No Phony Heroics

Thrown into the war with as little warning as the G.I.s themselves, U.S. correspondents in Korea last week had their own tough job to do. Three correspondents had already been wounded,* another had been cut off behind Communist lines, and several had narrowly escaped ambush. Communications were meager and inadequate, the fighting chaotic and confusing. To the credit of most of the newsmen, they told the story straight, without phony heroics or false optimism; to the credit of General MacArthur's press officers, the story went back home to the U.S. the way it was written.

The press had swarmed into Japan and Korea like homing bees. The Tokyo Press Club was operating a hotbed dormitory, as press reinforcements poured in from the U.S. and the Far East, en route to Korea. In Korea itself, correspondents were doing business on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Three early arrivals--Tom Lambert of the Associated Press, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News and Gordon Walker of the Christian Science Monitor--took over a three-room frame house in Taejon, near U.S. Army headquarters. Their privacy was soon invaded by later arrivals who posted a sign: KOREAN KORRESPONDENTS CLUB. Before long, the club was equipped with iced beer, a poker game, and two grumbling Korean houseboys, and had begun to acquire the homey look of the pressroom in a police station.

Three-Minute Men. Every day an open-topped jeep, packed with correspondents, made the run from the club to the front. News was easy to find, but hard to get out. There was still only one telephone line to Japan. Since Army calls had priority over news, the dispatches were frequently well behind the actual fighting. When the phone was busiest, each reporter was rationed to three minutes. Anyone with a big story had to file it in "takes" (some editors printed fragments of stories,'with apologies to readers), or thumb a plane ride to Japan and file the story in one piece.

In such confusion, writing was understandably spotty. A.P.'s Lambert sent a terse, convincing eyewitness account of unequal battle: "An American stood up, the long bazooka at his shoulder. He blasted away, but the shells fell short . . . The tanks laughed at [us] with machine guns." But he also wrote perhaps the most implausible battlefield quote of the war: "As the first rocket let go with a swishing hiss, a soldier with his face crushed in the dirt muttered, 'Judas, everyone's getting up on these modern techniques.' !

Old Hands. Such seasoned war correspondents as the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart and the United Press's Bob Miller, who arrived in the second wave, quickly proved that their hands had not lost their skill.

Bigart, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his World War II reporting (TIME, Aug. 27, 1945) pulled no punches: "[I] never saw anything like the bitterness and bewilderment displayed by the men at the front yesterday when they received their orders to withdraw [from Chonan] ... It was a galling humiliation ... To break contact with the enemy and achieve an orderly retreat is difficult, even for troops highly trained . . . These troops were not highly trained. They had been living the comparatively soft life of occupation troops in Japan. Less than 10 percent of them had previous combat experience . . ."

The U.P.'s Miller, who was wounded at Verdun in World War II, also minced no words in reporting the battle of Chonan: "Until then, the war for most of [the young G.I.s] was a lark. But under rifle fire and mortar shells, they fled with fear and panic . . ."

* United Press's Jack James, struck by a shell fragment in the foot; the New York Times's Burton Crane, TIME'S Frank Gibney (TIME, July 10).

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