Eve of a Hundred Midnights (37 page)

Though Mel now discussed the urgency of the Philippines' plight, as he began writing “This Is Our Battle” he also wove the situation in China into his narrative. From the first moment
Time
's staff received word that the couple was safe in Australia, word spread about the adventure they'd had.

Meanwhile, the Jacobys did what they could to catch up with the real world and begin to enjoy married life.

“Being married is wonderful,” Annalee wrote. “We're probably the only two people who were actually happy on Corregidor.”

Mel and Annalee had themselves escaped death, injury, and capture, but they did not flee the Philippines unscarred. Australia was not home. In fact, Mel didn't even write home for two weeks after he and Annalee arrived in Brisbane; only in the unsettled realization of what had happened in Bataan did he write a letter. Melbourne may have been a reunion, but it was an uncertain one marred by the absence of friends.

“It's hard to get used to all these temporary luxuries,” Mel told Elza and Manfred when he finally wrote. “We are living in a comfortable false security now.”

Mel wanted real security. He thought about home, and an
image came to mind of his parents' home in Bel Air. Then and for decades to come, Elza and Manfred's house was known for its elaborate floral displays.

“Your telegram about the flowers in the garden at home made me want to tell Mr. Luce that I would come, but I don't think it's smart right now.”

After Mel and Annalee arrived in Melbourne,
Time
wanted him to write up his escape. He composed a 4,000-word account that he sent as soon as censors cleared sensitive details about the route they'd taken, who helped them, and what their blockade runner looked like.

Weeks after sneaking out of Corregidor and months after their New Year's Eve escape, Mel and Annalee had lost everything except the $700 that remained in their pockets, but they had made it. Still, their future was uncertain. The army draft—for which Mel's employers at
Time
had already twice arranged deferrals—again loomed. Meanwhile, the publishing offers continued. The couple had to make a decision. They could abandon frontline journalism and return to the United States to complete the book. But if they did, Mel risked being drafted (though he wasn't completely opposed to joining the service as an officer). Meanwhile, despite Annalee's accreditation as a correspondent, if she returned to the United States, the government might still prevent her from getting another passport to leave the country.

Mel and Annalee thought instead about returning directly to Chungking, where conditions were worsening. They knew that city's rhythms well. They thought perhaps they could even continue to cover the war from China as husband and wife, the way the Mydanses had done before everything changed in the Philippines.

But with the Japanese and Americans battling across the Pacific, getting back to China wouldn't be easy. Even if the Jacobys made it to Chungking, they'd have each other, but they wouldn't ever be safe or secure. Bombs would continue to fall all around them, and the possibility of a Japanese victory would always loom.

Mel and Annalee's escape had been undeniably dramatic. It also made for a wonderfully upbeat story after the United States endured the Pearl Harbor attacks and the fall of the Philippines. Almost as soon as the Jacobys reported from Brisbane, the producers of the
March of Time
radio series set to work on an episode that would dramatize the escape while informing listeners about the state of the resistance in the Pacific.

For the last five minutes of the show, CBS planned a live radio linkup with Mel. Mel didn't want to be the focus of the piece, however, so he offered to get someone who'd served on Bataan. He turned to Brigadier General Harold H. George (“Pursuit Hal,” who had led Bataan's air defenses).
Time
told both Mel's family and George's, and they (and Annalee's family as well) were ecstatic about the chance to hear their voices after so many months. But when the announcer broke in after the melodramatic and sappy dramatized depiction of Mel and Annalee's escape, he was unable to reach Melbourne, disappointing the families.

Instead, the announcer read a cable that Mel had sent to his
Time
editors describing General George, who lauded the American fighting forces in the Philippines when Mel interviewed him.

