Eve of a Hundred Midnights (32 page)

Mel and Annalee were barraged by memories at each turn. They passed anti-aircraft batteries, a motor pool, a machine shop, even a bakery (though one that had never had bread to bake) and a makeshift abattoir where first caribou, then mules, then even monkeys were slaughtered for the soldiers' meals.

Across the narrow channel from Bataan, Clark Lee had finished wrapping up his own affairs on Corregidor, and now he was waiting for the Jacobys at the same dock on the island's north side where the trio had come ashore on New Year's Day. He did bring a typewriter, as well as a razor, a toothbrush, and a change of clothes.

The
Princesa
approached at dusk, slowly steaming westward. They boarded and were greeted by four British and two American civilians who had received field commissions after fleeing from Manila to Bataan. They had boarded the
Princesa
from a separate launch earlier. Among them was Lew Carson, a Shanghai-based executive for Reliance Motors hired by the army to help manage its motor pool, and Charles Van Landingham, a former banker who escaped to Bataan on a tiny sailboat on New Year's Eve. Also a contributor to the
Saturday Evening Post,
Van Landingham was struck by how deceptively peaceful the green jungles of Bataan looked as he left:

“It was hard to realize that under that leafy canopy thousands of hollow-eyed, half-sick men stood by their guns, fighting on grimly in the hope that help would come before it was too late,” Van Landingham wrote.

Its lights dark, the
Princesa
slowly made its way into mine-laden Manila Bay. Huge searchlights on Fortuna Island scanned the sky above the island as its “ack-ack” guns—anti-aircraft artillery—fired at Japanese bombers. The darkness gave way momentarily to the glow of the guns' tracers, which lit the passengers' faces. Then night returned across the ship's deck.

From Corregidor, a searchlight swept the coast in front of the
Princesa
. A small, fast torpedo boat appeared and led the ship through the mines, barely visible but for the path carved by its wake. The craft was skillfully piloted by Lieutenant John D. Bulkeley, who provided a few minutes of covering fire while guiding the
Princesa
toward the mouth of Manila Bay. Then, in a final farewell gesture, Bulkeley flashed the torpedo boat's starboard light and roared back to Bataan, leaving nothing but darkness in his wake.

Night on the Pacific washed across the
Princesa
. Only the distant flash of Japanese artillery punctuated the dark. The ship's two masts bobbed beneath what Mel's eyes found to be a “too bright moon.” This was the same moon the soldiers on Bataan prayed would descend quickly, lest even a quick glint of its light across a shining service rifle's barrel draw a sniper's bullet. Now the moon cursed the
Princesa
. The nearby shore was dark, but everyone aboard the
Princesa
knew it crawled with enemy forces. They silently watched the passing islands. Each lurch of the ship tied the passengers' stomachs in a “tight feeling.”

A crew member snapped a chicken's neck. The reporters jumped at the bird's sudden, loud squawk.

It was just dinner, but everyone crossed their fingers.

“Sure, we'll make it,” someone said. “Easy.”

All three reporters rapped their fists on the wooden deck.

Nobody slept. Everyone kept watch, fearful of missing even the briefest moment of movement. Finally out of Manila
Harbor, the ship maneuvered toward the southeast and crept through the darkness along Batangas, on the Luzon coast south of Manila.

Thousands of miles, countless inlets and islands, circling recon planes, even submarines and destroyers dispatched by the Philippines' new conquerors lay between the reporters and safety in Australia. They spoke little. Instead, they reflected privately on the soldiers they had met on Corregidor and Bataan, the onslaught both places had endured, and their own good fortune so far.

“We talk very little sitting on deck now. We are remembering MacArthur's men, how hard it was to finally leave, how lucky the three of us are. We'd gotten through the [Japanese] before,” Mel wrote. “Everything we've known the past two months is swallowed in blackness beyond.”

O
n February 24, 1942, a battle group led by the USS
Enterprise
attacked Wake Island. The same day, Allied forces led by British general Archibald Percival Wavell began withdrawing from the island of Java. And in Los Angeles, California, anti-aircraft gun operators saw what they thought was an invading plane, panicked, and shot more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition at bombers that were not there.

That morning, along the northeast side of the Philippine island of Mindoro, the secluded bay of Pola was quiet. A small ship, the
Princesa de Cebu,
was anchored a few hundred yards from shore. On board, its crew and passengers ate a slow breakfast of canned corn beef. There was even time for watery coffee.

A small river led from the middle of the bay into a mangrove swamp. Small clumps of buildings with walls and roofs made of dried palm fronds were wedged between the river mouth and a hillside rising from the west side of the bay. A beach ringed the entire bay, and behind it and the structures rose a wall of slender trees.

