Almost a Family Page 5

  In his coverage, Barney was passionate about the American airmen. He was amazed at their prowess and their footloose bravery. In letters home to our mother, he was continually struck by how young they were. “You would be enthralled by what goes on in the sky now and again, and by the kids who do it,” he wrote. “A high school loose in whining motors.” Port Moresby and Townsville, in Queensland, Australia, where the airmen were based, were small places, and Barney personally knew many of the pilots and crews from interviews when they returned from missions, exhausted but grateful to be alive. In the same way that Ernie Pyle became known as the GIs’ reporter, he became known as the aviators’ reporter.

  Barney’s fascination with the airmen was in part a reflection of his thwarted ambition. As an infantryman in France twenty-four years before, he had toyed with the idea of becoming a pilot, a not uncommon aspiration among the young men raising their eyes from the muddy, rat-infested trenches to the primitive flying machines soaring above. But his passion for the pilots and crew also came from the exigencies of the reporting situation in the Pacific. At this stage the war was being fought in the skies. Airpower was key, and everything rode on whether the American airmen could turn back the Japanese dominance gained from their capture of strategic airfields.

  Early on Barney ran up against the U.S. Army censors and bridled under their thick blue pencils. He was among the first to abandon the daily press conferences and hopscotch around northern Australia, catching military and civilian flights to reach American air bases. While dozens of his colleagues cooled their heels in Melbourne, he interviewed pilots and bombardiers to get firsthand accounts of their missions, telling readers what it was like to zoom down on bombing runs on Japanese destroyers and engage in dogfights with Japanese Zeros.

  His copy, cleared by the censors under the dateline “AT A UNITED NATIONS AIR BASE, Southwestern Pacific,” was filled with color and human beings speaking in real language. He wrote about a lieutenant who managed a perfect crash landing even though he had shrapnel wounds in his throttle arm, no landing gear, and a Japanese Zero firing on his tail. And about a downed pilot who made it back to base after two days in the jungle; swimming a river, he was attacked by a crocodile, which bit him twice, until he finally plunged his eight-inch-long jungle knife into its throat. A nineteen-year-old Brooklyn boy, a turret gunner on his first mission, candidly admitted his fear up until the point that he shot down a couple of Zeros; asked how he felt about his first kill, he suddenly stopped, turned serious, and said, “Kind of funny.” Another pilot told of being trailed by a Zero, which moved so close that it almost joined his formation. Strangely, it did not fire. He looked over and realized the Japanese pilot flying parallel to him was dead.

  One of my favorites is about Jerry Crosson, a thirty-year-old former policeman from Staten Island who had just returned from his first bombing run. Seated before an unappetizing lump of meat in the mess hall, Crosson waxed nostalgic about New York, describing a fantasy night out on the town. First he’d go to a Broadway musical. Then he’d “very much enjoy a dinner at the Rainbow Room in Radio City.” He’d choose a table overlooking midtown Manhattan and he’d order trout cooked in wine sauce, a mixed salad, a good dry white wine, and plain vanilla ice cream. Seated across from him, and dancing with him between courses, would be his girlfriend, Miss Valina P. Hurst, also of Staten Island. He had planned to marry her but didn’t get around to it before “the Japs busted my marriage up.” He was planning to rectify that once he got home. The story ended: “Jerry would like Miss Hurst and his parents to know that he is feeling fine and he would like the rest of the United States to know that he and his colleagues are fully confident that they can dispose of the Japanese if supplies and planes keep coming this way.” The Times went all out on the story. Editors sent a reporter to Crosson’s father’s house and another to Miss Hurst’s house, where she was found dressed in a new Easter ensemble of powder blue. At first she thought the reporter on her doorstep was a neighbor’s joke, but then she realized it was for real. She said she was sure her fiancé would “come back and we’ll have our evening.” The Rainbow Room was contacted and said it would be delighted to serve the couple, gratis, and the chef, Frederic Beaumont, said he personally would attend to the trout. The editors put the story on page one and splashed photos inside.