While Mel arranged the
March of Time
broadcast, General George prepared his own next mission. On April 22, Lieutenant General George Brett, the newly appointed commander of the Allied Air Forces for the Southwest, ordered Pursuit Hal to rush at once to Darwin, a port town in northern Australia. Darwin had been bombed repeatedly following an intense raid on February 19, and it looked like it was about to become the next flash point in the war. As described by Colonel Allison Ind—George's assistant and chief of intelligence at the time—Darwin mattered not just because it represented a possible foothold for the Japanese on Allied territory; it was also close to enemy positions on the island of Timor—300 miles away—and in the Celebes, a group of Indonesian islands another few hundred miles farther away, where Japan was massing its forces for what many thought was an upcoming invasion of Australia.

“Indeed, it was a case of plugging the threatened break in the dike with bare fingers,” Ind wrote. “There was little else, should the flood pressure increase.”

General George was to assume command of the U.S. Army Air Forces in Darwin. Pursuit Hal, the army hoped, could translate his expertise from defending Bataan amid such pitched odds to leading a far better prepared defense of Darwin's skies. The order energized General George, and his clearly defined mission left him a “changed man.”

“This metamorphosis was characterized initially by a furious burst of energy and planning,” Ind wrote. “He was happy. Here was action. He was a man of action. Here was field service. He loved field service. Waves of rank at a main headquarters depressed him. Again he would be with his men fighting a war on a tooth-for-tooth basis, only he insisted that it be three-teeth-for-a-tooth basis, ‘—or you aren't winning this war!'”

Following his aborted
March of Time
broadcast, Mel learned
about General George's order to transfer to Darwin. A battle was brewing, and a story. Preparations for the defense of Australia would provide the kind of heroic narrative of U.S. resilience that
Time
's editors craved. Because he knew the general, because he had seen what the pilots under his command had done in Bataan, and because he had long been interested in aviation himself, Mel realized that he was uniquely positioned to tell such a story, and he began reporting a series of dispatches on the Army Air Forces's mobilization in northern Australia.

General George invited Mel to come along to see the preparations firsthand. Even though this meant traveling across Australia so soon after the trip through the Pacific, the trip's distance didn't seem to faze Mel, who told Clark Lee that it was little more than a “short hop” to see a few airfields. Whatever Mel called it, the 2,300-mile trip would take two days one way. George planned multiple stops along the way to inspect and show off the string of air bases the Allies were hastily constructing across the continent. As Ind recounts, the general was enthusiastic about Mel joining him.

Two days before Mel's trip, he and Annalee cabled her parents in Maryland. The Jacobys were excited to check in with the Whitmores, including their dog, and to report that Annalee had sold another story to
Liberty
about Corregidor. The dog, reported the
Evening Star
in Washington, D.C., was included in the family's reply, cabling, “Woof.”

Before Mel left Melbourne, he dined with Carlos Romulo, newly arrived from Bataan and now General MacArthur's aide-de-camp and a press assistant. Mel identified with Romulo first and foremost as a fellow journalist, but also as a representative of the nation Mel was coming to appreciate as much as China. He told Romulo about how scrupulously he had noted the
conditions he witnessed on his and Annalee's voyage through the Philippines.

“The natives hailed us as deliverers, as if we were gods because we were Americans,” Mel told Romulo at dinner. “When I think of the loyalty and the abiding, simple faith the Filipinos have in America and realize we haven't lived up to it. . . .”

Mel trailed off, but Romulo perceived that his interest in opening American eyes to the Philippines' dire situation was sincere. It echoed Mel's concern for China, and though by that point Mel felt deeply for the Filipinos, he also thought about that first home of his in Asia, and the people there. As far away as he may have been from the Chinese people, he couldn't forget them.

Mel would leave with George on April 27. On the night of April 26, Colonels Diller and Huff arranged a dinner at the Australia Hotel to formally celebrate the Jacobys' safe escape. The entire press gang present in Melbourne came for the celebration. Yes, the lines between soldier and correspondent were blurred, but the intimacy shared by source and subject was understandable.

“[Mel and Annalee] had been through everything with us and we understood each other so well,” Diller later wrote to Mel's mother.

