctored Mel's and other reporters' copy for political and sensationalist ends to make MacArthur and others look good. Ample evidence exists that Mel did admire MacArthur, but the general was far from the only voice calling for reinforcements in the Pacific and a rethinking of the Europe First strategy.