  I turned to the end of the scrapbook. There was Barney’s obit and the accompanying photo, one I had seen scores of times. He stood tall in his uniform, staring into the camera with a jaunty smile, his hands clasped behind his back, his cap at a roguish angle. On the following page came his last story, printed posthumously. He described the lives of the correspondents in the Pacific and compared the conditions they endured with those of the correspondents in the Great War—an assignment, I surmised, that had been dreamt up by the Times Magazine editor back home.

  I envisioned him at the correspondents’ hut in Port Moresby, gamely deciding to write the damn thing. Maybe it was a certain “let’s get it over with” attitude, or maybe it was the topic—a personal recollection demanding the use of the pronoun I—but his writing seemed to open up and soar as he looked to a future when the peace would have been won and the soldiers would return home.

  Typically when he wrote a story or a letter home, as I came to learn from letters from his colleagues, he took his typewriter out on the veranda or under a tree. That was probably what he had done this time. The flies were buzzing around in the hot sun and so he decided to put them in his story. He typed: “SOMEWHERE IN NEW GUINEA,” then:

  If the flies will please get off my arms and out of my mouth and eyes, I will write a little article comparing the job of war correspondent in this war and in the last one. In the last war I was not a correspondent, but I saw some in France. It was pretty near the front, too. They were accompanying an eminent visitor.…

  It was near the Ourcq River where there had just been some trouble. Company B was lying in the shelter of a low ridge. Members were somewhat battle-shocked, very hungry and very dirty. And they knew they were soon to go over that ridge where more trouble awaited them. These war correspondents came along, looking very clean and well fed and asking a lot of questions. You took one look at them and knew there wasn’t a cootie among them. You disliked them.

  One difference between war correspondents in the last war and this war is that this time I don’t dislike correspondents. I hope the soldiers don’t.

  He described the mundane details of everyday life. The correspondents had it better than the soldiers, he said, because they had a shower—an open-air pole attached to a bacon tin with holes punched in the bottom and connected to a hose. He talked about hitching rides in planes, the difficulties in transmitting copy, and the godsend of a fifteen-hour time difference in meeting deadlines. He also dealt with army press relations and the censors, for whom he uncharacteristically expressed sympathy.

  A man who has spent his life in newspaper work is apt to believe that in the long run the best thing to do is to tell the truth. If the truth hurts enough, the necessary corrective will be automatically generated. Military training is likely to produce a different point of view—the attitude that the best possible face must be put on things.… All of which makes operations difficult for those who have to carry out the general principles laid down by their chief.

  Finally, he spoke of a new sense of optimism in New Guinea—a great change from when he had first arrived—and of the resolve of the airmen. He said that there were more American planes and fewer enemy attacks. Calling upon his own experience, he said the mood felt like the midsummer of 1918, when the Americans had pushed the Germans out of the Marne. But there was a big difference—in the attitude of those doing the fighting.

  The correspondent in this war, unlike his predecessor of twenty-five years ago, can find manifold evidence that the victory will be well used. Young men who are doing our fighting are, to a surprising extent, thinking about the war’s end not only in terms of getting back home to their wives and
sweethearts and getting away from danger and discomfort. They are thinking also in terms of what kind of world we shall have after peace comes. They are thinking realistically. Above all, they want the United States to be kept strong on land and sea.

  The politician who preaches “normalcy” at the end of this war will find some hard-headed opposition. He will find these men assured and matured beyond their years.… He will find that they want, not national escape to irresponsibility, but peacetime compulsory military service for youths now growing up.… He will find a greater love of peace than ever and with a realization that peace is not automatic but must be secured.

  These I believe are the views of the fighting men. I do not think a correspondent in 1917–19 could have found this realistic thinking about the future among our men in France. I know there was none of it in B Company. We wanted only to get it over with, to get home and forget there ever had been a war. It is stirring to see this change in attitude. It makes the dust all right, the flies all right, the heat all right.

  A man can climb the high hill near the airdrome just up the road and watch the bombers and fighters go forth. He can see the yellow bombs being loaded in their racks. He can see maintenance men keeping the strips in shape and chow trucks bearing food to pea-shooter pilots on the alert. He can see ambulances rush up to home-coming planes.

  From the high hill near the airdrome a man can see his countrymen building with blood, sweat and toil the firm resolution that their sons shall not die under bombs, but shall have peace, because they will know how to preserve the peace.

