Eve of a Hundred Midnights (19 page)

Government troops had massacred thousands of Communist
forces in Yenan, forces that had stayed behind after the Kuomintang ordered them to advance on Japanese troops to the north, a move that would have been suicidal for the Communists. Each side blamed the massacre on the other. The Communists believed that subordinates of Chiang Kai-shek had orchestrated the attack and that he later covered it up; the Nationalists alleged that the government troops were attacked and had returned fire out of self-defense.

As Teddy White and Annalee later detailed, Chungking “buzzed with rumors of an open breach, of an all out civil war.” According to the two of them, the government troops who carried out the attacks treated the Communists they'd captured savagely.

“The New Fourth Army incident drew a line of emotional hysteria across all future relations of government and Communists,” they later wrote. “In the beginning it had been a war of all China against the Japanese; now it was a war of two Chinas—a Communist China and a Kuomintang China.”

When Mel arrived in Chungking that May, it remained unclear how matters stood between the two factions. One of Mel's reporting priorities would quickly become assessing whether the United Front that had been forged following the 1936 Sian incident could be salvaged or if indeed China's resistance was fracturing.

“The Communist-Kuomintang question is still an open sore,” Mel wrote a month after his arrival. “No one knows exactly how things stand.”

Still, just as he had done when he wrote calmingly to Elza about hysterical coverage of air raids, or even earlier, during the chaos following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Mel told his mother that conditions in China weren't nearly as bad as rumored. Whether that was true for China as a whole, Mel discovered upon returning to Chungking that the same could
not be said of the places there that had felt most like home. The city's infrastructure was crumbling as the war dragged on, leaving the Press Hostel without electricity and consistent water supplies. It was also overcrowded—Mel had to squeeze in and share Teddy's room—and there were holes in the wall from nearby explosions.

“Aside from these minor points—everything is fine,” Mel deadpanned in a letter.

Meanwhile, Holly Tong's radio operation was in shambles, which had serious consequences for Mel's stringing for NBC. The Japanese had pounded XGOY's facilities, and Mel discovered that Mike Peng, the station manager, was struggling to keep the station on the air.

But Mel now had an out: Teddy White, who was going back to the States with Henry Luce after the publisher's visit, suggested that Mel take over his duties for
Time
. After connecting with Luce on the
Clipper,
Mel felt comfortable taking the job despite his earlier belief that he had a bigger future at
Newsweek
. With the new position, Mel resigned from XGOY, happy that he would no longer be drawing a salary from the government, though he still volunteered to help keep the station's broadcasts on the air.

Helping XGOY stay afloat was hard. It meant working in darkness until 10:00
P.M
. in a fifty-foot-deep dugout. With Chungking's electrical infrastructure in shambles, the station kept its equipment powered with batteries pulled from cars.

Mel spent much of his first week back in Chungking scouring the city for any piece of equipment he could use to whip the station into shape. He scrounged up spare batteries to power the station. He found extra vacuum tubes. Some nights Mel and XGOY's staff would even broadcast without lights in the studio.

Still, once the studio was on the air, the result was much the same as it had been a year before. XGOY's straining equipment sent Mel's voice through Chungking's souplike fog along radio waves that undulated for 10,000 miles to a little California beach town with a long wooden pier, hugged by dry, brownish mountains.

There in Ventura, on the sand a couple of miles south of the pier, tall rhombic antennae caught the signal and transmitted it through a nest of wires to a nearby Tudor-style home. (Doc Stuart and Alacia Held had moved their radio operation from their downtown dentist office.) Before seeing the day's patients, Stuart and Held carefully monitored the incoming transmission, recorded and transcribed the broadcast, then retransmitted it to propagandists and news outlets.

The broadcast closed with a familiar sign-off spoken by a young journalist from nearby Los Angeles.

“XGOY is signing off now,” Mel said. “This is the Voice of China, the Chinese international broadcasting station, Szechuan China. Good morning, America, and good night, China.”

F
or most of the hot, suffocating day of June 5, 1941, there were no bombers above Chungking. There were no alarms. There were no screams. There was simply the background chatter of a busy Thursday.

But beginning at about 6:00
P.M.
that night, the city's soundscape shifted. Alarms rang. Storefront shutters clattered closed.

Within an hour, eight Japanese planes roared overhead. Their crews opened bomb bay doors and showered Chungking with devices packed with kerosene and gasoline. Flaring across the sky, the bombs ignited the papery buildings that packed much of the dense city, replacing Chungking's daily noise with the crackle of flames.

