Press on Bataan

First news roundup of the "Lost Battalion" of U.S. correspondents with MacArthur on Bataan was squeezed through last week by TIME'S Correspondent Melville Jacoby:

When Manila was abandoned, U.P.'s Frank Hewlett, the New York Times's Nat Floyd, Reuters' Curtis Hindson escaped by automobile, which roared over bridges a few moments before they were dynamited. A.P.'s Clark Lee, Melville Jacoby and wife Annalee* caught a small island freighter at midnight on New Year's Eve as the Manila docks went up in flames. Other correspondents including LIFE'S Photographer Carl Mydans and his wife Shelley (also a staff photographer) were, so far as is known, captured in Manila.

On Bataan the correspondents, now in khaki, live with the troops, share their foxhole existence in everything but firing guns and flying planes. They are allowed to visit any front or headquarters they please, though they time their movements with some regard for the disposition of field kitchens. A.P.'s Clark Lee has even gone on night patrols.

Exceptional correspondent is U.P.'s Frank Hewlett (former acting Manila bureau chief). Whereas the others hitchhike, he sports a Chevrolet sedan with a small Filipino chauffeur named Hoolio. Grinning Hoolio has been nicknamed the "Sage of Bataan."

Correspondents are allowed to file 500 words a day, but the transmission facilities are so busy with military matters that the dispatches usually fail to get through. Troopers everywhere pester the correspondents to report news of their individual safety, always ask when reinforcements will arrive.

First casualty among Bataan correspondents was U.P.'s Franz Weisblatt, a dark adventure hunter with a colorful career (once written up in True Adventure) as fortune hunter in China, newsman in Manchuria and Japan. Wounded and captured when he was cut off with an Army unit, Correspondent Weisblatt was reported by Tokyo radio to be a prisoner of war, suggesting that the Japs don't regard correspondents as civilians.

*Six-foot, 25-year-old Correspondent Jacoby, transferred from TIME'S Chungking bureau to Manila, two weeks before the Jap attack took a half day off to marry beauteous Annalee Whitmore, a Stanford fellow student who quit a Hollywood script-writing job to follow him to China.

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