No signs of life in the village were visible. The morning was deceptively peaceful. No artillery boomed. No bombers roared the morning awake. One hundred or so miles southeast of Bataan—though the
Princesa
had sailed a longer course through the darkened waters to get there—the awakening world on Mindoro seemed “luxurious.”

The morning sun cast the surrounding jungle's trees in so many different shades that some broad fronds seemed almost yellow; others displayed the luxuriant green of a deep forest, while still others sparkled in emerald. Carabao lumbered through nearby fields as egrets lazed on their backs. Bright and blue, the sky stretched from the foothills of Naujan Mountain across the bay's lowlands toward prominent Mount Dumali and bathed Pola in sultry heat.

No sooner had Mel, Annalee, Clark, and the other passengers emptied their tin coffee mugs than a distant engine's whir pierced the morning calm. The whir came closer and grew into a sputtering racket as a small plane appeared high above the boat, circling in the sky.

Everyone on the
Princesa
was certain of the plane's identity. It looked and sounded just like a Japanese reconnaissance plane
with a loud engine that flew over Corregidor and Bataan every morning, photographing defenses and identifying artillery positions before air raids.

“Photo Joe” they called it. Joe may have been on his way to set the scene for another pummeling of Corregidor, but the fact that he was circling above the bay wasn't encouraging. Barely out of Corregidor, had the
Princesa
already been spotted?

There was no time to waste. The pilot might have already radioed his headquarters. A squadron of Japanese planes could arrive any second and annihilate the
Princesa
. It wouldn't be safe to be on board the boat until the sun set.

“Two Japanese cruisers were sinking everything afloat in Philippine waters and bombers were getting the ships the destroyers missed,” Annalee wrote.

Mel and Clark grabbed the pistols and grenades that MacArthur had given them on Corregidor as everyone jumped into a rowboat and paddled toward shore.

As the group reached shore, they could see that the buildings along the bay front were empty. Pola looked like a ghost town. The only sign of life was a fat pig scampering across the dirt road between the vacated buildings. Had the village already been abandoned? Had a Japanese landing force invaded Mindoro and rounded up the villagers?

Suddenly, just as the launch came near shore and pulled alongside an empty
banca
—a small outrigger canoe—the village sprang to life. Dozens of people emerged at once from the trees. The villagers and the city's constabulary had kept a close eye on this mysterious ship when it arrived overnight. As soon as someone saw its launch headed toward the shore and their village, they'd alerted the town and everyone raced into the jungle without even closing their front doors.

Once scouts at the jungle's edge saw the dinghy's American flags, they raced back toward shore. Clad in khaki shirts and
white shorts, a few villagers—many of them children—were led by a police captain gripping a sawed-off shotgun. The newcomers remained wary at first, but soon relaxed. Smiles spread across the Filipinos' faces. Most kept a keen eye on the weapons attached to Mel's and Clark's belts. Mel watched a conclusion form in anxious eyes.

“You're the reinforcements, finally come from America!” a voice shouted in English. It was the town's mayor, a schoolteacher and former commonwealth official. He welcomed the visitors.

It was a heartbreaking exclamation, but the Jacobys and their friends couldn't correct them. They didn't know yet who else might be on the island. They would have to be discreet if they were going to make it out of the Philippines without being captured. Just being on a freighter had already made it hard enough to stay hidden. In any case, there wasn't time for small talk until they knew that Photo Joe wasn't coming back. As they stepped onto the sand, the reporters anxiously scanned the sky.

Then one of the British businessmen they were traveling with blurted out that they weren't reinforcements. They'd only come from Bataan. The crestfallen mayor seemed to deflate when he realized what the Brit was telling him.

Mel, Annalee, and Clark were stunned that their companion had spoken so clumsily. Rumors spread fast among the villages peppering the Philippines—millions of Filipino civilians had fled Manila and other cities to the jungles after the Japanese occupation began. Some among the millions, though not all, were surely hangers-on of the Sakdalistas who assisted Japan's fifth-column work. Should they or other spies be hidden among the Pola villagers, or if they knew a boat full of Americans escaping Corregidor had slipped past the Japanese blockade, they might inform Japanese forces. This threatened
not just the
Princesa
and its passengers but the entire blockade-running operation.

Though the townspeople were disappointed to learn that there wasn't help coming to the Philippines, they welcomed Mel and the
Princesa
's other passengers. They had been listening to Carlos Romulo's “Voice of Freedom” and other broadcasts about the war, and they were eager to learn more about how it was progressing. To Mel, the questions were “eager.” To Clark, they were “embarrassing.” To Annalee, they were constant.

“We heard the same thing over and over—‘We love America. We want to fight. We want to help fight. But when are the American planes coming?'” she wrote.

