Eve of a Hundred Midnights (31 page)

Mel based many of his dispatches on candid admissions from the enlisted men and officers pinned down in Bataan's jungles. He and Annalee could easily have never ended up reaching Corregidor in the first place, though it is true that MacArthur's press officers' familiarity with the couple made it easier for them to stay on the island once they had arrived. However, one of the key reasons Mel and the other reporters wanted off Corregidor was expressly because their 500-words-per-day radio limit constrained their reporting. With no way to get the entire story out, no guarantee that a dispatch would be received, and no way to know whether it would be accurately edited even if it was received, Corregidor fast became a 1,735-acre prison. Whether or not MacArthur had influenced coverage on Corregidor so far, the general was about to involve himself in Mel's story.

General MacArthur's six-foot frame bounded about his cramped, makeshift headquarters beneath Malinta, making the room—only 15 feet wide, but 160 feet long and full of desks, chairs, phones, maps, and other equipment—seem even smaller than it was. It was February 23, 1942, and at a rare moment when Annalee wasn't present (she was elsewhere in Malinta), the general asked Mel and Clark a simple question:

“Do you want to go now?”

MacArthur suggested a promising and straightforward, if risky, plan: a blockade runner that had just reached Corregidor from Cebu, a still-unoccupied island 350 miles to the southeast
, would sneak past the Japanese at night and hide out by day as it island-hopped back to Cebu. There they could either try to find another boat out of the Philippines or, if necessary, hide in the jungles until it was safe to flee. MacArthur would send them with a letter authorizing military support, as well as grenades and pistols.

Dangerous as it may have been, it was probably the reporters' last chance to leave Corregidor. MacArthur may have been eager to have three fewer mouths to feed and beds to provide, but he also believed that if Mel, Annalee, and Clark escaped, their coverage could help pressure the U.S. government into taking the fight for the Philippines seriously. MacArthur believed that the journalists' unhindered reports to their news outlets could stir enough interest back in the United States to pressure policymakers to send relief to his beleaguered troops. After all, those troops had already lasted much longer than anyone expected, despite their meager supplies.

Half a world away, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat urging the nation to maintain its resolve. The radio address marked the first time the White House made public its Europe First strategy, and it didn't sit well with Americans enraged by the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

The very next day Americans also learned that around the same time Roosevelt was delivering his speech pressing the United States to prioritize the drive against Hitler, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the coast of California and shelled an oil field just north of bucolic Santa Barbara. The oil field was surrounded by little more than patches of sagebrush and some live oak stands and a few frightened horses, so the damage was nil. Still, the wounds from Pearl Harbor were raw.

This was the first attack on the continental United States since the end of the Civil War, nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. Though the shelling was an attack of opportunity
by the submarine's captain, not part of a larger assault, it rattled the nation and stoked fears that an assault on the West Coast was coming.

Earlier on the day Roosevelt publicly defended the U.S. government's lack of reinforcements for the Philippines, he secretly ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines. Roosevelt wanted the general in Australia to serve as Supreme Allied Commander in the South Pacific.

MacArthur, Mel wrote, “must have been boiling” inside, especially after having just promised the forces under his command that reinforcements were coming. In January, Roosevelt's State of the Union Address had pledged that the United States would produce 45,000 combat planes in 1942 and 100,000 more the following year. MacArthur knew that not a single one of those planes would be made available to the U.S. forces in the Philippines. Roosevelt's evacuation order, meanwhile, reinforced existing perceptions that MacArthur had abandoned his responsibilities when he issued the Open City declaration in Manila and took shelter on Corregidor. Now the general would either have to defy Roosevelt's orders or leave behind the tens of thousands under his command—even as they lacked the supplies necessary to maintain their fight—and confirm those perceptions that he was a coward.

