Covering Korea

In Korea last week, a harassed Public Information officer looked over half a dozen correspondents who had just flown in from Tokyo and muttered wearily: "By the time we start getting back some of the ground we've lost, there'll be a reporter in every rifle squad."

It wasn't quite that crowded. But by last week there were 271 correspondents from 19 countries reporting the Korean war. And they were still coming in.

Debonair Columnist Joe Alsop flew in to Tokyo with five pieces of luggage en route to Korea, was finally convinced that he needed only a single musette bag. Randolph Churchill, representing the London Daily Telegraph, caused an uproar in Tokyo's Press Club by demanding that he be allowed to sign chits for drinks before he had plunked down his membership deposit. (He was put out.) Almost every newcomer expected to be taken out for one last binge in Tokyo before leaving for the front.

Rough & Rudimentary. In Korea, the going was almost as rough for correspondents as it was for soldiers. Most of them took their chances with the troops, ate and slept where they could, were soon covered with mosquito and flea bites, came down with dysentery.

One night in Taejon, Jack Percival, a peppery, tough Australian reporter, bedded down among his fellow reporters on the floor of an old house. Shortly after, he dashed out into the living room. "There's a woman in there," he gasped. "There was one fellow kept rolling over in his sleep next to me. I gave him a good push and I found out it wasn't a he."

Percival had unwittingly gone to bed between the only women correspondents then in Korea, the New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins and Collier's Charlotte Knight, who were getting the same treatment as the men.

Communications, too, had been rudimentary at first. Early in the war the United Press's Rutherford Poats tried to speed things up by borrowing some carrier pigeons from Tokyo's Mainichi. One of Poats's copy-bearing pigeons took a leisurely eleven days to fly from Korea to Tokyo. (The U.P. put the story on the wires anyway.) By last week communications were vastly improved. Telephone and teletype lines, in some cases, had been extended down to division headquarters. On good days, Korea copy reached Tokyo anywhere from one to six hours after it had been filed.

Polished Jobs. In spite of all the difficulties and dangers (see below), many a correspondent was doing a competent job of reporting. The flood of interviews with combat-weary G.I.s, which had brought down the wrath of General MacArthur (TIME, July 24), had largely dried up. Now the cables gave a clearer, more matter-of-fact picture of the kind of guerrilla war the U.N. troops were fighting and how they were reluctantly learning the inhuman way they had to fight it (see WAR IN ASIA).

Honors for outstanding coverage by a single newspaper went to the New York Herald Tribune, whose Pulitzer Prizewinning Homer Bigart and hard-driving Marguerite Higgins spurred each other on in a perpetual competition for top billing on the Tribune's front page. To get it, both were taking chances that many other reporters shied away from. In one dispatch Bigart reported: "This correspondent was one of the three reporters who saw the action and . . . the only newsman to get out alive." Wrote Miss Higgins last week, "A reinforced American patrol, accompanied by this correspondent, this afternoon barreled eight miles deep through enemy territory . . . Snipers picked at the road, but the jeep flew faster than the bullets which knicked just in back of our right rear tire."

Out of Tune. Though it had four men covering the war, the New York Times had been lagging well behind the Trib. But Times coverage had steadily improved, was given a lift by the clean, lucid battle reports of William H. Lawrence, a veteran World War II correspondent who had been flown out to Korea a month after war's start. In trying to report like the late Ernie Pyle, the New York Post's Jimmy Cannon occasionally sank into bathos, but more often caught the quirks of G.I. psychology and cadences of G.I. speech. In a wry story of a captured guerrilla who kept protesting his innocence, Cannon ended on the G.I. jeer: "The next thing he'll want to go to church . . . Even a Republican would be a Democrat in his spot."

Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News also had an eye for colorful detail, an ear for a quote and an offhand way of pointing up the haphazard confusion of war. In a dispatch last week, Beech quoted a young lieutenant who had unaccountably survived the almost direct hit of an enemy shell: "I called battalion headquarters last night and my C.O. wanted to know who was talking. I said it was Sullivan and he said, 'Why, you're dead.' I said, 'the heck I am.'"

The ear of some British reporters was not so well attuned to American speech. In London's Daily Mail last week, Correspondent Alan Humphreys "quoted" a U.S. officer's comment on North Korean artillery fire: "They know our address all right. It was like Guy Fawkes night, with the flares going up."

Last Assignment

Four days after war broke out in Korea, Christopher Buckley of the London Daily Telegraph flew into Tokyo from London. A few days later, Ian Morrison of the London Times arrived from Singapore. Both crack correspondents, they proceeded to give the British press some of its best war correspondence.

Buckley, 45, an English schoolmaster turned journalist, was correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor before he joined the Telegraph in 1940. Tall, spare and ungainly, Buckley always carried a handful of books, maps and notebooks on assignments, always looked as though he was scurrying around to find his umbrella. One of World War II's most capable reporters, he covered the fighting in Greece, North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy, was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work.

Morrison, 37, son of the Times's famed correspondent Dr. George Ernest ("Chinese") Morrison (who had a street in Peking named after him) once taught English at Japan's Hokkaido Imperial University, joined the Times in 1941. Seldom perturbed, Morrison was equally at home at a swank Singapore party or in a sweaty Indonesian crowd in Jakarta, liked to discuss literature and philosophy as he jounced around in a jeep in Korea.

Last week, Morrison and Buckley were riding in a jeep with Colonel Unni Nayar, India's alternate representative on the U.N. Commission on Korea, who had handled press relations for Prime Minister Nehru during his 1949 U.S. visit. Near Waegwan, the jeep struck a land mine, blew up. Morrison and Nayar were killed instantly. Buckley, wounded fatally, died* soon after in a Taegu hospital.

*In seven weeks of the Korean war, ten correspondents have been killed or are missing. Total of civilian U.S. correspondents killed in four years of World War II: 37.

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