When the Japanese hit in the Pacific, wire services were better prepared for war than was the rest of the nation. The Associated Press had gradually increased its foreign staff to a point where experienced men were ready when the United States entered into actual hostilities. These foreign correspondents became our war correspondents.

D. Witt Hancock

In December 1941 D. Witt Hancock was Associated Press bureau chief at Karachi, India. Following the declaration of war, he started preparing for duty with combat forces in the Pacific.

In January 1942 Hancock was ordered by AP to proceed to the Dutch East Indies-if his health permitted. Hancock was a tall, lean, dark-eyed veteran correspondent. But he should have come home instead of going off to the war-ravaged tropics because he was afflicted with diabetes. His life depended on three insulin injections daily. The Associated Press took this into consideration when ordering him to various assignments. Hancock had been on foreign duty since 1936 and had seen the world catch fire with all the fury of total war. He had witnessed preparations for war in England and Russia. Up until the first month in 1942, he unhappily felt that he had skirted the war areas. When the United States became a participant, he was destined by his own zeal to be on the spot for news.

Hancock had been accompanied by his strikingly beautiful British wife for the last two and one half years. She was now in Calcutta awaiting boat transportation to Australia. After Witt left Calcutta in January 1942 for the Indies, Mrs. Hancock remained there for three weeks without word of him. Witt finally managed to contact her by telephoning the New York AP by way of Australia; New York then cabled her through London. He wanted her to return to America because of the explosive situation in the Near East.(2)

Before her departure, she learned of the bombing of Rangoon and Japanese air action throughout Asia. In February 1942 she boarded the S.S. Manhattan (U.S.S. Wakefield) in Bombay for America. She arrived in New York after 32 days at sea with no news of the war's progress. She immediately checked with New York AP and learned that Witt was missing. Then began a long vigil, for her correspondent husband was not officially declared dead until four years later.

Witt Hancock drowned in the sinking of an evacuation ship off Java after it was strafed by a Japanese fighter plane. He is believed to have been shot before going down with the Poelau Bras, a Dutch freighter. William H. McDougall, Jr. of United Press was aboard with Hancock at the time.

Hancock embarked on a newspaper career during his high school days in Bluefield, West Virginia where he grew up with eight brothers.

He reported local sports events for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He later attended Davidson College in North Carolina where he edited the school yearbook, Scrips and Cranks. He was an outstanding student and demonstrated early the writing ability that was later to earn him exciting assignments all over the world for AP. He was a member of Sigma Upsilon, honorary literary fraternity; Omicron Delta Kappa, leadership fraternity; and Kappa Alpha, social fraternity.

Following graduation, Hancock worked on The State, a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina; the Hickory (N.C.) Record; the Henderson (N.C.) Dispatch; and in 1929 he joined the Associated Press at Raleigh, North Carolina. Hancock was anxious to go abroad, and after training on the AP foreign desk in New York, he was sent to England in 1936. In addition to covering Great Britain's most famous address, No. 10 Downing Street, he managed to take a wife in London. In 1939 he married blond and blue-eyed Doreen Peck, a professional model and fashion designer.(3)

After much diplomatic maneuvering in London, New York, Washington and the Soviet capital, Witt Hancock managed to get a visa to Moscow in August 1939. He arrived on the 17th of that month, and the next day he covered the biggest assignment of his life to date. As the youngest bureau chief in Moscow, he was on hand for the signing of the Russian-German aliance at the Kremlin. Witt had a keen sense of international news concepts. When the full text of the Russian pact with Hitler was distributed, he quickly noted that the usual "escape" clauses were missing. He reported such in his dispatch. From Moscow on August 24, 1939, after an "official delay," Hancock filed the following report to the world:

Moscow, Aug. 24 -- (AP) Germany and Soviet Russia early today signed a non-agression pact binding each of them for ten years not to "associate itself with any other grouping of powers which directly or indirectly is aimed at the other party."

By the pact they also agreed to "constantly remain in consultation with one another" on their common interests, to adjust differences by arbitration.

The pact did not include the usual escape clause providing for denunciation in case one of the contracting powers attacked a third power. This provision has been written into most non-agression agreements signed in the past by Moscow.

The non-agression clauses bind each power to refrain from any act of force against the other and to refrain from supporting any third party which might engage in war-like acts against either of the signatories.

In the 13 months as Moscow's AP chief, Witt Hancock managed to be on hand for the major news breaks of the Russian "expansion" program. He brought to the outside world news of the Russian invasion of Finland, its march into Poland, and its "liberation" of Estonia-Latvia. Russia was still a deep mystery to most of the world, and the Russians capitalized on that fact.

