The Press: Lucked Out

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Over the German short-wave radio one night last week cooed the snide voice of a Nazi announcer, straining to be funny. "A woman correspondent, Mary Allen," he said, "has fallen into Italo-German hands. . . . She was the only representative of the Anglo-American press to attend such an unladylike affair [the British commando raid on Tobruk]. . . . Some of the correspondents who took part in the Dieppe landing returned . . . well tutored. . . . This time they sent a woman to Tobruk. As you can see, it's hardly courteous, but very American."

This naive willingness to believe anything of the unpredictable Americans must have brightened the hard lot of Laurence Edmund ("Larry") Allen, if he heard it. The A.P.'s and the U.S.'s most embattled foreign correspondent was apparently a prisoner of war. He was aboard the British destroyer Sikh when she went down in Tobruk harbor, laying a smoke screen for the withdrawal. The U.P.'s George Palmer, only other U.S. correspondent accompanying the naval task force, escaped.

If indestructible Larry Allen's luck had indeed run out (his capture is still not officially confirmed), he could console himself with the knowledge that his courageous efforts to get the news had made newspaper history. He brashed his way aboard the British Mediterranean fleet two years ago—the first reporter in either World War I or II to see action from the bridge of a fighting ship. The result was exciting first-person copy, and two miraculous escapes from death: 1) when Allen and the aircraft carrier Illustrious survived a seven-hour Stuka-torpedo plane attack in January 1941; 2) when Allen, who could not swim, almost went to the bottom with the torpedoed British cruiser Galatea.

This close call taught the 34-year-old, Maryland-born A. P. man a lesson. When he returned to the U.S. last March for his first furlough in four years, he learned to swim. This precaution may have saved his life at Tobruk. Allen remained in the U.S. long enough to collect a Pulitzer Prize for his work and to say no to the horde of book publishers, radio and lecture impresarios, who rushed at him, checkbooks in hand. The unassuming "darling" of the British Mediterranean fleet said he just wanted to go on doing his job ("I would find it rather hard to live with myself if I left the A.P."). Son of an impoverished coal operator who died when Larry was eleven, Allen had the only job he had ever wanted, and he was grateful for it. "America" he said, "is the only country where your life is what you make it." With that, self-made Correspondent Allen returned to the wars.

Allen is the 18th U.S. correspondent (newspaper, magazine, radio) to be taken prisoner on the job in World War II. Eight others have died,* three are missing, 18 have been wounded or injured while working, 57 have been interned and, with some exceptions, subsequently repatriated.