The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan by Steven Casey

Author:Steven Casey [Casey, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, military, World War II, United States, 20th Century, World, Language Arts & Disciplines, journalism
ISBN: 9780190053635
Google: pzoqEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-07-15T20:31:35.485030+00:00

Fig. 9.2. Tillman Durdin of the New York Times (right) sheltering from Japanese fire on the Myitkyina airstrip, May 19, 1944, with his typewriter close at hand. Private collection.

As the rain poured, the siege continued. When attacks by inexperienced Chinese troops petered out against strong Japanese positions, Stilwell desperately hunted around for any American reinforcements, pressganging into action not only support units in the rear but even a number of ill and exhausted Marauders in convalescent camps. The response came close to outright mutiny. Embittered troops called Stilwell “bloodless and cold-hearted, without a drop of human kindness.” At least one openly contemplated what would later be known as “fragging.” “I had him in my sights,” boasted an enlisted man. “I coulda squeezed one off and no one woulda known it wasn’t a Jap that got that son-of-a-bitch.”68

Such sentiments had the potential to inflict enormous damage on Stilwell’s hard-earned reputation if they made it into print, a prospect that became more likely when the media flew its own reinforcements into Myitkyina. Toby Wiant was one such “pinch hitter.” The UP man had last seen Burma in early April, when he had departed “with a terrific stomachache and slight fever.” His first reaction on his return was fear: the airstrip, he noted, was even more dangerous than the jungle had been, with incoming fire bursting all around. His second sensation was frustration at the difficulty of telling this story. “At Kandy,” he observed, “we had fast communications—only an hour and a half on urgent stuff to NYC, not more than four hours on stories at the regular press rates. . . . Here in the jungle,” by contrast, “communications are slow and unreliable. . . . On the average, it takes 12 hours for one of my stories to reach Delhi; an hour or so to go through censorship there; and 12 additional hours to reach NYC.”69

These delays at least gave Stilwell some time to control the story, as Jack Bell found to his cost. Bell had been a machine-gunner in the last war, when his bravery had resulted in the award of the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre. After many years as a sports reporter for the Miami Herald, he had created the “Town Crier” column in 1941 as a “place where appeals were made for all sorts of items for service men.”70 At Myitkyina, Bell’s concern for the well-being of the fighting man led him to compose a particularly incendiary dispatch. The replacements Stilwell had thrown into action, he wrote, were

not a well-trained infantry outfit fully equipped, but an assortment of cooks, quartermaster men, artillery men, signal corps men, band men, and some infantry men from one division. They tell, and bitterly, too, how they were herded onto the ship, not knowing who their officers were with no semblance of organization. . . . They got off planes at Myitkyina with Jap snipers and machine gunners everywhere—and many of them didn’t know how to put a clip of shells into a rifle.

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