Still, Roosevelt's order came as no surprise. Since the beginning of the year, American submarines had been secretly spiriting away crucial documents and millions of dollars' worth of gold that had been brought to Corregidor when Manila was evacuated, and the subs had also taken key officers and civilians from Corregidor. By the end of February 1942, the subs had helped 200 people escape in an effort to limit losses from what many privately acknowledged was inevitable defeat. But MacArthur's troops held on in Corregidor and Bataan for far longer than other Allied strongholds in the Pacific
. They might have survived for even longer had they been properly supplied.

But they were forced to fight with few resources, and inevitably defeat loomed for the “Defenders of Bataan.”

Two weeks before he would finally evacuate, the general paced through his cramped command center, explaining the escape he'd arranged for the journalists. Never letting his grip slip from his long, black cigarette holder, he stopped moving only to issue orders to subordinates.

The plan for Mel, Annalee, and Clark would require them to piggyback on a secret mission that was already under way to smuggle supplies past Japanese lines of control to Bataan and Corregidor. Without a convoy to reinforce Bataan and Corregidor, conditions had been worsening daily. Though the United States still controlled much of the Philippines, there were few routes available to get supplies from unoccupied islands past the Japanese blockade.

Japan had yet to invade the Visayas, a group of islands in the central Philippines. One of those islands, Cebu, had become the primary staging point to transfer on to Corregidor and Bataan the food, ammunition, uniforms, or other matériel that came from the other islands or from farther away.

The U.S. Army Transportation Service still needed ships to get those supplies past Japan's blockade and into Bataan, so Major Cornelius Byrd of the ATS searched Cebu for private ship captains willing to smuggle supplies for him. There were two things he needed for the mission to succeed besides their willingness: a boat small enough not to attract too much attention from a distance, and a boat that didn't burn coal or diesel, because their exhaust would be easily spotted by Japanese patrols.
One of the many small vessels that regularly traveled between the various Philippines islands would be ideal.

The first ship Byrd identified for the Corregidor supply mission was a 700-ton inter-island freighter called the
Princesa de Cebu
. The
Princesa
successfully pierced the blockade and arrived off Corregidor in the dead of night on February 21, two days before MacArthur called the meeting with the journalists. Though the ship brought as much food as it could carry from Cebu, it was still a tiny vessel. The smuggled rations could feed the troops on Bataan for only two days—which was far from what was necessary to substantially maintain their resistance.

The
Princesa
was the central piece in MacArthur's plan for the journalists. He had arranged for the
Princesa
's crew to take Mel, Clark, and Annalee on their journey back to Cebu. Amid Cebu's relative calm, the journalists could seek another boat or a plane to transport them the remainder of the way to the safety of Australia. While the general may very well have seen the reporters' safe escape as an opportunity to get the word out about Corregidor's pressed conditions, it was a spontaneous plan, not part of the
Princesa
's original operation. The plan could still put the reporters and everyone else involved at considerable risk.

MacArthur spent an hour with Mel and Clark. While describing the plan, the general frequently interrupted himself to explain his interpretation of how Bataan and Corregidor mattered to the larger U.S. fight and to share his analysis of the strategic situation in the Pacific. Finally, however, the general stopped pacing and looked at the reporters one more time.

“Get rid of your khakis, arm yourselves every time you make landfall, and travel only at night,” MacArthur advised.
Then he looked at his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland.

“Dick, make arrangements immediately,” he ordered.

Sutherland gave Mel and Clark each a .45-caliber pistol, a grenade, a rifle, and a small amount of ammunition. He also gave them copies of a letter with MacArthur's signature instructing any American forces they encountered to render whatever aid they could to the escapees. Though carrying firearms could have endangered the journalists and would normally be inadvisable for war correspondents, this was an extraordinary circumstance.

MacArthur turned back to the reporters, his cigarette between his lips, and shook their hands.

“I believe you will make it,” he said. Then he looked at Mel. “Say goodbye to Annalee for me.”

As soon as he left MacArthur's office, Mel found Annalee in the ladies' lateral. The couple then headed to MacArthur's personal quarters so they could bid farewell to the general's wife, Jean, whom they'd befriended over the six weeks they'd been on Corregidor, and the MacArthurs' four-year-old son, Arthur.

