Eve of a Hundred Midnights (33 page)

“They are short on food,” wrote Mel, pumping up the pro-U.S. propaganda as he continued. “Shipping has ceased
entirely. They have no currency, and no trade, but they are willing to wait. They have been raised by Uncle Sam and they are as good movie fans as the average American.”

This is not to say that the villagers were not preparing for war. In each place the
Princesa
stopped, Filipino men proudly displayed their long, sharpened, machete-like bolos. In others, eager recruits clamored to join up, even though they were underprovisioned.

“You see a band of newly organized soldiers wearing blue denims; they have seen pictures of machine guns but never touched one, they've been taught how to use an army grenade but all they have is a Coca-Cola bottle filled with powder filched from a [Japanese] mine which broke loose and floated nearby,” Mel wrote.

Rather than run from the Japanese, who seemed impossible to escape, many Filipinos continued to paddle bancas into placid waters and spear fish until the nets full of their catch sagged. They continued to welcome friendly newcomers with wide smiles and platters overloaded with ripe green mangoes and bananas and to nudge their shy, smiling children to play the piano for unexpected guests. The sun shone and the breeze laconically tousled the palms, the pleasant weather contrasting with the thorough unpleasantness of war.

Idyllic waters lapped at the edge of each bay, but on nearly every shore anxiety still filled the faces of the villagers whom Mel and Annalee encountered. In each place the
Princesa
stopped, people desperately hoped the ship was the spearhead of a convoy; to a person, each time, they deflated when they realized the ship and its passengers were all alone.

Nearly every villager seemed to have a story to share with the traveling reporters, harrowing accounts of looted villages and
farms, townspeople forced into hard labor, and sisters, mothers, and daughters raped by the invaders. One town's residents told of Japanese neighbors who lived quietly in the community for years, then vanished when the war started, as if they had been preparing for an invasion since they arrived.

In another village, the reporters heard, hundreds of people who had never seen an airplane came out to watch a squadron's approach and were killed by bombs. Filipinos on the island of Masbate described how American miners had been rounded up, tied to poles, and carried off by the occupiers. The Filipinos often implored their powerless visitors to send them arms so they could carry out guerrilla raids on the Japanese. All the boatload of journalists could do was promise to tell their story.

On the third day of their trip, the group came ashore at Estancia, a small village on the northeast corner of the island of Panay. Clark wrote that he, Van Landingham, and Lew Carson hired a local driver to take them to the city of Capiz (present-day
Roxas City). The three were amazed that they could buy Coca-Cola and chewing gum and newspapers there, and that one of the two girls they offered rides to along the way had just won a beauty contest.

“We had forgotten there were such things as beauty contests and beauty parlors,” Clark wrote.

But fear returned that night. First, two Japanese planes flew low over Clark and the others as they returned from their expedition to Capiz. Then, at dusk, as the
Princesa
prepared to leave Estancia, Mel noticed a German priest taking note of them as they left port. While Clark and Van Landingham worried about bombers, Mel worried about signal fires.

As soon as the
Princesa
pushed off, a huge fire erupted on the hill behind the ship. Suddenly, the sky lit up as another fire ignited in a straight line across the bay. Everyone had been certain they were signal fires similar to what collaborators working with Japan had used early in the war to guide Japanese planes to American airfields and other targets. This would be their tensest night yet.

“Fine. Travelling. Love. Annalee.”

On February 27, this concise telegram showed up in Bethesda, Maryland, where Annalee's parents now lived. The overjoyed Whitmores dashed off a letter to Elza and Manfred Meyberg, their new son-in-law's parents.

“I'm so happy and grateful I can hardly write,” Anne Whitmore wrote. “Won't it be wonderful when we get our next cable telling where they're going? I do hope it's home.”

In Los Angeles, just after 10:30 that morning, the Meybergs received a similar note from Mel. All either family had known up until then was that their children were safe, that they had made it to Corregidor, and that they were somehow able to get
word through the State Department to Henry Luce, who had passed word on to the Meybergs through David Hulburd.

The telegram had been radioed from a place called “Cebu.” On the sheet the Meybergs received, someone had penciled “Below Luzon,” as if that person had just looked up where Cebu was located. That same day, four days after leaving The Rock, the
Princesa
arrived at Barili, a small port on the west side of the twenty-two-mile-wide island about 350 miles southeast of Corregidor. No bomber had seen the German priest's signal fire and attacked the
Princesa
. No enemy destroyer had intercepted the ship as it crept around the island of Negros toward Barili, roughly 100 miles away from Estancia.

