The Press: Covering Korea

In Korea last week, a harassed Public Information officer looked over half a dozen correspondents who had just flown in from Tokyo and muttered wearily: "By the time we start getting back some of the ground we've lost, there'll be a reporter in every rifle squad."

It wasn't quite that crowded. But by last week there were 271 correspondents from 19 countries reporting the Korean war. And they were still coming in.

Debonair Columnist Joe Alsop flew in to Tokyo with five pieces of luggage en route to Korea, was finally convinced that he needed only a single musette bag. Randolph Churchill, representing the London Daily Telegraph, caused an uproar in Tokyo's Press Club by demanding that he be allowed to sign chits for drinks before he had plunked down his membership deposit. (He was put out.) Almost every newcomer expected to be taken out for one last binge in Tokyo before leaving for the front.

Rough & Rudimentary. In Korea, the going was almost as rough for correspondents as it was for soldiers. Most of them took their chances with the troops, ate and slept where they could, were soon covered with mosquito and flea bites, came down with dysentery.

One night in Taejon, Jack Percival, a peppery, tough Australian reporter, bedded down among his fellow reporters on the floor of an old house. Shortly after, he dashed out into the living room. "There's a woman in there," he gasped. "There was one fellow kept rolling over in his sleep next to me. I gave him a good push and I found out it wasn't a he."

Percival had unwittingly gone to bed between the only women correspondents then in Korea, the New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins and Collier's Charlotte Knight, who were getting the same treatment as the men.

Communications, too, had been rudimentary at first. Early in the war the United Press's Rutherford Poats tried to speed things up by borrowing some carrier pigeons from Tokyo's Mainichi. One of Poats's copy-bearing pigeons took a leisurely eleven days to fly from Korea to Tokyo. (The U.P. put the story on the wires anyway.) By last week communications were vastly improved. Telephone and teletype lines, in some cases, had been extended down to division headquarters. On good days, Korea copy reached Tokyo anywhere from one to six hours after it had been filed.

Polished Jobs. In spite of all the difficulties and dangers (see below), many a correspondent was doing a competent job of reporting. The flood of interviews with combat-weary G.I.s, which had brought down the wrath of General MacArthur (TIME, July 24), had largely dried up. Now the cables gave a clearer, more matter-of-fact picture of the kind of guerrilla war the U.N. troops were fighting and how they were reluctantly learning the inhuman way they had to fight it (see WAR IN ASIA).