THE NEWS-HAWKS GATHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 152, 22 May 1942, Page 6

THE NEWS-HAWKS GATHER

Influx of Overseas War Correspondents Indicates The Importance of New Zealand’s Part In Pacific Struggle

HERE are now approximately 40 overseas newspaper correspondents, including seven photographers, in Australia, a sure indication of the important part the Commonwealth is playing in the battle for the Pacific. Indicative, too, of New Zealand’s role in the struggle is the fact that a little over a week ago there were four American and two Australian correspondents busily scurrying round Wellington interviewing Cabinet Ministers, chatting with Service chiefs, and generally accumulating "background." They were V. D. Gardner ("Sydney Morning Herald"), Jonathan Rice (Acme News Agency and N.E.A.), Clark Lee (Associated Press), H. Keys (Australian representative of the " Daily Express,’ London), F. Tilman Durdin (" New York Times"), and Merrill Mueller (International News Service). Mr. Keys and Mr. Durdin were out of town when "The Listener" cast its net, but here’s some news about the other four newspaper men.

The War in Pictures (are RICE, who takes pictures for Acme, is a serious young man with glasses. He took journalism at Stanford University, was editor of the college paper, used to do commercial and salon photography, and once, before the war upset all his plans, had ambitions of becoming photo-editor of an illustrated picture magazine such as Life or Look. He was working long hours and flashing countless bulbs in San Francisco until a few months ago, and he had developed such an itch to go overseas that he was on the point of resigning and joining an ambulance corps in Libya when he was given a chance of coming south and covering the war in the Pacific. He left San Francisco with a hundredweight or so of equipment, including a portable wire photo-sending apparatus, a quarter-plate Speed Graphic, a reflex Press camera, a Kodak Ektra, and a few telephoto lenses and a year’s supply of film. He set up a bureau in Honolulu, mooried about Waikiki beach taking a few odd shots and kicking himself for having landed in a place where there was an early curfew, prohibition, and hardly a hula dancer. It took him three months to get from Honolulu to Australia, such a roundabout route did he take. Transferring from one U.S. cruiser to another he lost all his equipment and spent an hour floating listlessly in the Pacific. He is gradually re-equipping himself. He also had a grandstand seat

during a brush between United States warships and Japanese ‘planes. In Australia, where Mr. Rice spent several weeks before coming to New Zealand, there are now seven American cameramen, including Life’s crack photographer, Wallace Kirkland. Between them they did full justice to the pictorial side of the arrival of American troops. Mr. Rice is honest enough to declare that his hobbies no longer include photography. In fact, he says, he loathes taking pictures of people. His main interests in life, that is to say in normal times, are music and a St. Bernard dog named Heide who starred with Gracie Fields at a big charity ball and stole the show from everybody, collecting 700 dollars in dimes and nickels. At the Other End D. GARDNER, who represents The * Sydney Morning Herald, is a big, slow-spoken, easy-going Australian who, before coming to New Zealand, was a cable sub-editor on his paper. He has had several years of scratching out what other people wrote, and now, he says, it’s a real holiday to get at the other end of the cables. He started his newspaper career.on the now defunct Sydney Evening News and was on the Mel- bourne Herald before going to Sydney. The toughest and liveliest job he has had in the whole of his newspaper career, one gathers, was that of political roundsman at Canberra. Having once been a_ political roundsman you took wars in your stride.

Once, in newspaper circles, The Sydney Morning Herald was regarded as conservative to the point of dullness, but its coverage of the present war compares favourably with that of any other paper in the world. There are special "S.M.H." correspondents in London (four), New York (two), Moscow, Burma, India, the Middle East, and New Zealand. The paper also had correspondents in Manila and in Batavia. The Manila representative was Jack Percival, who is well known here in New Zealand, having made several trans Tasman flights with Kingsford-Smith and Ulm. He and his wife were captured by the Japanese, and nothing has been heard of them for many weeks. After hitting a bad "low" following the fall of Singapore, morale in Australia is better than it ever was, according to Mr. Gardner. It’s due to three things: the return of a large proportion of the A.LF., ever-increasing American aid, and the presence in Australia of Douglas MacArthur. "They’d give ome: to MacArthur," he says. Was With the Seoneau ‘THE job of foreign correspondent, they say, is one that the average American newspaperman would forfeit his right hand to get. The advice which Clark Lee, young Associated Press correspondent now in New Zealand, has to to offer is-better stick to crime reporting, book reviewing, or something like that. In wartime it’s just about as healthy piloting a dive bomber or operating an anti-tank gun as it is following up the war and reporting on it. In the Pacific war zone, at any rate. Take the case of A.P.’s representatives in the East. There were two men in Shanghai, two in Tokio, two in Manila, one in Hong Kong, one in Saigon, and one in Batavia. That makes nine. Two of them managed to keep a jump ahead of the Japanese, and Clark Lee is one of them. Of the seven captured, two are reported to have been shot, and others tortured. Definite news is lacking, but it is certain that the casualties have been enough to place the job of war correspondent in the Pacific high up on the list of risky trades,

