Journey into Fear

At long last, the foreign press invaded Soviet-occupied Manchuria. After months of Red tape and runarounds, 22 correspondents and photographers found it deceptively easy to push aside the iron curtain that had kept them out. With a hesitant Godspeed from the Chinese, they boarded northbound trains at Chinchow for sightseeing tours of Mukden, and Changchun, the capital.

Last week, as the newsmen straggled back to Shanghai and Peiping, bitter stories and shocking pictures showed up in the U.S. press. Getting at the news in liberated, looted Manchuria had been a grim business. Some of the correspondents wrote as if they had shared a nightmare.

In Mukden, they talked to one Soong Chu-sheng, tobacco factory manager. He told them how the Russians had looted last fall, had methodically stripped factories, had taken two-thirds of his cigaret output without pay. Shortly afterward, the talkative Soong was shot by a gunman. Several of the correspondents accused themselves in print of being "unwitting motivators" of his murder.

They had set out under the auspices of the Chinese, but were quickly taken in hand by the Russians. One group was confined for 54 hours in Mukden and 53 hours in Changchun, for arriving without official sanction. At Changchun, calling on frosty Major General Fedor Karlov, they were curtly told to stay away from Red Army installations. At the end of the interview, Karlov told newsmen: "We have no machines to take you back to the hotel." At 10 below zero, they trudged the three miles back through the snow. Several noted that U.S. Lend-Lease trucks and cars, with the Soviet star on them, passed them by.

Wrote the A.P.'s Spencer Davis: "We were fired on by unknown snipers while inspecting a stripped textile mill." Cabled the New York Herald Tribune's A. T. Steele: "The Tommy gun is king, and you see it everywhere." The New York Post's Robert P. ("Pepper") Martin, usually willing to lean over backwards to give the Soviets a break, angrily reported a "studied and cynical 'freeze' against correspondents, who received treatment usually accorded spies or nationals of an unfriendly nation. . . . This correspondent walked through city streets after dark with chill fear gripping his stomach when challenges sounded."

In the relative safety of Shanghai's Broadway Mansions Hotel, one of the frightened newsmen unburdened his soul to a stay-at-home, the New York Post's Andrew Freeman. Said he: "After what I have seen I am not only ideologically upset, I am disgusted and disheartened. I was unable to put in my stories how alarmed I am about the warlike attitude of a country I always believed liberal and a friendly ally."

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