Eve of a Hundred Midnights (34 page)

Two days after the
Princesa
arrived at Cebu, Mel saw that they had good reason to be so jittery. Early on the morning of March 1, spotters saw two large, dark shapes unexpectedly appear off Cebu's harbor. It immediately became clear that these were the two Japanese ships that patrolled the inter-island waters of the Philippines. Converging on Cebu on their way south toward an operation off the island of Mindanao, the ships—the 532-foot light cruiser
Kuma
and the 290-foot Ōtori-class torpedo boat
Kiji
—detoured toward Cebu and opened fire on the city's docks. The shelling destroyed three inter-island transports docked at Cebu, the
Regulus,
the
Lepus,
and the
Legazpi
. According to various histories, more than 300 people died in the attack. No doubt as a result of censorship concerns, neither Mel, Annalee, nor Clark made any mention of the attack; Carson would later mention it briefly in a private letter. Van
Landingham would include the attack in a story about his trip through the Philippines, but he sanitized the attack's damage.

“One [shell] struck the old Spanish fort,” Van Landingham wrote. “Others fell harmlessly into the bay.”

As in Manila Bay, scuttled ships littered the seafloor off Cebu, while the ruins of sabotaged oil facilities stretched smoldering across the marshy expanse of flatland just north of the port. All the bridges into town had already been demolished, leaving the lightly undulating road between Liloan and Cebu City one of the capital's few access points. On the island's only airfield, the Americans had intentionally torched the remaining airplanes to keep any resources out of Japanese hands.

Cebu was the end of the line for the
Princesa,
which would continue its operation smuggling supplies to Corregidor and Bataan. Its passengers would need to find another way off the island. Thus, their energies turned to brainstorming yet again how they might flee to safety. As the Jacobys settled into their “honeymoon suite” in downtown Cebu, Byrd provided a car and a driver to Clark, Van Landingham, and Lew Carson. The trio drove fifteen miles northeast of the city, past a series of lagoons, to the Liloan Beach Club. There they made a home for themselves as they waited for another ship to visit the island. After a few days on their own, Mel and Annalee joined their traveling companions at the clubhouse.

The beach club's “postcard beauty” comprised a sliver of sandy beach lined with swaying palm trees hugging a crescent-shaped bay. In front of the club, silt deposited by the Jubay River created a six-meter-deep shelf that turned the water a dusty but turquoise-tinged brown. About 500 meters from the shore the waters darkened to sapphire right where the seafloor dropped 600 meters beneath the surface.

Roughly in the center of the crescent, the plaster-coated clubhouse looked whiter than possible in the March sun. The blazing lightness of the club's walls stood out above the tropical waters, the building's Spanish-colonial-inspired balustrades too elegant for the harsh conditions of this war and its arched windows an indication of a time now vanished. The club's sprawling patio and second-floor deck provided deceptively idyllic vantage points overlooking Liloan Bay. The club felt as if it sat on the edge of the world, but its view was hardly relaxing: the same shelf that stretched placidly under the surface of the bay made the cove a perfect landing spot for potential invaders, whose ships could anchor right at the nearby drop-off.

The danger was so great that the island's defense also required vigilance from the Liloan Club's new inhabitants. Each of the people staying at the club volunteered for two-hour shifts to stand watch over the bay. Should a vessel approach, they'd not only be able to alert a nearby contingent of Filipino scouts, they might also get a jump-start on an escape before word circulated that Cebu's tranquillity was nearing its end.

Given as much privacy for their “honeymoon” as the group's constant vigilance could afford, Mel and Annalee combined their watch shifts once they finally joined the others at the club. Clark, Van Landingham, and Carson slept on the beach club's porch, while Mel and Annalee slept in the main building. When they were on watch, Mel and Annalee stayed up together for hours. Savoring the chance to be together alone after six weeks of cramped confines on Corregidor and the frightening journey aboard the
Princesa,
Mel was reminded by the warm breezes of his mother's home in Southern California and her prizewinning gardens. As he had done when the raids on Corregidor were at their worst, Mel described Elza's
gardens to Annalee. He didn't spare a detail. The descriptions were as vivid as Mel could make them, and Annalee felt like she was walking in the gardens with him as he talked.

During the day, the Jacobys joined their traveling companions in swimming, playing golf on a vacant course nearby, and talking to the locals. One afternoon, the Jacobys, Clark Lee, Lew Carson, and Charles Van Landingham were the guests of honor at a feast in the Liloan Beach Club's dining room. After the meal, dozens of local Filipinos crowded around the lunch table, laughing and telling stories with the reporters and one another. It was during boisterous moments like these that Mel felt a sense of camaraderie and kinship with the Filipino people that reminded him of how he had felt in Chungking.

Along the beach in front of the shuttered, arching windows of the beach club's faux-Spanish facade, the night was both
welcome and feared. On the one hand, it held Mel and Annalee together. The night, the sand, and the quiet rumble of the ever-crashing sea felt like their own private world. The ocean's murmur matched the murmur in their chests. After so many months of racing beneath foreboding skies, they absorbed the quiet and one another's presence, for once sharing words not with the rest of the world but only between themselves.

On the other hand, danger surrounded them. The moon was too bright for comfort, and their eyes forever scanned the sea for the hunters sure to come.

“The moon rising, shadows, lights, everything kept us on edge,” Mel wrote.

