Reporting Under Fire (17 page)

From Kimpo (now Gimpo) Airfield, where grounded planes were on fire, the four reporters hurried on to Seoul where American military advisors worked and lived. Clearly, South Korea was in chaos, as streams of refugees poured into Seoul from the north, just 35 miles away. Maggie recalled the scene thusly:

The road to Seoul was crowded with refugees. There were hundreds of Korean women with babies bound papoose-style to their backs and huge bundles on their heads. There were scores of trucks, elaborately camouflaged with branches….

It was a moving and rather terrifying experience, there on that rainy road to Seoul, to have the crowds cheer and wave as our little caravan of Americans went by…. I
thought then, as I was to think often in later days, I hope we don't let them down.

The South Koreans fought well but were no match for the Russian-made tanks that ground their way along the Uijeongbu corridor toward Seoul. Late in the night, Maggie—relegated to separate sleeping quarters at American headquarters and separated from the other reporters—was called to evacuate along with American soldiers and move south toward a bridge that crossed the Han River. She watched as the bridge exploded into orange flames. It had been destroyed by the disorganized South Koreans in a defensive move to keep the Communists from moving closer. But the South Koreans had miscalculated their timing, leaving thousands of their own soldiers and citizens— and the Americans—trapped on the north bank of the Han. There seemed to be no other way across the river.

In the midst of retreat, an American colonel pointed out to Maggie that she could file a story from a nearby radio truck. She grabbed her typewriter,

put it on the front of the jeep, and typed furiously. Streams of retreating South Korean soldiers were then passing our stationary convoy. Many of them turned their heads and gaped at the sight of an American woman, dressed in a navy-blue skirt, flowered blouse, and bright blue sweater, typing away on a jeep in the haze of daybreak. I got my copy all right. But as far as I know, communications never were established long enough to send it.

The Americans commandeered tiny boats and began to push across the river, pointing rifles at anyone who threatened them. It was havoc all around as people tried to escape. Korean soldiers
shot at fleeing boatmen, hoping they would return to shore so they could escape as well. Others stormed the smaller craft and swamped them as they climbed in. Maggie was separated from the other reporters, and she crossed the Han River safely. A single file of refugees then marched up a mountain trail toward Suwon, South Korea's brand new temporary capital. The group included the Korean minister of the interior, South Korean soldiers, an old man, diplomats, children, and Maggie Higgins.

In the opening assaults of the Korean War, Maggie and the other reporters witnessed—and lived through—four evacuations in 10 days. Maggie saw the very first American death in that war, as 19-year-old Private Kenneth Shadrick lifted his head to take aim and was shot. The reporters could only shake their heads, knowing that these young soldiers had just finished basic training and had no real battle experience. Outnumbered and green, these young men and their commanders had sacrificed themselves. “Are you correspondents telling the people back home the truth?” a 26-year-old lieutenant barked at Maggie. “Are you telling them that out of one platoon of 20 men, we have three left? Are you telling them that we have nothing to fight with, and that it is an utterly useless war?” Maggie did, in a book she titled simply,
War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.

If Maggie had held communist sympathies during college, she abandoned them when she reported on the Korean War:

We know now that it is fortunate for our world that it resisted Red aggression at that time and in that place. Korea has served as a kind of international alarm clock to wake up the world.

There is a dangerous gap between the mobilized might of the free world and the armaments of the Red
world—the Red world which, since 1945, has been talking peace and rushing preparations for war. Korea ripped away our complacency, our smug feeling that all we had to do for our safety was to build bigger atomic bombs. Korea has shown how weak America was. It has shown how desperately we needed to arm and to produce tough, hard-fighting foot soldiers. It was better to find this out in Korea and in June of 1950 than on our own shores and possibly too late.

In the midst of trying to dodge gunfire, evacuate, write stories, and file them on time—yet another challenge—Maggie had problems of her own. Homer Bigart arrived in Korea and pulled rank on Maggie, ordering her to go back to Tokyo. Maggie protested: there was plenty of work for them both. But then Bigart got nasty and threatened to get her fired.

Bigart also told Maggie that she didn't have a single friend in Tokyo, which both puzzled and bothered her. She wondered what was going on. She learned later that four other news bureau chiefs in Seoul, the so-called “Palace Guard,” who alone had access to General Douglas MacArthur, were furious when she broke the story about American bombings north of the 38th parallel. The four had agreed to release the news together at a later date and now believed that Maggie had gotten the privileged information from MacArthur himself. Maggie insisted she knew nothing of the agreement but she did know about the bombings—from a completely different source.

As Homer Bigart continued to harass Maggie, she sent a message to the bosses in New York asking permission to stay on. Days later, when she still had no answer back, she worried about what to do. She sought out her friend Carl Mydans, the
Time
and
Life
magazine photographer, to share her worries. Mydans
asked her a piercing question: “What is more important to you, Maggie, the experience of covering the Korean War or fears of losing your job?”

Maggie Higgins stayed on in Korea. In mid-July, as she covered the Battle of Taejon in a jeep scrounged by Keyes Beech, Maggie got a rude shock of her own. The army was expelling her from Korea. She wrote that the news felt as though she'd been hit by gunfire. She was ordered out of the Korean theater of war immediately, and no one could explain why.

Tensions between army brass and war correspondents had arisen in Korea. It looked as though MacArthur's headquarters thought the press was more hindrance than help to their war effort. Maggie thought that MacArthur's press chief viewed the press corps as natural enemies. Correspondents were allowed use of the telephone only in the dead of night. It didn't matter if the line was free of other military traffic during waking hours. The only sure way a reporter could file her stories was to have them flown to Tokyo.