In the hotel lobby, joy spilled forth from the table of reporters and press officers with whom they'd survived so much. So raucous was their laughter that it leapt into the camera lenses, and so happy were the reunited friends that the photos these lenses captured still seem to chatter nearly three-quarters of a century later. In one, Teddy White gesticulates across the table, his face beaming while he makes a point. At his side, Annalee, her hair in curls for the first time in months, can't stifle a laugh. Colonel Diller crumples in smiles on Teddy's other side.

In another shot, across a table covered with potted succulents
, Mel smirks mid-bite, still wearing his khaki correspondent's uniform and a brown coat but now filling them out better than he had when he'd first arrived at Brisbane. Next to Mel, Peggy Durdin gazes across the table and gestures toward her mouth as if adding description to the story.

The gang from Chungking and Manila all knew how precious a night like this had become in this pounding of a war. Almost everyone, Mel noted, “had narrow escapes from Singapore, Burma, the Indies.” Now those who made it to Australia gravitated toward one another.

These were old friends. Permanent friends. Friends who would carry this moment together always, whatever “always” meant.

As the feast rolled on, the correspondents' party continued up the stairs. Diller, Huff, Peggy Durdin, the Jacobys, and Romulo packed the room of the United Press's Frank Hewlett.

Mel and Annalee were reminded of that other gathering five months earlier, on New Year's Eve, in Mel and Annalee's Manila hotel room. But now fear was replaced by joy. Mel sprawled across Hewlett's bed, eagerly prodding Romulo to describe his own hair-raising escape from the Philippines.

“Tell us the story, Carlos,” Mel insisted. “Tell us how you made it out, and don't spare a thing. Tell us about the antiaircraft fire.”

It was clear that Mel had already heard the story; everyone had. But as the “last man out of Bataan,” Romulo's story was already legendary beyond the Philippines.

“And the earthquake,” Mel said. “Tell us everything.”

Mel wanted every earthshaking detail of Carlos's escape from Bataan. Mel's own escape didn't lack theatrics, but he couldn't get enough of Romulo's tale. After all, what did it lack? An amphibious vehicle converted into a rattling plane,
enemy fire, even the minute-long temblor that shook the earth right as the plane took off. This was a year of great escapes. None of the reporters packed into the room wanted the story, or the night, to end.

Soon the soldiers would return to battle, and the reporters would go back to covering the war, but this moment of warmth imprinted itself in Romulo's mind, as it probably did for the other reporters. These were the kind of friendships forged only in chaos. Their bonds were solidified amid rock-hewn tunnels, bomb blasts, and blood-soaked jungles. Just for one night, the war was a million miles away. The party continued until all hours. For the moment, every reporter in that room was safe, home, and full of love.

Still, darkness hovered just outside the frame.

“We heard of unspeakable mass cruelties and individual cases of torture,” Romulo wrote in his diary. They were aware of reports of hundreds of Filipino soldiers dying each day as they were marched from Bataan and of “sick and ragged” Americans marched through Manila to a prison camp. When Corregidor finally fell a few weeks later, Romulo wouldn't be able to bear the news, especially about what might have happened to the seventy Filipina and American nurses remaining at the fortress.

“We tried in headquarters not to wonder what happened to those girls,” Romulo wrote. “I have seen the faces of our greatest soldiers grow white when they speak of Corregidor.”

And then there were Carl and Shelley.

Two thousand miles away, Mel knew that they were still alive but that, like their fellow captives, they were hungry. As Mel and his friends celebrated, the Mydanses witnessed horrors in captivity yet unimagined by those who escaped the Philippines.

“I hope something is being done regarding the exchange of
correspondents,” Mel wrote. “We cannot eat or drink without thinking of them.”

The next morning Mel set out for his trip north with General George. Annalee accompanied Mel to the airfield. On the tarmac, Colonel Ind, George's intelligence chief—who carried an almost romantic appreciation of the war, his superior officer, and the year that had transpired since he and Pursuit Hal left the United States on a special assignment to the Philippines—filmed the departure preparations with a 16-millimeter movie camera. Ind continued to record Mel and Annalee as the child of Hollywood and the MGM screenwriter embraced and kissed good-bye.