The reason for the Japanese dislike of foreign newspapermen, says Clark Lee, is the fact that Japanese correspondents are closely affiliated with the army and act as spies. And so the military play safe and work on the basis that all correspondents are spies. Mr. Lee describes himself lightly as a tenegade. His father was president of United Press, but he decided to strike out for himself, and joined up with A.P. (His college was Rutgers, famous for Paul Robeson and for the fact that everybody who goes there is supposed to be ready to die for dear old Rutgers at a moment’s notice.) He worked two years in the New Jersey bureau of A.P. (just missing the Lindbergh kidnapping, on which A.P. scooped the field), then two years in New York, then spent three years in Mexico as chief of bureau. That was the beginning of his wanderings. In 1938 he went to South America; in 1939 and 1940 he was with the Japanese Army, covering the war in China. In November of last year, flying home on hig first leave in six years, he had got as far as Manila when his office, realising that the East was about to blow up at any minute, cabled him to stay where he was. The next few months, on Batan and Corregidor, he saw all the action he could handle. He watched a big landing, was cut off by the Japanese on one occasion, was bombed and shelled moretimes than he can remember. Three times he lost all his luggage and gear. Like most other correspondents in Japan and China, Mr. Lee could foresee war with America a long time before December 7, 1941. In December of 1939, General Homma, the Japanese Army’s expert on western politics and culture and the man entrusted with the assault on Batan, informed him regretfully that "we'll have to fight you some day soon." The Blitz on London bh RE " MUELLER of the International News Service (no longer connected with Randolph Hearst) is a cheerful, objective young man with a (Continued on next page)

Visiting War Correspondents (Continued from previous page)

sandy moustache. He shared the blitz and flatted in Berkeley Square with Quentin Reynolds. "Quent. is the grandest guy. There’s nobody quite like him," says Mr. Mueller. As readers of his entertaining London Diary will remember, Mr. Reynolds had a couple of ribs broken by Goering one particularly dirty night. "Red " Mueller also had his share of bombing. He claims that he has been through 2,000 air raids, and certainly he knows what it’s like to be buffeted by bomb blast and punctured by bomb splinters. Mr. Mueller would tell you he cut his teeth on a slug of lead and had the smell of printer’s ink in his nostrils almost as soon as he could toddle. He took his first newspaper job at the age of 14, at 16 was editing a bi-weekly paper, and not long after that was a city reporter on the Buffalo Times. Next he was offered the choice of two jobs, one with the United Press and one with Mr. Hearst’s International News Service, but Mr. Hearst, as usually happened, offered more money. The outbreak of war found him in France, and after having covered as best he could the fall of France in all its sorry confusion, he caught a boat to England, being one of the last correspondents to get away. In London he was appointed an editor of his service there, and night after night worked through the

blitz. "It was tough on your nerves," he says. " You’d be at your typewriter, trying to deny the fact that bombers were overhead and the guns were blazing, when you’d hear one coming. Then you’d pause and just sit waiting to hear. where it landed. Then you’d pull yourself together and try to work again." Mr. Mueller doesn’t think that the world will ever again see blitzes of the magnitude of those in April and May of last year. After seeing how London could take it, he went on a roving assignment, visiting first the other blitzed cities and next covering the recreation, of the British Army. After that he left by destroyer for Gibraltar, flew by R.A.F. ‘plane to Malta, and from there to Libya, where he saw the December British drive. India, Ceylon, and Sumatra were his next ports of call. He was on a large ship which slipped away while the Japanese were attacking another convoy. Most of the lucky " beats’ he has had, Mr. Mueller credits to his early training as a sports writer. Many correspondents — Quentin Reynolds, H. R. Knickerbocker, and Clark Lee among them-were originally sports writers. He thinks that it speeds a man up and quickens his judgment. He himself was a " five-letter man" at college, specialising in basketball, football, swimming, tennis, and baseball.