Hors de Correspondence

At least 75 U.S. foreign correspondents have been silenced since Dec. 7 by arrest, capture and siege. Besides about three dozen held in Axis countries who may later be exchanged, there was last week a lost battalion of 22 correspondents in the Philippines who vanished two days before Manila's fall. Presumably they were with General MacArthur's forces on Bataan Peninsula. Only A.P.'s Clark Lee got out a brief dispatch--about three soldiers who escaped capture by playing dead. His story was relayed by Naval radio. Like MacArthur's bare communiques, it said nothing about the whereabouts of the correspondents. Adventures of some others: > At Rangoon U.P.'s Darrell Berrigan lay dangerously ill of cerebral malaria. He had come through the jungles from Bangkok, outwitted the Japs who arrested him as a spy on the Thailand-Burma border. > A.P.'s 34-year-old Larry Allen, now back with the British Mediterranean fleet, turned in his masterpiece with the story of the torpedoed British cruiser Galatea, which he survived by a near-miracle on Dec. 16. > From Free China U.P.'s Karl Eskelund, lean, bumptious Far Eastern veteran, sent out the first report of what happened to U.S. and British newsmen in Shanghai. Correspondent Eskelund and his pretty Chinese wife Paula slipped out of Shanghai the day (Dec. 21) that Jap police started rounding up U.S. and British "foreigners." A Chinese guide led them, by night, through narrow mountain passes to a farmhouse within earshot of a Jap garrison. Once, during their two-day hideout, they escaped a Jap searching party by a hair. A Chinese contraband runner loaded them at midnight into his small sampan, nosed upstream through sleet and snow for Free China. Japanese troops lined the right bank, Chinese the left; detection meant being riddled by both sides. At journey's end, too numb to move, they were carried through ice water and mud by the cheerful, barelegged boatman, given a royal welcome by Chinese villagers who had been raided and pillaged by Japanese for years.

A special casualty was President Roosevelt's sixth cousin Joseph W. Alsop Jr., 31-year-old ex-columnist (Alsop & Kintner), who was reported missing at Hong Kong. Not a casualty in the line of journalistic duty, Alsop was working for Chiang Kaishek, as liaison officer with the volunteer U.S. flyers under Colonel Claire Chennault. If the Japanese nabbed him he has even less chance of being exchanged than other correspondent prisoners.

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