A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. A Danger Shared is a collection of photographs taken by Melville Jacoby, an American exchange student and later war correspondent in China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines (for Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines) in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s. Author Bill Lascher’s text accompanying the photographs tells Jacoby’s story against the background of the gathering storm, and later when the storm breaks over the Asia-Pacific.
The Second World War in Asia is often told from the American, British, and Japanese perspectives, but Melville Jacoby’s photo-journalism focused on the people of China who suffered as much or more than any other people during the war. In his Foreword to this oversized book, Paul French notes that for many Americans and Europeans, the Asia-Pacific War is the “forgotten war” and China the “forgotten ally”. Jacoby’s photographs give a sense of what it was like for ordinary Chinese citizens to live and work and survive in the midst of war and foreign occupation. The photographs capture, in Lascher’s words, “moments of serenity… even as tumult surrounds people.”
Jacoby was interested in all facets of everyday life in the places he visited. For example, in Canton (Guangzhou), he photographed people living aboard small wooden boats (sampans) on the Pearl River, rickshaws carrying people through the city’s streets, and a priest holding a large turtle near a Chinese temple. In Guangxi province, Jacoby photographed part of a village where the homes were built on stilts near a river, a reservoir on a friend’s family’s land, a police dog and a water buffalo. In Macau, Jacoby photographed the tree-lined Praia Grande near the Bela Vista Hotel. In Xi’an, he photographed women with bound feet. In Kalgan (Zhangjikou), he photographed a colleague on a camel. In Yuanping on his way to Beijing after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Jacoby took pictures of a muddy road and donkeys pulling a cart.
Jacoby visited the bustling city of Shanghai where he photographed rickshaws, automobiles, restaurants, storefronts, soup kitchens, bombed-out streets, and Jewish refugees and pedestrians showing Japanese soldiers their identification papers at the Garden Bridge. He also took photographs of wartime French Indochina, including a bomb-damaged Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia.
The Nationalist capital of Chungking is featured in dozens of photographs: the riverfront and crowded hillsides; the stone stairways on the residential hills and cliffs; people enjoying a meal, while others wash laundry in the river; the Shanhuba airfield on an island in the middle of the Yangtze River; more rickshaws; crowded buses and trucks; shopkeepers, vendors, barbers, and puppet shows; the Soviet embassy; and Chungking’s children at play. There are many photographs of Chiang Kai-shek, but even more of Soong Mayling (Madame Chiang) and her sisters. The Soong sisters “toured Red Cross hospitals, orphanages, and industrial cooperatives, met socialites at formal teas, and sat down for interviews” and made radio broadcasts to America. They were Chiang’s most important ambassadors during the war.
The most compelling photographs in the book are the scenes of destruction near Chungking’s shelters after bombings, especially a photograph that in today’s terms went “viral” internationally. Jacoby captured the
gruesome image of bodies strewn across one of Chungking’s many stone staircases in early June 1941. The image galvanized public opinion in the U.S. and underscored the deepening suffering in Chungking, where thousands of people died, either trying to leave an overcrowded, locked shelter, or pushing to get inside.
Lascher calls this photograph “one of the most iconic visuals from China’s four years of war.”
Lascher notes that the community of war correspondents stayed at Chungking’s Press Hostel and made lasting friendships. Jacoby bonded with Time’s Theodore White, and later briefly courted and married Annalee Whitmore, who wrote speeches for Madame Chiang. The couple married in Manila, the Philippines, where Jacoby reported on the Japanese invasion, MacArthur’s retreat to Corregidor and his escape to Australia, episodes covered in a previous book by Bill Lascher, Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific. The Jacobys followed MacArthur to Brisbane and Melbourne. It was on a side trip to Darwin that Melville Jacoby was killed in an accident at Batchelor airfield when a P-40 fighter spun out of control and struck a vehicle that was transporting Jacoby and Brigadier Gen Harold George. He was 25 years old.