Casualties

Two more U.S. war correspondents lost their lives, a third was missing last week. Total toll since the war's start in 1939: dead, twelve; missing, three; wounded, more than 30. The two new deaths came at the end of a fast flight across the Atlantic, when the Yankee Clipper, swooping to a Lisbon landing, crashed into the wide, swift Tagus River estuary.

One victim was Ben Robertson Jr., a soft-voiced, insatiably curious South Carolina bachelor who loved truth and people. At 39 he had lived a full life, sampling the world: he had newspapered in Hawaii and Australia, clerked in a U.S. consulate in Java, wandered through Borneo and India; he had worked for the New York Herald Tribune, the Associated Press (in Washington, London) and for the New York newspaper PM (London Moscow, the Middle East, India); he had written three books praised by critics; the latest: Red Hills and Cotton, published in 1942. Last week, newly rehired by the New York Herald Tribune, he was on his way to London. He was the second Herald Tribune man lost in this war (the first, Ralph Barnes, died in a plane crash in Yugoslavia in 1940).

The other correspondent killed at Lisbon was no veteran. Frank J. Cuhel, 38, unmarried and a 1928 Olympic Games hurdler from Iowa, was an export firm's Java representative in 1941. Pearl Harbor changed his life. He became a Mutual Broadcasting System correspondent in the Dutch East Indies, survived many a bombing, got out a hop ahead of the Japs, then broadcast from Australia until last year's end. He did so well that Mutual decided to send him to North Africa.

Reported missing was the New York Times's Robert Perkins Post, a 32-year-old, bespectacled ex-White House reporter. Last week Bob Post and five other correspondents who had taken special training for air combat assignments (they called themselves the "Writing Sixty-ninth") accompanied U.S. airmen over Wilhelmshaven, Germany to watch a bombing mission. Bob Post's plane was one of the seven that did not return. Army announcement said only that two men had been seen parachuting from it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.