Hancock and his wife learned that foreign correspondents were ranked one notch above first secretaries at embassies in priority. The Communists had learned the full impact that favorable publicity could have on the outside world and took care to see that newspapermen received the best of accommodations and service while stationed in Moscow. The Russians wanted either good publicity or no publicity at all. Consequently, expulsion of foreign correspondents was common in those critical days.

Witt became ill while in Moscow. Russian doctors diagnosed his ailment to be diabetes. Mrs. Hancock praised the Russian medics for their excellent handling of her husband. She attributed their extra precaution to the fact that they considered him a VIP.

The official blessings for entrance into Russia had taken 10 weeks to obtain. When the Hancocks wanted to leave for Turkey, Soviet red tape held them up for another eight. Before leaving, Witt burned all his papers, including story carbons and records. This was done in order to relive his AP replacement from any possible responsibility for past stories signed by Hancock. The Russian NKVD secret police asserted and practiced the right to enter the office at any time to search.

When the exit visas appeared to be stymied, Ambassador Steinhardt made a trade with the Russians who wanted to send a Russian choir to America for a concert tour. In a matter of hours he was responsible for the foreign office granting the Hancocks the right to leave.

Witt and Mrs. Hancock did not travel to Turkey together. He went first. She followed on a Finnish boat, and when the war broke out, she was caught on the high seas by Germans. Because she was a British subject, she was almost interned at Copenhagen, Denmark as an enemy alien. However, aboard ship the Finnish purser hid her passport when a German official inspected the ship's papers. She advisedly remained silent to conceal her accent, and she stood among several Finnish girls who were also aboard topside. With a scarf over her head in latest Finish fashion, Mrs. Hancock was able to run the Nazi gauntlet and join her husband in Istanbul.

Hancock headed the AP office in Turkey from September 1940 through July 1941. From there he went to Karachi, India and was parted from his wife at Calcutta in January 1942. From Calcutta, he flew by KLM Dutch Airlines to Akyab, Burma and on to Sumatra and Batavia.

The Japanese were stepping up bombing operations over free China, and they hit Rangoon hard. They were starting to concentrate air and sea operations throughout the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch were razing their rich holdings in Java rather than leave them to the enemy. American and British oil interests moved personnel to safer ground, essentially all that remained were Dutch personnel and certain non-combatants who only evacuated at the last minute. Included in this latter category were the only two American newspapermen in the area, William McDougall of United Press and Witt Hancock.

Both men boarded the 10,000 ton Netherlands line luxury freighter, Poelau Bras, on March 6, 1942 at Wijnkoops Bay in Soputh Java. After a sleepless night on the Indian Sea, dawn broke to the echo of prayers from the passengers and Dutch crew. Only time and speed could take them beyond the range of the Japanese fighter planes operating over Java and Sumatra.

At nine o'clock in the morning of March 6, a single engine Japanese reconnaissance plane circled low over the Poelau Bras and headed for the mainland. In two hours, the Poelau Bras would be out of range of the land-based airplanes.

At the eleventh hour, three Japanese dive bombers came in on the bow. Three more approached the stern, and three on the port side. In waves of three, they screamed their small bombs(4) into the deck and superstructure. According to McDougall(5) the 14 minutes that followed seemed like 200 years. The salvos were not powerful enough to sink the ship quickly, only to cripple it. After the life-jacketed passengers had jumped into the sea, the Japanese returned to machine-gun survivors. McDougall swam for hours before the one remaining life boat fished him out of the water. During that time McDougall saw Hancock for one fleeting moment on the forecastle. He remembered shouting for him to jump. He didn't. Witt was hit by machine gun fire before the ship sank. Witt Hancock's death marked the first loss of an American correspondent since the United States officially entered the war.

Melville Jacoby-Died April 29, 1942

Melville Jacoby

In his few months with the American forces, Melville Jacoby saw more than his share of war. First, he witnessed China's plight when that nation was in a death-grip with Japan. Following his graduation from Stanford University in 1937, (6) he became an exchange student at Lingnan University in Canton, China. Remaining in Chungking to work for the Chinese Ministry of Information, he later served as commentator for NBC and as correspondent for United Press. In June 1941 he became Time Incorporated's correspondent at Chungking. Time transferred him to Manila in October 1941. The next month he married Annalee Whitmore. (7)

When the Japanese occupied all of the Philippines, the Jacobys withdrew with the fighting forces and set up headquarters in Australia. Mel later covered the MacArthur withdrawal from Corregidor. In Australia he wrote about the defensive war and mentally prepared to see it to the end.

