Newseum War Stories: An Essay by Harry Evans
The War Correspondent
History
turned on the success of the invasion, but the scene on the beach was
desperate. The ships could not get close enough to put the soldiers ashore.
Hands full and weighed down by the heavy burden of their arms, the soldiers
had to simultaneously jump from the ships, get a footing in chest-deep
waves, and fight the enemy, who, standing unencumbered on dry and familiar
ground, could so easily kill and maim the invaders.
The war
correspondent reporting the scene in those terms observed: "These
perils frightened our soldiers, who were quite unaccustomed to battles
of this kind, with the result that they did not show the same alacrity
and enthusiasm as they usually did on dry land."
The candor
may strike an odd note. In the mythology of war, our men are never beset
by elemental fear, still less paralyzed by it. The lexicon of defeat,
if it has to be admitted, is of gallant retreats against overwhelming
odds. But the war correspondent writing the story of the battle on that
beach was uninhibited. He faced none of the frustrations and dilemmas
of the modern war correspondent because he was taking part in the battle
himself, as the commanding general of the invasion of Britain in the year
55 B.C.
Julius
Caesar is one of a very long line of soldiers who reported their own campaigns
firsthand. Thucydides was a military officer and his "History of
the Peloponnesian War" was informed by his experience in command
of the Greek fleet at Thasos in 424 B.C. and his defeat by the Spartan
general Brasidas. The professional independent war correspondent, the
unarmed civilian whose pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword,
does not arrive on the scene until the Crimean War (1853-55) in the persons
of William "Billy" Howard Russell of The Times of London,
Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the London Daily News and G.L. Gruneisen
of the Morning Post. So it is as well to acknowledge that our perennial
appetite for news of war has been served by "amateurs" from
time immemorial, in oral history, in poem and song, in legend and myth,
in drawing and painting and tapestry.
We know
how English axmen cut down the Norman armored knights at the Battle of
Hastings in 1066, and how King Harold died on Senlac Hill with an arrow
in his eye, because it is all recorded on the Bayeux Tapestry. Mark Kellogg,
a Western free-lance newspaper reporter, set out to tell us what happened
on the morning of June 26, 1876, on a hill at Little Bighorn in Montana.
"By the time this reaches you we will have met and fought the red
devils with what result remains to be seen," he wrote from Rosebud
Creek the day before. "I go with [Lt. Col. George] Custer and will
be at the death." And indeed he did die with the dashing officer
who had disobeyed orders and allowed the reporter to ride along with the
7th Cavalry. Our idea of how every man with Custer perished
comes from individual oral accounts retold by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors,
father to son and grandson, vividly supplemented by 41 pictographs drawn
by Red Horse, a Miniconjou Lakota chief at the battle. Only in 1999 were
all the elements of this war story properly compiled in book form by Herman
J. Viola ("Little Bighorn Remembered").
Whoever
is the chronicler, there is an eternal and compelling curiosity about
war, about wars in which our own survival is at stake, and wars long past.
So much heroism; so much folly; so many brilliant moves; so many blunders;
so many might-have-beens. In a current conflict, we fret about loved ones;
but in all war reports we share vicariously in the terrible excitement
of combat. We exult in victories; but we want to know whether the cause
is just, the means proportionate to the end, and the execution honorable.
We relish the drama of the front line, but we expect to be advised if
a decent patriotism is being exploited. Do the Viet Cong represent a nationalist
rebellion or aggression by international communism? Are there really vital
national interests in sending 500,000 U.S. troops into battle to eject
Iraq from Kuwait? And the arguments go on long after the battlefield has
been cleared of its dead.
For the
modern war correspondent, the imponderables are more numerous and the
canvas broader than it was for battle participants like Caesar, who practiced
war journalism before it was invented. The soldier-reporters were more
exposed to risk than the professional correspondent, but in reporting
they had a simpler task. They had access, by definition. They were their
own censors. They had no worry that their messages and histories would
inadvertently cost lives because communication was so slow and restricted.
They could take their time in reporting; they had no competition and their
eyewitness accounts were idiosyncratic.
Nobody
could match Capt. Robert Blakeney's account of the battle of Nivelle in
1813, when the French were finally driven out of Spain. Rushing an enemy
redoubt at the head of his regiment, his sword raised, he was struck by
a shot that shattered two bones of his left leg. The regiment went on
without him, but lying unmolested among the dead and the dying he had
a unique view of the battlefield:
The
awful events passing lay beneath my view; nor was there aught to interrupt
my observation save a few bodily twitches, the pangs of prostrated ambition,
and the shot and shells which burst close, or nearly cut the ground
from under me.
