Two Out of Three

From a low ridgeline above the Kum River last week, three U.S. correspondents watched an outnumbered, outgunned battalion of G.I.s fight a desperate delaying action. Only one of the newsmen, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart, got back to write about it. The others, Ray Richards of Hearst's International News Service and Corporal Ernie Peeler of Stars and Stripes, were killed as they ran for a jeep when the battalion was cut off. Richards was shot through the head, Peeler through the chest. They were the first newsmen to die in the Korean war.*

Both were war veterans. Richards, 56, a white-haired, restless oldtimer, had been on & off the firing line ever since (at 22) he covered Pershing's expedition against Pancho Villa for the old Denver Morning World. Later, Richards worked for newspapers in Honolulu, Tokyo and Shanghai, and covered the Sino-Japanese war. A onetime assistant city editor of Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, Richards was its Washington correspondent when he took leave last fall to go to Korea as a special adviser on international affairs to President Syngman Rhee. He was planning to come home as war broke out.

Peeler, 38, served in the Pacific in World War II as a Stars and Stripes correspondent. After his discharge, he broadcast a daily news show for a California radio station. Then, in 1949, Peeler re-enlisted and was assigned to the Tokyo edition of Stars and Stripes.

* In World War II, more than 40 U.S. civilian war correspondents and soldier correspondents for Stars and Stripes and Yank were killed.

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