Cebu was still under American control. In Barili, after disappointing the mayor with the news that they weren't reinforcements, Mel, Annalee, and Clark found someone to drive
them over the mountain spine that ran along the length of the island, then north along its eastern shore. They drove past cattle, rich farmland, and even stocked food stores. It was difficult to believe what they were seeing after six weeks of deprivation and violence on Corregidor and Bataan.

“With its sugar plantations and fruit trees and homes with bright-colored roofs, the island looked like the most beautiful place we had ever seen, and the most peaceful,” Clark wrote. Finally they reached Cebu City, the provincial capital, where they found a small American garrison and some sense of normalcy.

But bad news arrived in Cebu as well. George Rivers, one of the businessmen on the
Princesa
, had fallen ill with dengue fever and was getting worse. Lew Carson and the British passengers who had joined from Bataan took Rivers straight to Cebu's hospital. At first, the medical attention seemed to make a difference. Rivers's illness began to turn, and he left the hospital. But he had been weakened by the disease. On March 5, less than a week after they arrived at Cebu, the Brighton, England–born Rivers succumbed to a sudden heart attack. He was thirty-three years old.

While Rivers's friends said farewell to their companion, the Jacobys and Clark Lee got back to work. Thanks to the letter of introduction that MacArthur wrote before the reporters left Corregidor, military officials on Cebu granted the reporters access to the island's wireless transmitters. They were able to use these to assure their families that they were okay. But lest they tip off the Japanese to the blockade-running operation if their messages were intercepted, they couldn't provide many details. The messages carried location stamps that said they were on Cebu, but they couldn't describe the details of how they made it off Corregidor, which islands they'd stopped at on the way, how long they might be on Cebu, or where they might go next. Such details might also risk the lives of hospitable
islanders like the ones who'd welcomed them in Pola and on other islands.

At first, the war felt distant in Cebu City.

“Cebu brought back memories of Manila just before the invasion,” Van Landingham wrote.

Whereas Corregidor's Topside cinema had been bombed out, Cebu's movie theater was still functional, though the two films it showed were months old. There was one bar still open in the city, though only a few cases of whiskey and yet more San Miguel beer remained on hand.

These businesses were closed from 10:00
A.M
. to 3:00
P.M
., when air raids were most likely. The scattered customers who came to them lived in the canyons surrounding Cebu. About seventy American civilians—mostly businessmen—had abandoned their jobs as representatives of Western concerns based around the island and escaped to the relative safety of the city's canyons.

“There was an air of impending disaster,” Van Landingham wrote. There had already been air raids of strategic targets on nearby islands. Two enemy cruisers were known to be prowling the waters of the Visayan island group. It was only a matter of time before Japan invaded Cebu.

Cebu's American residents left behind golf courses and beach clubs and made spartan new homes out of makeshift hillside shacks. Some of them joined the soldiers stationed on the island, as civilians from Manila had done on Bataan, but the rest rarely left the hills. The city's streets felt ghostly and were mostly deserted, with the exception of the few people who slipped into town for supplies or drinks.

“It is amazing to see Americans having cocktails before dinner so close to Bataan and Corregidor where we had been, yet
feeling that the [Japanese] would come in momentarily,” Mel wrote.

Wedged between beaches and the island's hills, Cebu might have been called a sleepy town under different circumstances. Despite the town's somnolent character and mostly empty streets, after all the thatch-roofed villages and nipa huts, not to mention bamboo hospitals, dust, and tunnels, Cebu City seemed, to Clark, “as big as New York, even though it [has] only one five-story ‘skyscraper.'”

That “skyscraper” would briefly house Mel and Annalee. Major Cornelius Byrd of the U.S. Army Transportation Service lived in the building's penthouse apartment. Byrd had organized the blockade-running effort that sent the
Princesa
to Corregidor. He invited Mel and Annalee to stay in his apartment for the first few nights after the
Princesa
arrived. This gave Mel and Annalee some semblance of a return to the honeymoon that had been cut short by the war's arrival.

From a base known as Camp X, Colonel Irving C. Scudder commanded U.S. forces on the island, such as they were. Scudder gained command of the island in January, after General William F. Sharp departed for Mindanao. Scudder was left in charge of a garrison known as the Cebu Brigade, which consisted primarily of incompletely trained Filipino troops and a cobble of antiquated defenses, the most prominent of which was Fuerte de San Pedro, a triangular stone fort built 200 years earlier by the Spanish to repel Dutch pirates and other attackers.

Aside from the fort's rusty guns, there were few other defenses to speak of. As threatening as Cebu's defenses may have seemed half a century earlier, they would now likely be inconsequential for the modern Japanese ships sailing somewhere beyond the horizon. Soldiers and civilians alike knew this, and any approaching boat rattled Cebu residents, who were as “jittery as race colts.”