Assignment: War & Rebellion

World maps at the headquarters of major news-gathering organizations took a rare beating last week as harried editors plucked and switched pins representing correspondents to keep up with wide-ranging, fast-breaking stories of war and rebellion. The correspondents took a beating too--from bullets, censorship, travel snags, official red tape and broken communications.

To cover the Hungarian rebellion newsmen based all over Western Europe poured into Vienna and headed for the Hungarian border, minus Hungarian visas, which were almost impossible to get. At a manure-strewn Austrian border village named Nickelsdorf, they grabbed interviews with escaping travelers from Hungary, and pleaded with Hungarian border guards to let them in. In Budapest all but one of the handful of Western correspondents had to rely on Westerners heading for the Austrian border to carry their copy out; telephones, cables and telegraph lines were cut. The exception: the London Daily Mail's Noel Barber, who had a car, enabling him to commute regularly to the border, where he worked over his copy in the Hungarian customhouse until another Mailman arrived from Vienna to rush it off for transmission. He was gleeful at the way his job was going. "My paper loves me now!" he crowed one morning. "Oh, how they love me!"

Next day in Budapest, Barber made the mistake of violating a rule he had set for himself: no travel at night. With the London Daily Express' Sefton Delmer and an interpreter, he set out to tour the city. Russian machine gunners opened up on the car, almost cut it in two, crumpled

Barber in his seat. Delmer got behind the wheel and sped to safety on two flat tires. A bullet had creased Barber's skull; forty stitches were needed to close the wound.

"Take a Picture for Me." Meantime correspondents were building up pressure at the Nickelsdorf frontier barrier. First to get through was the Daily Express' Sydney Smith. When the guards lifted the barrier for another purpose, Smith gunned his poised car, shot past them and, despite their shouts to halt, lit out for Budapest. Next day other newsmen persuaded the guards to let them through in cars and as hitchhikers on Hungarian army trucks. In Budapest they set up shop in the Duna Hotel, a dingy fleabag on the Danube. There they got a shaky warning from the New York Post's Seymour Freidin; a Soviet officer had just rescued him from a nervous Russian private as he was about to put a bullet through Freidin's head.

Other newsmen were not so lucky as Si Freidin. While covering a fight at Communist Party headquarters in Pest, LIFE Correspondent Tim Foote was shot in the left hand. A burst of machine-gun bullets ripped open the leg and abdomen of tall, famed Paris-Match Photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini. From the ground, Pedrazzini held out his camera to a Match correspondent standing next to him and said: "Here, take a picture for me."

In the shortage of hands, the A.P. sent George Boultwood from its Bonn bureau to Budapest to join its resident man, Endre Marton. Boultwood took along his 17-year-old son George Peter, who was soon filing his own byline stories from the Hungarian capital. The U.P.'s Anthony J. Cavendish scored a feat by covering the Polish rebellion in Warsaw, then flying into Hungary with a Polish plane carrying plasma. He landed 33 miles south of Budapest, hitchhiked to the suburbs, had to walk the last five miles. He sent out a fast-moving 2,000-word eyewitnesser.

"Madame Parachute." The Hungarian story was still sizzling when Israel's invasion of Egypt caught some editors flat-footed--and several Middle East cor respondents off their Cairo base on swings through Jordan and Lebanon. Those in Amman and Beirut were sealed off from action by censorship or travel restrictions. Editors urgently ordered new shifts in their European bureaus to get extra men to Cairo, as well as to Tel Aviv and the British-French base on Cyprus. A dozen correspondents rushing to the Middle East were stranded in Athens when the U.S.

Air Force canceled a plan to fly them to Israel, from which it was evacuating U.S. citizens.

In London, efforts to get accreditation with the British Expeditionary Force to Egypt met with such bureaucratic bungling that most newsmen felt sure they were getting a deliberate runaround. When they applied at the Ministry of Defense, they were told to apply in Cyprus. When they arrived in Cyprus, they were told to apply in London. Soon more than 100 newsmen were on Cyprus badgering the army. But at week's end only 20--including three Americans--were chosen to go to the invasion front. From Paris with French accreditation came a planeload of journalists including 32-year-old brunette Brigitte Friang, a heroine of the French World War II resistance known as "Ma dame Parachute." She carried an official letter authorizing her to make parachute jumps from military aircraft in the combat area--if she could get there.

Icing on the Cake. One correspondent, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prizewinning Homer Bigart, had a hand in each of the week's big stories. A veteran reporter of battle in Korea and Palestine when he worked for the Herald Tribune, Bigart had been rushed from New York to Vienna to work on the Hungarian revolution. He was filing from Hungary when the Times cabled him to get to Israel. Three days later, Bigart's byline appeared over a story from Tel Aviv. The Times's shift of Bigart was only icing on the cake. Thanks to both foresight and luck, the Times had its own coverage wherever the news was breaking; chance found its Military Analyst Hanson W. Baldwin in Cyprus just as the British and French served their ultimatum.

Cairo's news output was slowed by snarled communications and muffled by censorship. And, with its airfields under British bombardment, the Egyptian capital was also the hardest place for a correspondent to get to. None made it last week, though some were trying by way of Khartoum and Libya. By commercial plane and chartered flight, 50 correspondents streamed into Tel Aviv. But Israel refused to accredit any foreigners to its forces, gave out the news in meager communiques. Newsmen tried to drive to the front in taxicabs, but the roads were closely guarded, and few made it. Yet they managed to file 800,000 words in the first four days of hostilities, all through two weary, sleepless operators, the only men left in the cable office after Israel's call-up. This week, as the Russians launched their all-out attack on Hungary, the correspondents' problem was not getting into Budapest but getting out. Many made it to Vienna before the Soviet drive began. Those who did not took shelter in the U.S. and British legations, or joined a convoy of diplomats' families only to be held up near the Austrian border by surly Soviet tankmen. A Russian tank major summed up the menace to newsmen in the latest turn of the Hungarian story when he growled: "I would particularly like to shoot reporters and diplomats."

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