Though MacArthur's own order to withdraw was a closely held military secret, many of the officers circulating through Malinta's tunnels appeared to know something was up. As the Jacobys left the tunnel and made their way to the North Docks, they exchanged glances with many of the friends they'd made.

“We could say goodbye to but a few officers, but there were some seemingly knowing nods from friends who must have known we weren't just bound for the Bataan front to get more stories,” Mel wrote.

Just before they left, the Jacobys ran into Diller and Huff. Both press officers knew of the reporters' escape plans. They had a bottle with them. As they said good-bye, Diller poured a round of drinks.

“To our next drink,” they toasted.

As Mel prepared to leave—he and Annalee carried only small packs and reluctantly left their typewriter behind—he also made one last radio dispatch.

“I will be very busy on an important story for the next few weeks, so don't query,” he radioed Hulburd, closing the cable with the telegraph code reporters used to communicate that a dispatch was completed and that further information was not on its way: “This is message thirty.”

Hours after the toast with Colonels Diller and Huff, Mel and Annalee crossed the two miles to Bataan and wandered the network of tree trails hidden beneath the jungle's canopy one last time. By this point, the two were familiar enough with the paths that they could follow them without a guide. They sat down beneath a thick knot of banyan trees near the shore to absorb their last moments on the peninsula.

“We sit by the side of a Bataan roadway waiting,” Mel wrote. “Our visions of past months of war are vivid, clouded only momentarily during this waiting by thick sheets of Bataan dust rolling off the road every time a car or truck races by. We wonder for a moment when we will return—and how.”

Finally, escape was in sight. At dusk, a launch would arrive to take the Jacobys to the
Princesa de Cebu
. That ship, they hoped, would then slip past enemy patrols at the mouth of Manila Bay and carry the reporters through the Philippines—possibly even farther across treacherous, Japanese-controlled sea-lanes and on to refuge in Australia, thousands of miles to the south.

Through a pair of binoculars borrowed from a soldier on the Bataan coast, Mel peered south toward Manila. He could see the rising sun of the Japanese flag fluttering over the Manila Hotel, the same place where he'd had his last Christmas dinner,
where Annalee had danced with Russell Brines and Clark Lee had urged Mel to flee the Philippines. He knew that Carl and Shelley were somewhere beneath that fluttering crimson-and-white banner. A reliable confidential source had told Mel that the Mydanses were among the thousands in captivity at Manila's Santo Tomas University, which the Japanese had turned into an internment camp. However, it had been a month since that report.

That day Mel and Annalee felt as “impregnable as the mountain,” almost invincible “for the first time in this war.” Finally, they were leaving, Mel wrote, recalling people and moments from his six weeks on Corregidor and Bataan. Leaving everything. Leaving General Douglas MacArthur. Leaving the general's trusted lieutenants, who had become their friends. Leaving the scores of men they'd met at the front whose stories had yet to be told. They were leaving all of them behind, “most of all the scared Pennsylvania soldier who ran the first time he heard [Japanese] fire but who braved machine gun fire the second time to carry his officer off the field.”

As the Jacobys walked along the tree trail, a Jeep carrying two officers skidded into the dirt. The noise and dust shook Annalee and Mel back into the moment. They stood up and greeted the officers. It was the first time Mel really registered the weariness on the faces of those fighting in Bataan. Despite the fatigue in their eyes, neither officer mentioned their exhaustion. Instead, they chatted casually, sharing rumors and battlefield legends until the soldiers finally drove off a few minutes later. Mel and Annalee again turned to thoughts more hopeful than the soldiers' exhaustion. Like thoughts of ice cream sodas. Could they ever taste as good as they imagined?

Finally, the sun began to set. It was time.

The couple ran back toward the shore along the tree trails. One path led to the last American planes remaining in the Philippines, the rickety trainers, a couple of obsolete fighters, the P-40 so “full of holes.” The planes were hidden next to an airstrip that resembled a hiking trail more than a runway.