Little & Late

The U.S. press took a beating on the French beachheads last week.

Most newspaper readers, knowing that the invasion going was tough and that dead Germans were more important than live news, were reasonably content with their papers' big headlines and voluminous coverage. But newspaper editors were painfully aware that P: U.S. correspondents' copy direct from the beaches reached the U.S. 28 hours to four days late.

P:The news pool, into which the OWI tried to have all available assault copy funneled and shared jointly by U.S. press agencies, broke down in bickering and what one correspondent called "no more than the usual thuggery." After five days it was abandoned.

P:British correspondents covering British troops had fewer difficulties. Lacking dispatches from their own men, U.S. newspapers published stories under unknown British bylines.

P:Radio, the press's light-swift competitor, got its biggest break and made the most of it (see RADIO). As it almost always must, radio got the jump on the Big Story. Then it proceeded to steal the show. U.S. newspapers got much of their eyewitness copy from radio reporters.

Back to the Pigeon. What had delayed the beachhead stories? U.S. editors did not know for four days. Then they learned only a little. It was not censorship this time, but a breakdown in communications. Radio transmitters for the press, sent in on jeeps, had been washed out in the landings. The intricately planned system for sending copy to England by courier never got going, for lack of couriers.

Correspondents had joked in advance about carrier pigeons--"they don't understand the problem." But two of the best stories came by pigeon-messenger.

Only by the first week's end could the Associated Press report that communications had become "well established," that there was now "reasonable assurance" of prompt, direct coverage from France.

Some Got Through. A few correspondents accompanying the assault troops had better luck (or greater resourcefulness) than others and got their stories to the U.S. fairly promptly. Among them the Chicago Daily News's belligerent Bill Stoneman, the United Press's veteran Henry T. Gorrell and Richard D. McMillan, the New York Herald Tribune's Joseph Driscoll.

What the newspapers lacked in eyewitness stories they almost made up in swift and excellent picture coverage. First to get to London with photographs of the landings was Acme's stocky, persuasive Bert Brandt (see cut). He would have had a notable scoop if his negatives had not been pooled. Cameraman Brandt took no chances on couriers, made three hitchhiking boat transfers in the rough Channel before reaching England, finished his journey in a jeep. His pictures of the invasion beaches were the first to reach the U.S.

How It Felt. The failure of communications could not dim the assault correspondents' heroism. The A.P.'s Henry B. Jameson was the first American newsman casualty. The craft he rode to France was offshore 14 hours, frequently under heavy fire. Hit in the shoulder and leg, Reporter Jameson was able to walk off smiling (see put). First killed: the British Exchange Telegraph's Arthur Thorpe, in a naval action.

Lloyds offered 33-to-1 against any newsman's bet that he would be killed. But professionally imaginative correspondents took little comfort from these odds, or from such grim expressions of goodwill as were offered by the commanding officer of the assault unit to which A. P.'s lank, drawling Don Whitehead was assigned; Said the C.O.: "We are ready to help you. . . . The people at home won't know what is happening unless you are given information and I want them to know. ... If you're wounded, we'll take care of you. If you're killed we'll bury you."

Ernie Pyle's first invasion dispatch, which reached the U.S. four days late, was written aboard a landing craft en route to France. In it he described newsmen's pre-invasion sensations with his usual disarming frankness:

"Men like Don Whitehead and Clark Lee [I.N.S.], who had been through the mill so long and so boldly, began to get nerves. And frankly I was the worst of the lot, and continued to be. I began having terrible periods of depression and often would dream hideous dreams about it. All the time fear lay blackly deep upon your consciousness. It bore down on your heart like an all-consuming weight. People would talk to you, and you wouldn't hear what they were saying.

"The army said they would try to give us 24 hours' notice of departure. Actually the call came at 9 o'clock one morning and we were ordered to be a certain place with full field kit at 10:30. ... The first night we spent together at an assembly area, an army tent camp. . . . The weather was cold and three blankets were not enough. I hardly slept at all. When we awakened early the next morning . . . Don Whitehead said, 'It's just as miserable as it always was.'

"You see, we had all been living comfortably in hotels or apartments for the last few weeks. We had got a little soft, and here we were again starting back to the old horrible life we had known for so long--sleeping on the ground, only cold water, rations, foxholes and dirt. We were off to war again."

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