In Line of Duty

Some 20 front-line correspondents have been killed or captured since the U.S. went to war, including several believed to have faced Jap firing squads. Numbered with them last week was Melville Jacoby, brilliant, 25-year-old correspondent of TIME and LIFE who died instantly in the freak plane accident that killed Brigadier General Harold H. ("Pursuit") George at an advance air base in Australia.

After Jacoby's last-minute escape from Manila, his numerous close shaves on Bataan and his really dangerous escape through the Jap blockade (TIME, April 13), Australia looked almost like a tame haven.

Barely three years ago, in his last year at Stanford, Jacoby wrote to his mother in Los Angeles about his first reporting assignments (part-time for the San Francisco News): "I think I am going to like being a reporter as soon as I get a little more confidence." In China he got it fast. Paying his own fare out to Shanghai, Jacoby wangled a job under Dr. Hollington Tong, was delegated to reorganize Chungking's radio broadcasting. When he had got U.S. hookups for Madame Chiang Kaishek, her sisters (Madame Kung and Madame Sun Yat-sen), he headed home via Indo-China. He stopped over eight months, got arrested for taking pictures during the Jap invasion, came out a full-fledged U.P. correspondent.

Day after he arrived home on a Norwegian freighter a friend called, asked: "Do you remember Annalee Whitmore?" At Stanford she had worked on the college paper with him. Now a scriptwriter for MGM, she wanted help to get a passport to China. Jacoby spent a week wire-pulling, announced one day to his mother: "That girl's damn smart." She got the passport and a publicity job in Chungking. Jacoby went on his way to Chungking by Clipper, was hired by TIME. Once after a bad air raid he wrote to discourage her coming, saying Chungking was no place for a woman. At the bottom of the letter he penciled: "P.S. Hurry up."

The morning after her arrival Jacoby got a cable transferring him to Manila. He proposed from rickshaw to rickshaw as they jogged over bomb-pitted streets to attend a missionary's reception. To her rickshaw drawn by a straining coolie he shouted: "Say, will you marry me?" Pretty dark-eyed Annalee, craning backward, shouted: "What did you say?" Repeated Jacoby: "I said, will you marry me?" No answer. At the reception, between introductions, he pressed for an answer. He got it after Annalee said "How do you do" to the fifth missionary. "Yes," she said.

Again she had to stay behind while he went to Manila. She caught up two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Married immediately, they slipped away for a two-day rainy honeymoon in a cottage at Tagaytay. But they were not alone; they had to see to the care & feeding of two baby giant pandas, gifts of Madame Chiang Kaishek, en route to the U.S. Their magnificent wedding presents from Chinese officials--red satin embroidered blankets, silver filigree china, Tao silver and bamboo vases--went up in smoke a week later when Manila fell.

On Bataan, where Annalee mended and patched her sweater-and-slacks trousseau for two months, the Jacobys' foxhole honeymoon did not dampen their spirits. And Jacoby, besides adding to his laurels as a correspondent, took some of the best photographs to come from that front.

Australia was a happy surcease. Annalee got a permanent and new clothes. They rented a pleasant apartment. TIME, thinking they had been through enough and having got two other correspondents to the spot, suggested bringing them home. Before the Jacobys could decide what to do Melville accepted General George's invitation to fly with him on a week's inspection of north Australia air bases.

Wrote MacArthur in the communique announcing Jacoby's death last week: "Melville Jacoby covered the Philippine campaign for TIME and LIFE with complete devotion to military standards. He could well have served as a model for war correspondents at the front."

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