Melville Jacoby died at the age of 25. By then he was already considered a veteran correspondent in the young Pacific war.

Before Manila fell, as a Philippine corespondent for Life and Time, Jacoby followed the army to Corregidor. From there he followed General Douglas MacArthur and his troops onto the Bataan Peninsula where he covered the last days of American action in that sector. Limited wireless facilities prevented him from filing detailed stories, but those he did send out were the most vivid read by the American public.

This was late in January 1942. American troops were outnumbered six to one by the Japanese. Bataan was a mountainous, heavily wooded peninsula ill-adapted to mechanized warfare. It was from this vantage point that Jacoby filed the classics of World War II.

In the February 9, 1942 edition of Life magazine, Jacoby signed "The Battle of Bataan" story in which he described the makeshift war then being fought. He described the gradual advance of the Japanese through the jungle. Jacoby wrote:

The paramount topic is guessing when help will arrive, betting on when they will return to Manila. The men have seen action and tell plenty of stories about the Japanese: how, across the barbed wire on the firing line, the Nipponese dead are piled high. They say the stench of rotting bodies is terrific, though the Japanese have been removing their dead by the truckload, taking them to Manila where they have taken over all the morgues.

Our men show light wounds from the light-caliber Japanese rifles. One sergeant who was shot through the neck, the bullet coming out the other side, merely put Band-Aids on each side and continued fighting. Another tells how a shell fragment hit him square in the seat of the pants, knocking him face down in the dirt but not injuring him. The men like to repeat stories of unusual nature which pass up and down the lines.

Jacoby's story abruptly ended there, possibly because of transmission difficulties.

In telling about Melville Jacoby, it is necessary to quote extensively from his few stories coming out of Bataan. Jacoby died a young man, but in his last few weeks of life, he produced stories considered among the finest to come out of World War II.

Taking Care of the Wounded in the Bataan Front was a story signed by Jacoby and datelined Corregidor, February 6, 1942. It contained the personal warmth that he was known to incorporate into his writing.

The Herculean task of moving MacArthur's forces to Bataan is best told in a story of the Medical Corps under Colonel Webb E. Cooper. Establishing base hospitals in the thick, malaria-infested jungles meant bulldozing through two and one half miles of tangled brush, blasting trees out of their path, working while dive bombers were operating overhead. It meant having engineers install light plants and build water chlorinators. It even meant changing the course of the river which runs through one hospital. Besides the construction work for these base hospitals, there is the search for enough tents to cover the patients when the rainy season begins, and the problems of transporting the limited quantities of medical supplies and tinned foods and even of milling rice by hand. I see nurses sleeping, unsheltered except for trees, with foxholes by their beds, washing their own overalls, bathing in streams, yet very cheerful when working among patients.

Old Lucky Strike cartons, a badly battered Packard sedan and a small radio, around the open air hospital, are remindful of America's gilded luxuries. It gives me a strange feeling of unreality seeing wounded Americans who do not have access to our highly developed x-ray machines, serums and vaccines. It is even more unreal to calculate the number of modern stoves in America and then see every two wood stoves in the Bataan jungles feeding more than one thousand twice daily.

Contained in this same story of hard-struck Bataan was a reminder about those who had sold manufactured goods to the Japanese in pre-Pearl Harbor years. Jacoby described how doctors had a habit of paying the Red Cross five dollars every time they failed to find a bullet when they probed wounds. He wrote, ". . . they also bet on the type of shrapnel they will find in wounds. They have already found parts of Fords and various other metal parts, including nuts and bolts, all made in the U.S. They have even extracted a Singer sewing machine screwdriver from one soldier."

Jacoby reported that sickness became as dangerous as the enemy. Every day the men expected to see the American fleet come to their rescue. Brief reports of successful action elsewhere filtered through to give them hope of support. For example, he wrote, ". . . everyone was cheered by the news of the Makassar naval battle." The Battle of Makassar Strait took place between Borneo and Celebes. It was here that the Japanese suffered their first sea setback when American and Dutch air and naval forces attacked from Dutch bases.