In my view,
the birth and maturation of the unarmed professional war correspondent
had four midwives: Democracy. Time. Scale. Speed.
Democracy,
nurtured by nearly universal suffrage and popular education, meant governments
had more and more to justify the blood, tears, toil and sweat of going
to war. And the advent of total war widened the risks beyond the fighting
men to every man, woman and child in the nation. Newspapers naturally
played on the notion that only independent reporting would satisfy the
popular appetite. The fact that war stories sold more newspapers than
anything else only demonstrates that high-mindedness and commercial gain
are not always in conflict. Governments, for their part, became willing
to provide battlefield access for reporters because they presumed the
journalists would wave the flag.
Timeliness
was the second midwife, first recognized by The Times in London.
The newspaper abandoned the traditional practice of relying on letters
from junior officers at the battlefront when its readers clamored to know
what was happening day by day in the Crimean peninsula, where England,
with France and the Ottoman Turks, was fighting the Russians. Lt. Charles
Naysmith of the East India Company's Bombay Artillery was covering the
fighting for The Times, but he was thought to have no sense of
urgency; perhaps his first priority was staying alive. The frustrated
Times manager rebuked the foreign editor: "I wish you would
impress upon Naysmith with all your eloquence the absolute necessity of
writing as often as he can and sending letters without delay." The
letters took more than a week to arrive anyway, coming by horse and steamer.
The appointment of a stocky Irishman, William Howard Russell, was the
trailblazing result, and the term "war correspondent" was apt,
for the editor of The Times, John Delane, asked Russell to write
him letters. Delane decided what he would take from them, for use in his
news and opinion columns. When Russell saw the scandals in the Crimea,
he asked, "Am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?" Delane
urged Russell to report all he saw, then withheld from publication any
material he deemed too sensitive. But the information he kept from the
public he made certain to circulate among government ministers.
The third
midwife was Scale. Bigger, longer and more far-flung wars required
more trained observers, more coordination of their efforts.
Speed.
Finally, communication speeded up and with it competition between publishers
and editors to have reporters cunning in the means of transmission and
the evasion of bureaucracy. Curiously, in the 21st century
communication is so transformed that we are at the dawn of a new era where
the war correspondent yields ground to the ordinary citizen. Today, people
may speak directly to others by e-mail and the Internet, reporting their
own experiences — unfiltered by journalist, editor or censor.
During
the 1999 Kosovo war, a Web site organized by The Institute for War and
Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net) attracted contributions from ordinary citizens.
One described what it was like to be caught up in ethnic cleansing in
Pristina.
Armed
men wearing black masks and blue police helmets just came and said,
‘You have to leave.' I watched the people flee from their homes
through my window. They left all their possessions behind — they
weren't even allowed to take their identification cards. All they had
was the sadness in their eyes.
Later,
when Kosovo was occupied by NATO, the same nonpartisan Web site was open
to Serbs reporting attacks on them by returning Kosovars. Web site and
e-mail reports like this will enrich the coverage of war, but they have
the weakness of their openness: they can easily be manipulated. I don't
believe they will ever supplant the professional correspondent and the
authority of a recognized news organization in the way the reporter supplanted
the literate soldier.
The real
explosion of professional coverage came with the U.S. Civil War. As in
all things, America went in for mass production. Newspapers in the South
still relied heavily on telegrams and letters from serving officers, but
at least 500 reporters covered the war for the North — after a fashion.
In the summary of Phillip Knightley, author of the seminal history of
war reporting, "The First Casualty," the adjectives that could
be pinned on the reporters' chests were ignorant, dishonest, unethical,
inaccurate, partisan and inflammatory.
The nonprofessionals
had a better record than that. In the Napoleonic Wars, brilliant firsthand
accounts of the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo come to us from soldiers
and sailors. Caesar had as good an eye for a story as any tabloid reporter.
This is how he related what happened to the Roman legionnaires skulking
in their ships rather than face the Anglo-Saxon javelins:
The
man who carried the eagle of the tenth legion, after praying to the
gods that his action might bring good luck to the legion, cried in a
loud voice, ‘Jump down, comrades, unless you want to surrender
our eagle to the enemy; I, at any rate, mean to do my duty to my country
and my general.' With these words he leapt out of the ship and advanced
toward the enemy with the eagle in his hands. At this the soldiers,
exhorting each other not to submit to such a disgrace, jumped with one
accord from the ship, and the men from the next ships, when they saw
them, followed them and advanced against the enemy.
