Missing Correspondents

The hazards of correspondents in World War II were last week brought home to the U.S. press by fragmentary accounts of what happened to American newsmen in Yugoslavia.

From Budapest, after a dead silence of 19 days, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News Correspondent Sam Brewer cabled a story of his escape from Yugoslavia. "Now I know how it feels to wait for a firing squad," he began. His adventures started on his way to Belgrade when a train dumped him out ten miles outside the city. Against a black cloud over the town wheeled the Nazi dive-bombers. Correspondent Brewer, guided by flames, trudged on alone with pack and typewriter toward the city. In the deserted, fire-drenched, shattered streets, stumbling through splintered glass, he was arrested by eight Comitadjis with shotguns and pistols. Unable to read, they concluded his passport was forged, his typewriter a portable radio transmitter, his extra boots final proof that he was a Nazi parachutist spy. One urged shooting him on the spot.

Next twelve hours he was kept under armed guard in a major's automobile. At last they parked in a cherry orchard outside Belgrade. It was 6 in the morning; the major said he would deal with him when he woke at 9. In time's nick he was saved by a Serbian editor, a reserve colonel.

With Correspondent Brewer as he arrived in Budapest was CBS Radio Correspondent Cecil Brown--thrice arrested on suspicion of spying--who told of the "odor of death which hangs over the half-destroyed capital" as he watched German soldiers dig out a few of the 7,000 dead, the 10,000 wounded. Stranded in Zagreb was A.P. Correspondent Max Harrelson, his passport seized by the new puppet Croat Government.

Fate of five other U.S. correspondents is not yet known. They are A.P.'s Robert St. John, U.P.'s Leon Kay, the New York Herald Tribune's Russell Hill, the New York Times's Ray Brock, and Leigh White of CBS and Overseas News Agency. When last heard of (at Cattaro, April 16), they were heading into the Adriatic in a rowboat, presumably bound for Greece.

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