In Life magazine of March 16, 1942, Jacoby reported that the entire "Battle of the Philippines has been up to individuals." He educated America about some of the now-legendary heroes who fought there. He explained how Brig. General H. J. (Pat) Casey of New York seemed able to accomplish almost anything asked of him. General Casey had come to the Philippines at the personal request of General MacArthur. He was known to recruit civilians for demolition work when he was short of military personnel. Jacoby wrote, "Casey's men fight, build roads and pack trails, repair barbed wire and make whiskey from rice in their spare time." Casey was just one of the characters Jacoby helped immortalize by recording his deeds in print.

Many of the men who fought for MacArthur were in their late teens and had arrived in the Pacific without any training. Many arrived during the Christmas holidays. Jacoby stayed with these troops, these boys who were fighting their first war and doing it with their backs to the sea. During those early and critical days on Bataan, Jacoby wrote that our men were fighting on courage alone.

Jacoby also wrote with praise about the Philippine Scouts. He said that as far as fighting tactics were concerned, the Filipino Scouts presented the most formidable match for the Japanese.

They knew how to use their rifles and bayonets, but prefer the latter. The Scouts' American officers are best typified by the now-legendary "one-man army" of Captain Arthur W. Wermuth. Wermuth, credited with more than 100 snipers, is husky, tall, bow-legged from early ranch life when he used to break horses and hunt. Adventurous, he once got in a jam running guns to South America, likes whiskey and has a big collection of Jap trophies. On one raid Wermuth spotted three pack horses of which the Scout with him said: "Sir, those are not Calesa horses, they're too fat." Wermuth ambled over, found them to be cavalry horses, turned them loose and sent them running with a rump slap. A few minutes later three Jap cavalrymen rose up. Wermuth, waiting, shot them and took the horses and equipment." (8)

Jacoby wrote that Wermuth was like an enthusiastic football player called out of a crucial game who pleads, "Put me in again, coach."

In the March 30, 1942 issue of Life magazine, Melville Jacoby wrote his farewell to Bataan, his final report on MacArthur's men on the Philippine front. This was the first report on the fate of Don Bell, a correspondent who had been on the Japanese blacklist for years because of his radio blasts from Manila. Jacoby wrote, "The details of Don Bell's death that have circulated suggest that he was tortured by the Japs who used cigarette butts on his skin and then finished him off with a bayonet. . . . Bell had been telling the truth too long for the Japanese."

Jacoby and his wife left the "rock" of Corregidor by boat. Melville brought back to civilization initial reports of Japanese butchers taking over Manila. Those stories will serve as useful refreshers for men who tend to romanticize war.

In his last cable from the Philippines, Jacoby appropriately concluded his story with the following impressions:

...we have seen MacArthur's men fighting. We carry a last picture of the General himself, tall, determined, neat, leaping from his desk like a man of 30, clapping a fellow officer on the back who had done well, pacing incessantly, sending his men from him inspired by his rolling flow of words spoken in a low emotional voice."

In the cold bleak dawn of April 29, 1942, Melville Jacoby was preparing to board an American transport plane at a secret Australian airfield. He had just completed his coverage of the Bataan air force headquarters of Brig. General Harold H. George. Now he was accompanying the general on an inspection trip to the northern Australian front where several American units were setting up defensive air bases.

Jacoby and General George were standing with other khaki-clad personnel when a fighter plane went out of control on take off and crashed into the group. Jacoby was killed instantly; George died later in the field hospital.

In the War Department communique announcing Jacoby's death, General MacArthur wrote, "Melville Jacoby covered the Philippine campaign with efficiency and devotion, and fulfilled completely his obligations, both to the public press and to the military forces. He could well have served as a model for war correspondents at the front."

Byron Darnton-Died October 18, 1942

Byron Darton

Like many war correspondents, Byron Darnton of The New York Times trained to cover World War II with the same vigor that many soldiers trained to fight in it.

When The Times did not have him on some roving assignment, Darnton was writing about workers training for defense industry jobs in 1939 and 1940. When thousands of migrant workers headed for defense centers, Darnton was assigned by The Times to do a story on housing conditions there. Between research trips on this assignment, he travelled to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to cover the devastating spring flood that hit that community. He also covered the American Legion Convention in Milwaukee the following year.

When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, Darnton was hardly able to leave his desk. In addition to regular news duties, he was then engrossed in preparing and promoting a radio news broadcast presented by The Times. He is credited with doing most of the pioneer work on this program.