“Fires lit the city and the sky above glowed pink and red,” Mel wrote two days later in one of his first reports to David Hulburd, his new editor at
Time,
describing one of Chungking's most catastrophic nights yet. He had been on the south bank of the Yangtze during the attack.

When the first alert went up that evening, nearly 5,000 people had packed into the city's largest dugout, nearly a mile and a half long.

At first the city's air raid warning system indicated that the enemy was gone. But half an hour later, the warning signal returned. More planes were coming. Police shouted for people to return to the shelters. Most had noticed the signal themselves and were already running back toward the gates.

“In one giant shove they crammed, jammed their way back through the monster dugout's three entrances,” Mel wrote. The weakest in the crowds stumbled, and the panicked crowds shoved forward over them even as more fell beneath their feet.

“The sweltering crowd grew restless after the bombs had fallen,” Mel wrote. “Hundreds of them shoved towards one of the three entranceways for fresh air and a look-see.”

However, the shelter's gates were locked, and guards wouldn't reopen them. A few minutes passed, and the crowds began crashing against the main gate. Its guard relented, and the crowds streamed out to watch their city burn.

Now the city heard bones and flesh crumple as people ran in every possible direction. They bellowed. They cried. They sobbed. They gasped for air in the choked tunnels and howled in pain as they clawed and bit at one another as they tried to break free.

“There was shouting and cursing as only China knows it,” Mel wrote. “Women beating against those in front, children trying to find air. Scores went down to their death. As the sound of Japanese planes droning overhead came to their ears the shoving became even more intense and the bodies along the floor of the passageway more numerous. The excitement spread through the dugout like a swift breeze.”

As the next round of bombs fell, those inside the dugout again panicked and surged back against the entrances. Waves of frightened residents rushed both into and out of the shelter, each stampede crushing the other. The guards were so overwhelmed that they locked the entrance gates again, trapping the frightened masses inside, leaving those within to claw, scratch, and shove at one another.

Two more waves of bombers attacked, drawing the crisis out for hours. As ever more people were crushed and asphyxiated, bodies piled higher. “Whole families went down into the damp, dirt floor tearing at each other,” Mel wrote. “Body packed against body, walls of flesh grew.”

Finally, by midnight, the raids were over. Elsewhere in Chungking people emerged from the dugouts with their children in their arms. Exhausted, but alive, they headed home and tried to get to sleep.

“Cars honked along the streets again, government people and big merchants came out of their better-made dugouts only half tired, half joking about being kept awake all night,” Mel wrote.

But in the city center another two hours passed before the
public shelter's gates were opened. Its guards had fled. Once the gates finally were unlocked, few people emerged.

“There were only a few faint cries heard inside,” Mel wrote.

First local police and other authorities arrived, followed by Red Cross workers. They found bodies everywhere, some unmoving, a few still writhing.

“Most were dead,” Mel wrote. “Like piles of leering, gasping sardines in a cannery, they were twisted and piled here and there along the dirt-floored dugout. A few arms and legs were twitching.”

More than 4,000 people are thought to have died in the catastrophe. Blame for the disaster was spread widely. Starting within a day of the attack, air defense commanders were fired, foreign engineers decried shelter designs that limited air circulation
and lacked ventilation, doctors excoriated soldiers for not properly removing the bodies, and politicians called for the heads of the municipal officials who cut corners while building the structure.

The night after the attack, Mel and the United Press's Mac Fisher crossed the Yangtze River from the foreign district on the south bank to observe the recovery. On the sampan crossing the river, the reporters met survivors, one of whom had lost two brothers in the disaster. He claimed he saw Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek burst into tears when he visited the dugout at 4:00
A.M
., a scene that was widely reported elsewhere.

Once Mel reached the dugout, he pulled out his camera. At the main entrance, seeing dozens of masked Chinese soldiers carrying dead bodies from the shelter's black maw, he snapped a picture. On a nearby staircase he saw the dead still piled and sprawled where they had fallen an entire day before. He clicked the shutter again. Nearby, Red Cross workers threw the victims' corpses into a truck, and Mel took another picture. He saw a lifeless child crushed by the stampede and took one more picture.

Along with a multipage dispatch describing the catastrophe in excruciating detail, Mel sent the negatives of these ghastly images to his editor, who passed them on to
Time
's sister publication,
Life
magazine.
Life
let Mel's photos do the talking and offered only a few paragraphs of explanatory text to contextualize the tragic images, which were accompanied in the magazine by a final, full-page print of a dead boy sprawled backward over a step, a little girl splayed nearby, both surrounded by dozens of other bodies.
^*
Many of the bodies were half-naked,
their clothes having been torn off in the frenzy to escape the stampede.

