Reporters Are Tough

Out of the great, grey-green, greasy New Guinea jungles last week staggered an American newspaper man with a World War II record for hardihood. He was A.P.'s quiet, lanky Vern Haugland, 34, who had been missing for 47 days. Of the 100 or so U.S. flyers who have turned up after forced landings in the steaming New Guinea interior, none had survived so long.

On Aug. 7 Haugland flipped a coin with an Australian correspondent for a seat on an outgoing U.S. Army bomber. The A.P. man won. The plane used up its gasoline bucking a tropical storm; Haugland and the crew bailed out at 13,000 feet. Eight days later two of the crew reached Port Moresby. Within 20 days all but Haugland and the navigator had straggled in.

Haugland turned up at a remote mission station on the southeast coast. Emaciated, exhausted, delirious and sick with malaria, he was flown to a Port Moresby hospital, where physicians predicted his recovery. How he had got through one of the earth's most rugged regions without benefit of maps, food, weapons, or military preconditioning, no one could tell. Haugland was too sick to.

Month ago I.N.S.'s Jack Singer got aboard a torpedo plane and watched U.S. Navy flyers set the Jap carrier Ryuzyo afire off the Solomon Islands. His own bomber slipped a torpedo into the ship from less than 800 yards, survived some stubborn Jap Zeros, got home. Singer figured he was lucky to get back alive. But it made a swell combat story.

Not so lucky last week, Singer was reported missing. The Navy didn't say where or how, but ominously advised that it was forwarding his personal effects.

Before Pearl Harbor Jack Singer was a New York Journal-American sportswriter with a talent for making friends and turning out sharp copy. When war came, the slim, good-looking youngster (27) said his job was unimportant, asked for foreign service. Last April he got it. Word of his mishap moved Navy Secretary Knox to say: "I think we all feel a great sense of pride at the long chance men are taking to get the news."

The Nazis finally admitted last week that A.P.'s indestructible Larry Allen is a prisoner of war (TIME, Sept. 28), but they scarcely knew what to make of him. Picked up in a boat after the British destroyer he was on had been sunk off Tobruk, the first thing he did after landing was to demand an interview with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The Germans, astounded by this "rather queer wish by the prisoner," turned it down.

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