During the critical months prior to the United States' entry into the war, Darnton confided to his friends that he felt it was only a matter of time before we were also doing battle with Hitler. He had written extensively about the long debate between interventionists and isolationists in the United States. When war came, he wanted to do his part. Consequently, he requested that he be sent abroad as a war correspondent. The opportunity to do so came in February 1942 when he was ordered to Australia. He was among the first group of American correspondents to leave by convoy for the Pacific front. While en route, fourteen newsmen elected him their official "life boat drill leader" after a campaign and mock election. Crude signs of "Darnton for Dog Catcher" appeared aboard ship. But this was all in fun, for in truth Darnton was popular among his fellow correspondents. They nicknamed him "Barney." The unfailing wit that marked his casual conversation was also injected into his reporting.

At first opportunity he made his was from Australia to advaced bases in New Guinea. He was on of the first correspondents to hit the islands, and in July 1942 he underwent his first Japanese air raid. He wrote a characteristically amusing account of how he had jumped for a slit trench when the raiders appeared and in doing so embedded his knee in the back of a Brooklyn private. Darnton wrote other amusing anecdotes while at the New Guinea front. For instance, he once remarked upon the size of area mosquitos by quoting a gasoline truck attendant at the airdrome as saying: "I put forty gallons of gas in one the other day before I realized it was a mosquito, not an Airocobra."

Darnton was prepared to follow the American troops back to the Philippines and on to Japan when he was killed accidently at an advanced operational base in New Guinea on October 18, 1942.

Byron Darnton was born in Adrian, Michigan on November 8, 1897. While in high school in that town, he once visited his uncle's home in New York City. The uncle, Charles Darnton, was then drama critic for Pulitzer's Evening World. This experience generated the germ of interest in a newspaper career. He saw the big city sights and paid his first visit to the inside of a newspaper office. He later told friends that he never lost the itch for a newspaperman's life after that brief encounter.

When he finished high school in 1917, the United States entered World War I. Darnton immediately joined the Michigan National Guard. He went to France in January 1918 as a member of the Red Arrow Division. His outfit remained at the front from May until November of that year. They all saw plenty of hard fighting. It was his Division that first set foot on German soil at Alsace in May 1918. He participated in battles of the Oise, the Aisne, the Meuse-Argonne, and the attack on the Kriemhilde-Stellunlg line.

Rising from private to line sergeant, he was selected for officers' training just before the armistice. The war's end stopped his training, but while en route to the United States, his commission as second lieutenant caught up with him.

After receiving his discharge from the service, Darnton entered the University of Michigan. There he edited the college newspaper and joined Sigma Phi fraternity. After two years he left college with a friend and revisited the battlefields of France and Germany on which he had fought. Upon returning to the States, he landed his first newspaper job as a reporter on the Sandusky (Ohio) Herald.

On year later he moved on to The Baltimore Sun. While a staff member of that paper, he also found time to contribute several short stories to the old Smart Set magazine. Henry L. Mencken was an editor. Mr. Mencken thought so highly of the young writer that he tried to persuade Darnton to take up fiction writing as a career. The life of a reporter was in Darnton's blood, however, and he chose to remain in that profession.

For a short time Darnton worked for The Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. While in the Quaker City, a prominent advertising agency offered him a very large salary to leave the Fourth Estate. After just three weeks away he quit his new job in disgust and returned to reporting, determined never again to stray from his preferred newspaper career.

Darnton began to work on the copy desk of The New York Post in 1925. Later he was moved to its rewrite desk where his ability quickly won him the admiration of his colleagues. They called him "the All-American rewrite man," and the title stuck. His first major assignment for The Post was to cover both party conventions in 1928.

Darnton's familiarity with foreign news was first acquired when he joined the Associated Press as day cable editor in 1930. Later he was promoted to city editor for the New York bureau of AP. He joined the news staff of The New York Times on April 30, 1934. His thorough knowledge of foreign news developments made him a natural choice for the man who should establish the Review of The Week section of The Times. However, after serving a term as an assistant Sunday editor, he returned to local news coverage in the fall of 1939. His deep-rooted love was for straight news, not for a review of "old" news. In 1940 he started his roving assignments for The Times. These were to take him all over the United States and on to cover the Pacific forces in battle.

Darnton was married to the former Eleanor Choate in April 1938. They had two sons, Robert Choate Darnton and John Townsend Darnton.

General MacArthur had been impressed with Darnton from his first meeting with The Times correspondent. He later related how gratified he was by Darnton's comprehensive grasp of the battle situation. Early in 1942 the two had discussed the approaching offensive war at a Port Moresby news conference. When Byron Darnton died in New Guinea, General MacArthur personally reported the accident to The New York Times and to Mrs. Darnton.