The story—Mel's first published contribution to
Life
—was a departure from the propaganda he had written for Holly Tong the previous summer. At a time when the Kuomintang struggled to keep control of this horrifying story, the report Mel sent with his photo negatives described the terrible scene he witnessed in far more vivid language than was usual for him and threaded a narrative reconstruction of the night's attack that re-created its horror without straying into hyperbole. Whereas in his master's thesis two years earlier he'd decried the “horror angle” in newspaper reports about the war's first days in Peiping, he was now witnessing and reporting a horror that was far too real.

The images also caused a stir among
Life
's readers. One subscriber wrote to the magazine to decry its lack of “editorial discretion,” saying no publication should print pictures that “degrade the human body.” Another anticipated that his peers would take offense at Mel's pictures, and that was why he welcomed the decision to print them. “It COULD happen here,” he wrote. Charles Kreiner, a reader from Baltimore, was altogether disbelieving. He claimed that Mel's shots were provided by China's publicity department and were the “fanciest piece of artificial nonsense” he'd ever seen. Kreiner wrote that he thought they were part of an elaborate propaganda scheme reliant on mannequins and sandbags for
gruesome effect.
Life
couldn't allow such an allegation to go unchallenged.

“Reader Kreiner, like many another American, is refusing to believe the terrible facts of war,” the editor responded, noting that Mel was there and saw the bodies. “
LIFE
vouches for the authenticity of the pictures.”

In weeks to come, Mel's follow-up reporting only underscored how serious the situation was. The dispatches Mel sent David Hulburd were dense with accounts of the missteps and corrupt actions that worsened the catastrophe, story threads that were far too troubling for the Nationalists to contain. Much of that follow-up reporting would never see its way into print, but at this moment Mel was doing exactly what he'd set out to do when he first left for Shanghai after completing his thesis: he was documenting a nation and a city enduring a moment too important for the world to ignore. Now, as Mel began his career at Time Inc., he might be able to get the world's attention.

All summer long, Mel sent dispatches to
Time
. Fortunately, he had Teddy White in the magazine's New York offices both to help interpret the significance of his reporting to the publication's editors and to relay their messages and requests to Mel in a way he would understand. Already close friends, Mel and Teddy had established a sort of language between themselves common to people who work together in high-intensity environments. For example, shortly before the catastrophic raid on the downtown Chungking shelter, Mel began one letter with a note that indicated to Teddy that his message might be interrupted.

“Well, my friend, the ball just climbed to its place, and you know what that means,” Mel wrote, referring to Chungking's
system of visual warnings to alert the city to imminent air raids.

Writing to Teddy also allowed Mel to vent in a way that he couldn't with his mother and stepfather. He could talk about the minutiae of his work and his experiences in Chungking with Teddy because Teddy understood the city and China.

But even with Teddy's advocacy, Mel wasn't completely comfortable in his new position. He knew he could have had a secure job back in Sacramento, so far from the bombs. He could have been a bureau chief for the United Press, filtering the war's news through the quiet of the Golden State's capital. But Chungking, where the “full weight of being a
Time
correspondent” was suddenly crashing down upon him, was anything but quiet.

“I must admit I haven't had the confidence in the moment I thought I had,” he told his parents. “The job has me a bit worried. There is so much to do; and Teddy White did such a good job before me.”

By the summer of 1941, America's neutrality in the China-Japan conflict had become little more than a charade, and a halfhearted one at that. That spring the United States had finalized its long-negotiated lend-lease program, which would provide economic and material support to China, Great Britain, and, eventually, the Soviet Union for their war efforts. Now goods and supplies were beginning to pour into China. President Roosevelt's handpicked advisor to the Chinese, Owen Lattimore, had just arrived in China. Indeed, Lattimore showed up in Chungking only shortly after the magazine he edited—
Asia
—published the analysis of the previous fall's Indochina crisis that Mel had written in New York that March. That story explained not only how Japan had maneuvered its
way into control of the French colony but how it had set the stage for the conflict to come.

Meanwhile, three of the American air defense strategists who had traveled on the Pan-Am
Clipper
with Mel had been spending weeks reviewing China's readiness for aerial warfare, as well as Japan's use of airpower. Their 8,000-mile tour of China was a poorly kept secret; indeed, the Japanese had chased the air mission's plane through the country. Often airfields and other sites they had visited were attacked shortly after they departed. Once, in Chengtu (Chengdu), the officers had to jump for cover in a nearby grave mound as a Japanese plane strafed an airfield.