Caesar's
report is eerily reminiscent of the scene at Omaha Beach on D-Day when
the men of the 1st Division and 29th Division, supported
by the 2nd Ranger Battalion, tried to get ashore. Men carrying
66 pounds of equipment had to jump into water that not only was deep but
laced with booby traps and mines; many drowned. Those who made it to the
beach — mostly to the wrong sectors, for which they had not been
trained — curled up in the sand behind the seawall, pinned down by
intense machine-gun, rifle, mortar and artillery fire from the sheer cliffs
above. Gen. Omar Bradley's beachhead, like Caesar's, would have been lost
but for inspired leadership — in a richer idiom. "Get the hell
off this damn beach and go kill some Germans," screamed Col. Charles
Canham at an officer taking refuge in a pillbox. "Get your ass out
of there and show some leadership." Col. George Taylor famously yelled,
"Two kinds of people are staying on this beach: the dead and those
who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here."
We owe
these scenes to postwar writers who have made an attempt to reconstruct
Omaha Beach. At the time, the reality of the landing, its full horror,
its blunders and the awesome nature of its heroism did not come through.
There were 558 accredited print and radio correspondents for the five
Normandy landings, but the arena was vast and chaotic. The reporters were
restricted by censorship as well as by German soldiers doing their damnedest
to nail anything that moved. Censors went on the beaches with the reporters,
checking that none of them wrote or radioed dispatches that would help
the enemy or dismay people at home.
The correspondents
filed 700,000 words on the first day. Columnist Ernie Pyle, arriving on
the second day, sent three dispatches from Omaha Beach, and Martha Gellhorn
reported from one of the hospital ships after getting ashore as a stretcher-bearer.
Radio transmitted into living rooms the sound of gunfire and men's cheers
and ship's whistles and planes. The reports were all very exciting, but
readers and listeners were not encouraged to imagine men in a funk, or
told that infantry were landing with weapons inferior to the Germans'
in every category, except artillery, or that the U.S. Navy launched assault
craft so far out that most of the amphibious tanks and guns were swamped
and sank in heavy seas, or that among the 2,500 Americans dead at the
end of the first day were 40 percent of the combat engineers. The much-loved
Pyle, who footslogged with the grunts in North Africa, Sicily, Italy,
France and the Pacific, was laconic: "Our men were pinned down for
a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that
beach and accomplished our landing."
The cryptic
reticence is explicable, but the consequence of the way the landing was
covered at the time was well summed up by Max Hastings in his 1984 reconstruction
of D-Day ("Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy"): "Few
Europeans and Americans of the postwar generation have grasped just how
intense were the early [Normandy] battles." The folk memory is of
an effort of fearless superiority. Steven Spielberg's epic film "Saving
Private Ryan" has finally done something to redress this notion.
The film is a work of singular imagination. Spielberg was not even born
when the Americans went ashore. He does not attempt to suggest what went
wrong. His portrayal of the landings is impressionistic, but it is a masterpiece
of cinematic art. It evokes the ordeal of the men on the beach; it makes
their achievement all the more memorable. "Saving Private Ryan"
is very like Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." Crane
had not seen military action anywhere when he published his novel in 1895.
Spielberg was unconcerned with the larger picture or the logistics, with
the essential pith of war reporting, and Crane was unconcerned with "Stonewall"
Jackson's tactics in the woods at Chancellorsville where his soldier-coward
had his epiphany.
But works
of such artistic imagination give us a sense of the emotions and chaos
of the battlefield. And there are many: Virginia Cowles in the middle
of the panic-stricken flight from Paris in June 1940; John Hersey in the
jungle on Guadalcanal in 1942; Tom Wolfe on the aircraft carrier Coral
Sea in 1967, recreating life-and-death minutes in the day of a Navy pilot
on missions over North Vietnam; Michael Herr a year later evoking the
spirit of the besieged Marines at Khe Sanh. They are answers to the questions
Walt Whitman posed so poetically:
What
history, I say, can ever give — for who can know — the mad,
determin'd tussle of the armies, in all their separate large and small
squads — as this — each steep'd from crown to toe in desperate,
mortal purports? Who know the conflict, hand-to-hand — the many
conflicts in the dark, those shadowy-tangled, flashing moon beam'd woods
— the writhing groups and squads — the cries, the din, the
cracking guns and pistols — the distant cannon — the cheers
and calls and threats and awful music of the oaths — the indescribable
mix — the officers' orders, persuasions, encouragements —
the devils fully roused in human hearts — the strong shout, Charge,
men charge — the flash of naked sword, and rolling flame and
smoke?
Who are
the writers and photographers and artists who have dared to answer Whitman's
cry, risking all in the cannon's mouth for the elusive words or pictures
that in the wild dark might light up a fragment of truth?
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