  I had grown up reading and rereading this particular story and listening to the tales my mother told me about my father. They helped form my early ideas about war and peace and about journalism and the indispensable service it provides to a democracy.

  In trying to re-create Barney’s life in Australia and New Guinea, I had a number of letters written by correspondents to my mother and later to my brother and me. First among them was a fifteen-page, single-spaced letter written four months after his death by Carleton “Bill” Kent of the Chicago Daily Times. A lanky midwesterner with an easygoing manner and a finely hewn sense of humor, Kent was among the fifteen reporters, photographers, and cameramen who shipped out on the SS Monterey, a cruise ship converted to a troop carrier, on February 18, 1942. They were informed only that they were bound for somewhere in the Pacific. There was little to do for eighteen days, and the boredom was killing. Like correspondents on downtime everywhere, they turned to alcohol and high jinks. Kent recounts “the great election for boat drill warden.” Told they needed a leader to organize an evacuation that might follow an enemy torpedo, they asked Barney to take the position, but he declined. A draft-Darnton movement exploded: Votes were purchased with whiskey, coalitions formed, and posters cropped up everywhere, exhorting ballots for Daruton, Darnton, Darnley, Dalton, Darnkampf (his name had been misspelled in the ship’s paper). DARNTON FOR DOG CATCHER, one said. Another: DARNLEY THE RAIL SPLITTER. HIS BOOTS ARE BIG ENOUGH. Moments before the polls were to open, the organizers of the draft-Darnton faction retired to a stateroom in a celebratory mood, sure that Darnton couldn’t come up with enough votes for anyone else to forestall his election.

  “We were pretty smug,” Kent recalled, “waiting for the electorate’s voice to begin bellowing for Darnkampf. But Darnton was game. In on our smugness swirled a sinister figure, cloaked in an army raincoat and wearing a handkerchief mask to cover his up-sweeping mustache. He handed over a letter, urging us to whisper to each of ten friends the information enclosed, and crept out, chuckling hideously. The letter urged all right-minded men to vote against Darnton.” Among other things, he was rumored to be “Roman Catholic and unpalatable to the farm vote.” The ugly whisper campaign failed: Barney was elected by a landslide. And when the drills were held, things turned serious. He insisted that the correspondents, who stood last in the order to reach the boat deck, move quickly and in an orderly fashion. “We developed precision, probably for the first time in our lives,” recalled Kent. “We weren’t allowed to dawdle over our aperitifs.”

  After a violent gale, the Monterey put in at Brisbane, and the correspondents had their first encounter with military obstructionism. The base commander informed them they were prohibited from writing about the convoy, visiting military installations, or filing stories of any kind. This was a blow to all of them, but especially to Barney, since he had found a B-17 pilot willing to take him and several others to Darwin to write about the damage there from a Japanese bombing raid. The trip was vetoed. They were ordered to Melbourne, but red tape delayed their departure. “We made febrile, slightly alcoholic tours of the city,” wrote Kent. “Mostly we stayed in our almost elegant apartments, vying with each other in sports like seeing who could lift the heaviest highball. The drinking on the way over had been a little crude.… Darnton wanted to get back on a firm foundation. But although his ingredients were pretty decent and his proportions perfect, the martinis were never very good. They tasted as if someone had soaked lead pencils in them. He was bitterly disappointed. Later I found out why they never appealed to him. I think that a few shakes of nostalgia had been added as a denaturing agent.”

  Eventually, they made their way to Melbourne, headquarters of the Australian armed forces and the small contingent of American troops. They ran into bewildering rules for multiple credentials and blanket restrictions on filing just about anything. But on March 17, a big story broke: General MacArthur had slipped through enemy lines in the Philippines, arrived in a Flying Fortress near Darwin, and was making his way south. The news was embargoed, but it was too big to contain and slipped out. Three days later, the general arrived in Adelaide, stepping out onto the station platform to deliver his now-famous statement: “I came through and I shall return.” Only a single foreign reporter, from United Press, was there to hear it. The others, including Barney, 480 miles away in Melbourne, were forced to lift the text from the afternoon Melbourne Herald because the army neglected to give it out.

