Chinese Coverage

Sunday before last Fox Movietone Cameraman Eric Mayell and Universal Newsreel's Norman Alley, lugging their cumbersome apparatus, struggled down to Nanking's shell-smashed Bund and frantically waved at a gunboat which was headed upriver. The Chinese were fleeing Nanking and Mayell and Alley did not plan to remain with a handful of their colleagues to witness the triumphal Japanese entry. The departing gunboat put off a motor sampan, which returned to pick them up. Thankful for their rescue and still a little worried for the safety of their friends they left behind, Mayell and Alley were, a few minutes later, climbing up the side of the U. S. S. Panay. . . .

Aboard the Panay, Messrs. Mayell and Alley joined 14 other civilians fleeing upriver, among them six journalists: Weldon James, United Press Nanking chief; G. M. McDonald of the London Times; Norman Soong of the New York Times; Luigi Barzina and Sandro Sandri, Italian correspondents; James Marshall, Collier's staff writer. Within 24 hours these eight newsmen had ringside seats at what may still become this century's Maine affair, when Japanese airplanes and machine guns from launches bombed, strafed and sank the Panay 25 miles upriver from Nanking.

No war has ever afforded journalists the downright uncomfortable immediacy of the Chinese-Japanese 1937 conflict. The immediacy is substantiated by the casualty list.

In the Panay incident, Jim Marshall was hit in the shoulder, leaped onto a Standard Oil tanker which nosed alongside the gunboat, got ashore with the aid of a U. S. seaman and was taken to Wuhu by friendly Japanese. Less fortunately, Sandro Sandri of the Turin Stampa died next day of a horribly painful stomach wound. Other foreign correspondent to die during the hostilities was Pembroke Stephens, crackman from the London Telegraph. He was machine-gunned while watching the siege of Shanghai from a water tower in the French Concession. Two New York Timesmen, Hallett Abend and Anthony James Billingham, were wounded when the Chinese accidentally bombed the Wing On department store in Shanghai.

Though bloody, the coverage of the Chinese war by U. S. newsmen and photographers has been exceptionally good. Hearst News of the Day's H. S. Wong; Universal's George Krainukov, MARCH OF TIME's Harrison Forman's bombing pictures of Shanghai were extraordinary, as were the reels taken by Arthur Menken of the announced bombing of Nanking two months ago. Last week reckless Cameraman Menken stayed behind in Nanking to film the Japanese occupation. His films were seized and then returned by Japanese officers. A. T. ("Arch") Steele of the Chicago Daily News filed a story on the city's gory fall which was the best piece of reporting that noted correspondent has done in China.

Notable, too, was Norman Soong's cool eyewitness account of the Panay bombing and sinking, and of the passengers' flight inland. At deferred press rate of 13-c- a word, that 5,220-word story was a bargain, would have been worth the 73-c--a-word urgent cable rate used on the hottest news "breaks." Messrs. Mayell's and Alley's films of the power-diving Japanese planes will be something to see in the U. S. next week if local police departments do not censor them as too inflammatory.

Censorship has not been a major problem in this war. The great bulk of the reporting has been done behind China's lines and the Chinese do not wish to minimize their foe's might. Coverage of this war has other quixotic aspects. Reporters who are in a Chinese city one day may find it belongs to Japan the next. In Shanghai correspondents and cameramen could sleep comfortably in clean hotel beds, decide each morning which army they wanted to cover that day. But such convenience bred its carelessness and, for example, all United Press men had to be warned against foolishly exposing themselves after a machine-gun bullet bounced off H. R. ("Bud") Ekins' tin hat. While Shanghai was a battlefield, New York Herald Tribune's Victor Keen took a day off and was married.

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