News with Bombs

In London the practical business of collecting news was carried out last week under adverse conditions:

> Most news offices had air-raid shelters underground, fitted up as newsrooms, with telephones and typewriters. Associated Press, United Press each kept a steel-helmeted reporter on its rooftop to watch raiders and telephone descriptions to the newsrooms down below. When the lookout announced that bombers were overhead, half the staff ducked into shelters; the rest stayed at their desks upstairs.

> The difficulty of getting news from place to place through damaged streets, under shrapnel showering from the sky, increased daily. A. P. installed a teletype to transmit dispatches to the cable office. The New York Times hired a veteran of the civil war in Spain, who shuttled imperturbably back & forth between the censor's office and the Times newsroom.

> Between air-raid alarms and work few newsmen got any rest. One of the worst off was Columbia Broadcasting System's Edward R. Murrow, who worked a 19 1/2-hour day. After his midnight broadcast he roamed the streets until 4:30 a.m., looking for damage, rose again at 9. In the basement studio where he spoke quietly across the sea, the floor was filled with mattresses on which were sleeping men.

> At Dover, now a way station on Hell's Corridor from Dunkirk to London, tall (6 ft. 5 in.), eccentric, Harvard-bred Guy Murchie of the Chicago Tribune, a onetime seaman, chauffeur, section hand, longshoreman, gravedigger, author (Men on the Horizon), was standing by a window in his top-floor hotel room while a squadron of German bombers droned overhead. He was talking with two naval officers and his assistant, Australian Stanley Johnstone, when there was an explosion. The whole side of the hotel collapsed. Down through four floors dropped Newsman Murchie in a shower of timbers, bricks, soot, debris. He climbed out of the wreckage with his assistant. They dug the hotel's pretty receptionist from under a pile of timbers, extricated one naval officer and put him in an ambulance. (The other officer was dead.) In a hospital where he was taken to have his own wounds treated, Guy Murchie telephoned 1,400 words to the Tribune's London office before he submitted to anesthetic.

> In a doorway near the hotel stood prematurely grey, slight Whitelaw Reid, 27-year-old son of Mr. & Mrs. Ogden Reid, publishers of the New York Herald Tribune. Son Reid, a Herald Tribune war correspondent since last June, emerged unharmed. His doorway did not fall.

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