In New York, Mel's editors knew little more than what his family had heard after he arrived on Cebu. Annalee had also sent David Hulburd a brief message on Mel's behalf saying that they were “progressing as rapidly as possible” and asking whether they wanted Mel to prepare a report for
Life
on his trip (they did). Mel sent one more brief message two days later, but then there was nothing. Even when the reporters were on Corregidor, Hulburd and his staff had usually had a vague sense of what Mel and Annalee were up to. Now there was only silence.

Meanwhile, on Cebu, Mel, Annalee, and their friends attempted to repair a captured Japanese fishing boat, imagining that they could use it for an escape in case another friendly vessel didn't arrive. If they couldn't fix the fishing boat and the situation became dire, their only choice besides trying to hide on Cebu—which didn't seem realistic—would be to take their borrowed car to the other side of the island, convince a local to row them away in a tiny, rickety banca, and gamble on surviving the vast Pacific, now an enormous war zone.

Mel and Annalee continued to gather notes for their reporting
, but they couldn't send any dispatches from Cebu. (The wireless station on the island was only capable of sending brief messages.) Hundreds, thousands of words remained unwritten. Dozens of rolls of film remained undeveloped. Countless letters and cables remained unsent. There was so much to say that they couldn't put on the page, and there had been so much more lost to the fires of the Bay View's furnace back in Manila.

While he was in Cebu City, Mel bought a secondhand typewriter so that he and Annalee would have one to use. Mel's “new” typewriter was a Corona Four manufactured in 1930, its black metal frame emblazoned with gold-colored DuCo lacquer. With little to do besides wait for an opportunity to escape and keep watch for the Japanese, and with Annalee there to help and collaborate, Mel began writing a book. First he wrote a long dispatch about what they had experienced since leaving MacArthur's bunker nearly two weeks earlier. Then he started writing about what Manila had been like on the day of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field, the events immediately preceding them, and the way those events played out in the Philippines. He also wanted to go further back, to situate the current battle in the broader conflict he'd watched emerge since he was at Lingnan five years earlier. He wanted to illustrate the thread that led from the Marco Polo Bridge incident through to the Pacific war, but with three years of notes in the Bay View's furnace, Mel had to write from his and Annalee's recollections. Nevertheless, he was grateful he had Annalee's photographic memory to help him reconstruct later events.

In the dispatches Mel wrote for
Time
and
Life
while he worked on the book, he reported the conditions he had witnessed on Corregidor and Bataan, as well as the accounts he'd gathered from villagers on the many stops between The Rock and Cebu. He hoped to describe the situation well enough to convince the American public to insist on aid for the Philippines
, and his dispatches described the Filipinos' eagerness to fight the Japanese.

Mel and Annalee had no way to know it yet, but Luce's deputies in New York had already transformed some of the reports they had sent from Corregidor into published stories. One was a narrative describing scenes from the Battle of Bataan—“Our launch works slowly into Mariveles landing and everyone quickly scrambles out,” read one of its lines. Another was a first-person account dictated to Annalee by Captain John Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry regiment of Filipino scouts and Americans that fought a delaying action during MacArthur's retreat to the embattled peninsula. Then there was the epic “Corregidor Cable No. 79,” which was published by the
Field Artillery Journal
through a special arrangement with Time Inc. It described many of the characters fighting on Corregidor and told their stories, including an account of three “boys” from Salinas, California, whose tanks were ambushed the day after Christmas and who then spent five days hiking through enemy territory back to Manila, one with a rivet from his destroyed tank lodged in his throat.

“All kinds of men make up MacArthur's Army—all John Does and Juan de la Cruzes who have learned to improvise, adopt [Japanese] tricks, and stick it out,” Mel had written.

Other memories remained vivid without notes or Annalee's memory. Manila. The people they'd left behind. Two people in particular haunted the couple: their imprisoned friends, Carl and Shelley Mydans. Mel and Annalee still only knew what they'd learned on Corregidor. They knew that the Mydanses were alive and safe, but they also knew from intelligence reports that reached MacArthur's staff that many of the prisoners didn't have enough food.

“We keep thinking about them now,” Annalee wrote. “If only they'd come!”

A week into March, a 5,500-ton cargo ship with blue masts and a gray hull docked in Corregidor. Its arrival was a shock, but a welcome one. The vessel, the
Doña Nati,
had brought food, small arms ammunition, and medical supplies all the way from Australia. It took two days for work crews to unload the ship. Built by the De La Rama shipping line, the
Doña Nati
was one of three ships that had successfully slipped through Japanese blockades from outside of the Philippines to deliver much-needed supplies to the islands.

“Some of the most courageous and ingenious people of this whole era were the blockade runners,” Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley wrote of the
Doña Nati
's crew and their counterparts on other smuggling ships.

At first, Cebu was to be the logistical hub for supplying bases around the Philippines, using resources from nearby islands. But then, as the Japanese blockade tightened, U.S. strategists had to look beyond the Philippines for supplies. The closest Allied territory with any kind of resources that could be made available was Australia; Cebu became a base for processing shipments from there before they were sent to Corregidor, Bataan, or islands in the Visayas that the Japanese hadn't yet occupied. But getting from Australia to Cebu involved traversing enemy waters.

The United States therefore needed to entice into service ship captains with vessels capable of making the long, dangerous journey past Japanese-controlled islands and shipping lanes, not to mention patrolling ships. In February 1942, two officers who had been staked with $10 million to disperse among any merchant sailors willing to attempt a trip arrived in Australia. Only ten ship captains answered the call. Of these, seven crews mutinied and forced their captains to turn back before entering dangerous waters. Just three made it all the way, one of which was the
Doña Nati,
captained by Ramon Pons.