I had already been with the troops three weeks. Now, with an entire division in the line and more due to arrive, the worst had already been endured. Realizing that as a female I was an obvious target for comment, I had taken great pains not to ask for anything that could possibly be construed as a special favor. Like the rest of the correspondents, when not sleeping on the ground at the front with an individual unit, I usually occupied a table top in the big, sprawling room at Taejon from which we telephoned. The custom was to come back from the front, bang out your story, and stretch out on the table top. You would try to sleep, despite the noise of other stories being shouted into the phone, till your turn came to read
your story to Tokyo. Then, no matter what the hour, you would probably start out again because the front lines were changing so fast you could not risk staying away any longer than necessary.

General Walton H. Walker had ousted Maggie because she was a female and “there are no facilities for ladies at the front.” Maggie retorted that there was no lack of bushes in Korea. She appealed Walker's declaration all the way to MacArthur at headquarters and stayed on the job until she was forced to take a train from the battle zone to army headquarters. When she arrived, hoping to make a personal plea to Walker, she was greeted by an army captain who put her in a jeep. The captain, armed with a carbine and a pair of armed soldiers, escorted Maggie directly to the airstrip. As they sped along, the captain “further clarified his views on women correspondents.”

By the time Maggie landed in Tokyo, MacArthur had rescinded the order to expel her from Korea. None other than Helen Rogers Reid, president of the
New York Herald Tribune
had cabled MacArthur—whose word was law in that part of the world—asking him to permit Maggie to go back to work. MacArthur's orders read: “Ban on women in Korea being lifted. Marguerite Higgins held in highest professional esteem by everyone.”

Back to work Maggie went. She was eating breakfast at US Army headquarters at Chingdoi, situated in an old wooden schoolhouse, when bullets and grenades blew through the walls.

I started to say something to Martin [Harold Martin of the
Saturday Evening Post]
as he crouched by the telephone methodically recording the battle in his notebook. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, I discovered, and
in shame I broke off after the first disgraceful squeak of words.

Certain that her life was ending, Maggie felt surprised that death was going to happen to her.

Then, as the conviction grew, I became hard inside and comparatively calm. I ceased worrying. Physically the result was that my teeth stopped chattering and my hands ceased shaking. This was a relief, as I would have been acutely embarrassed had any one caught me in that state.

Fortunately, by the time [Colonel John] Michaelis came around the corner and said, “How you doin', kid?” I was able to answer in a respectably self-contained tone of voice, “Just fine, sir.”

When the fighting grew desperate and casualties overwhelmed army medics, Maggie picked up glass bottles of blood plasma to administer to wounded soldiers. The grateful commander wrote a letter to the
Herald Tribune
extolling Maggie's bravery under fire. From then on, Maggie carried a carbine (rifle) when she rode shotgun in Keyes Beech's jeep. It would not have done any damage against a Soviet tank, but the carbine represented some kind of defense against North Korean soldiers.

By early August 1950, the North Koreans had pushed so far south that UN forces were squeezed into a small area of southeast South Korea. All the Americans could do was defend themselves until more soldiers, supplies, and aircraft could arrive to rejuvenate them. On September 15, MacArthur struck back at North Korea by staging an amphibious assault on the peninsula's west coast at Inchon, 30 miles from Seoul.

Marguerite Higgins typing in an army office in Korea, her face dirty from working in the field.
Marguerite Higgins Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

Maggie needed to get to the scene by ship, but the US Navy forbade access because she was a woman. Just as fast, her luck changed when there was a mix-up in paperwork. Maggie found herself allowed to board the USS
Henrico,
the command ship of a group of transports. She was at sea four days until it was time to drop into a landing craft and go ashore. Her memoir left a blunt, picturesque review of how a fighting man carried out an assault from the sea:

At three o'clock orders went out to lower the rectangular, flat-bottomed craft into the sea, and the squeaks of turning winches filled the air. From the deck I watched the same operation on the other transports, strung out down the channel as far as the eye could travel.

I was to go in the fifth wave to hit Red Beach. In our craft would be a mortar outfit, some riflemen, a photographer, John Davies of the Newark
Daily News,
and Lionel Crane of the London
Daily Express.

There was a final briefing emphasizing the split-second timing that was so vital. The tide would be at the right height for only four hours. We would strike at 5:30, half an hour before dead high. Assault waves, consisting of six landing craft lined up abreast, would hit the beach at two-minute intervals. This part of the operation had to be completed within an hour in order to permit the approach of larger landing ship tanks (LSTs), which would supply us with all our heavy equipment. The LSTs would hit the beach at high tide and then, as the waters ebbed away, be stranded helplessly on the mud flats. After eight o'clock, sea approaches to the assaulting marines would be cut off until the next high tide. It was a risk that had to be taken.

Maggie worked her way down the ship's side, hanging onto a net as she felt with her feet for the swaying rungs underneath. She “dropped last into the boat, which was now packed with 38 heavily laden marines, ponchos on their backs and rifles on their shoulders” as they waited for the rest of the landing craft in wave number five. Some of the marines were playing cards.

Finally we pulled out of the circle and started toward the assault control ship, nine miles down the channel….

Red Beach stretched out flatly directly behind the sea wall. Then after several hundred yards it rose sharply to form a cliff on the left side of the beach. Behind the cliff was a cemetery, one of our principal objectives.