As Pola's residents welcomed their Western visitors, their children raced to their homes and the jungle and returned with gifts of coconuts and bananas. By that time, the sun was high. Whether Photo Joe had seen the
Princesa
or not, there was nowhere safe for the travelers to sail until the sun set again, so the mayor invited the group to lunch.

“We stuffed ourselves with this welcome change from the corned-beef hash of Bataan, and then spent the day sleeping in the shade of the tall palms,” Van Landingham wrote.

Wine flowed readily, and the reporters' hosts toasted and boisterously cheered the United States. Praising “MacArthur, Bataan, and America over and over again, always pointing to their bolos significantly,” the Filipinos showed their eagerness to take up the fight alongside their rank-and-file American allies holed up on Corregidor and Bataan. “They are waiting for the convoy from America too. It is the same on every island.”

After the meal, Mel took numerous pictures. As he did, Annalee sat down next to an outdoor upright piano, surrounded by a dozen or so women from the village. A grinning little girl in a polka-dot dress played an impromptu concert. Occasionally
a teenager sat down to play alongside the girl. While Annalee watched, smiling, one of the other Americans sprawled in a nearby chair, looking relaxed. For at least this instant, life won out over war. Mel captured the afternoon in his lens.

As the sun began to set, Mel, Annalee, Clark, and the rest of the passengers on the
Princesa
returned to the ship. Now that it was getting dark, they'd be safe from bombers and Photo Joe. They sailed around a knot of land east of Pola, then turned southward into another night.

The Philippines comprise 7,000 islands—about 2,000 of which are inhabited. Each night, the
Princesa
sailed from one to another. Cebu was only 200 miles or so away from Pola, but the ship had to inch carefully through the islands. Each day its passengers disembarked on the closest shore and waited until they could continue their journey the following night. Each leg of the trip was relatively short. After the
Princesa
left Pola, it crossed the Tablas Strait to the island of the same name, then continued south along its western edge to sheltered Looc Bay, a journey of about eighty-five miles. There the group found a few bottles of the Philippines' ubiquitous San Miguel pale pilsen beer.

“It was warm, but tasted like champagne!” wrote Van Landingham.

Though they had to wait until the skies darkened to sail further, the night brought no relief. Mel, Clark, Annalee, and everyone aboard the
Princesa
took turns as the ship chugged through the night. The jittery lookouts imagined an ocean of dangers. “Each little fishing boat we passed might be a [Japanese] patrol boat,” Mel wrote. “Countless fires on the islands where farmers were burning their fields were possibly signal fires. The fires bothered us most.”

As frightening as each night was, the days began to seem like a tropical, if absurd, vacation. In the mornings, there was little to do besides eat, drink, and swim. They reveled in left-behind cases of San Miguel. There was always the fear of being spotted, as they had been that first morning, but the days lacked the uncertainty that accompanied each dark night.

“Every night on the ship we thought we'd die before morning,” Annalee wrote. “But every day was a wonderful vacation ashore eating eight meals and swimming in makeshift bathing suits.”

Annalee cut a polka-dot dress into two pieces, tied half of it across her chest and attached the other piece around her waist with a safety pin, creating a hand-made bikini. Mel repurposed his white boxer shorts into swim trunks. They let the warm inter-island waters wash the war from their bodies, if only for a moment.

Like thousands of newlyweds to come, they spent these
mornings splashing in the Pacific and laughing. Using borrowed bolos, they sliced coconuts open. As the ocean splashed around their feet, they lifted the fruit with both hands and drank thirstily of the translucent juices spilling over their lips. They lingered, smiling together on the shore, Annalee's clothes clinging to her curves, Mel's soaked chest hair matted against his skin.

Hundreds of Filipinos just like the ones in Pola greeted the ship as it slunk through their country. At nearly every stop, villagers waited on the top of portside steps or at the edge of beaches. Eager and curious to meet their surprise guests, most of them, especially the kids—wearing Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio sweatshirts—were joyful hosts. If any of the people they met were Sakdalistas, neither Mel nor Annalee seemed to know. Instead, the couple felt welcomed, and they felt a shared sense of purpose.

Despite the questions that Filipinos had for Mel and Clark and Annalee, their lives at first seemed to proceed as normal. The Philippines would suffer tremendously during the war, and Filipinos' daily lives were about to be violently disrupted. The Pola residents' anxiety when they first sighted the newcomers reflected their fear of what might have been on the way and what the
Princesa
's arrival could have signified. Each village seemed to have heard a different rumor about Japanese soldiers raping and pillaging their way through Luzon. Nevertheless, until whatever was to come actually arrived, life on the unoccupied islands could proceed much as it always had. They had, after all, been subject to U.S. rule for decades, and before that for hundreds of years under Spain.