  MacArthur’s arrival inspired hopes in the press corps that their filing headaches might end, but they got worse. The general’s top public-relations man, Lt. Col. LeGrande A. Diller, instituted draconian censorship. A daily communiqué contained little military information and a lot of puffery. In early April Barney pulled Kent aside and proposed a partnership to hitch rides to the American air bases up north and see how the war was going from there. Kent accepted the deal with alacrity. “I came to life,” he wrote. “Here was a sturdy oak for my ivy-like tendrils.” They grabbed a commercial flight to Townsville, on Queensland’s northeastern coast, which was serving as a base for bombers striking Rabaul and other Japanese strongholds. En route, the plane had to overnight in Brisbane. At dawn they were informed at the airport that there was a seat for only one; silently, they dug in their pockets for a couple of shillings and flipped them. Barney won.

  Kent described what happened next:

  But as I started to drag myself out of the office and back to the hotel, Barney went into action. I heard him screaming to the youth behind the desk that it was absolutely imperative that both Mr. Kent and himself get to Townsville that same day. We had obtained our tickets in Melbourne on the highest type of military priority—a priority so high and mighty that he couldn’t reveal the source of it to a civilian—and there would be hell to pay over this in government circles. Finally the bewildered boy said he thought he could cram both of us on the plane, but would have to take off our luggage and send it up the next day. Barney agreed to that readily, in the office. But when we got out to the airdrome, he began storming, his face dark with rage and flecked with foam. The agent in charge yielded, and Darnton and Kent and their luggage, excessively heavy, were flown to Townsville. From that day on, I felt about Darnton like the B-17 radio gunner who told us how his Fortress fought off 15 Zeros in a 45-minute melee over the New Guinea mountains. He pointed at the pilot, Maury Horgan, and said, “When the war’s over I’m going to do two thi
ngs—buy all the Boeing stock I can get, and follow Captain Horgan around like a dog.” Only I didn’t want to buy Times stock.

  In Townsville, they stayed at a grim hotel, summoned to dreadful meals by the cook, who would stand on the back stoop, smashing a hammer against a steel pan. But they were the only two American correspondents, and the pickings were good. They talked a lot about their wives. One night they both decided to write home, dragging their typewriters downstairs and setting them up on opposite sides of a table. They started in. “That is, Barney did,” Kent wrote. “I sat there for 45 minutes, making false start after false start. I got frantic. I tore up every sheet of paper after getting a driveling paragraph onto it. And Barney sat there, swiftly and surely beating out page after page to you, knowing what he wanted to say and how to say it. I despised the man.”

  In the cool evenings, they’d sit around talking endlessly about what they’d eat and drink when they returned to civilization. “Barney talked a lot about martinis. He used to tell me about his middle-of-the-week days off in Westport—how he would get up late, eat a big breakfast, and loll around the house until the gloaming. ‘Then Tootie would go out in the kitchen and stir up a batch of martinis. The pleasantest sound I can imagine right now would be to hear the ice hitting the sides of the mixing glass out in that kitchen.’ Long pause. ‘They were always just right. I know that, generally, women aren’t any good at mixing drinks. But let me tell you, Mister, Tootie can make the best martini in the world.’ ”

  Being away from general headquarters meant more freedom in reporting, but it had its perils. Following a tip, Barney and Kent hitched a ride on an observation plane to Charters Towers, an old gold-mining town, where they came up with an important exclusive—interviewing B-25 pilots who had just returned from the first bombing raid on the Philippines. The raid was led by Maj. Gen. Ralph Royce. They filled their notebooks and wrote lengthy dispatches, but by this time it was late. They woke up the town postmaster, bribed him to arouse the telegraphers, bribed them to open their wires, and sent the stories through. They retired for the night, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done. Days later, they discovered that General Royce had flown from the Philippines straight to Melbourne, where the news was released to the forty or fifty correspondents. Their own dispatches had been intentionally held up and limped into their home offices some seventeen hours later. “We realized that MacArthur’s headquarters always was going to beat us on major spot news breaks,” Kent wrote. “Even if we got it first, our stories would be held up in favor of a mass release at GHQ, where the good general could be assured of a large and good press.”