A Year of War

From Athens last week Newsman Leland Stowe (Chicago Daily News) cabled his opinion that Ralph Waldo Barnes, crack war correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, deserved a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1940. Eleven years before, when Stowe was head of the Herald Tribune's Paris bureau, he himself had won a Pulitzer Prize with the aid of young Reporter Barnes, who had managed to get a beat--the full text of the Young Plan--from a delegate to the Reparations Conference in Paris. But Stowe's suggestion was no mere logrolling.

A big bear of a man, endowed with inexhaustible energy, a hunger for facts, Ralph Barnes was at 41 one of the best informed journalists in Europe. He had covered most of the Continent at top speed--but his most remarkable year was 1940. When the year opened he was reporting a somnolent war with the B. E. F. Then he was transferred to Berlin, the first newsman to cover both sides of World War II. His wife and two young daughters went home to the U. S. With the German Army when it rolled into Dunkirk, Barnes saw the desolate beach on which men had died who were his comrades a few months earlier, sent back one of the most moving dispatches of the war.

Before June was over, the Germans sent Barnes packing when he wrote a displeasing dispatch about Soviet relations with the Reich. (His departure left the Herald Tribune without any reporter in Berlin.) Barnes went to Hungary and Rumania, looked at the smoldering Balkans, then on to Turkey, Syria, Palestine. With the British forces in Egypt he covered the Italian drive on Sidi Barrani. Later he flew with the R. A. F. on bombing missions, toured the Mediterranean on a British cruiser. (Respectful tars christened him "Barnacle Barnes, the Sailor.") When Mussolini's invincible troops invaded Greece, Ralph Barnes boarded a British warship, sailed for Athens.

There, one night last week, Ralph Barnes drove out over winding mountain roads to a military airport. On a moonlit field, surrounded by towering hills, he stuffed his big frame into a buoyant flying jacket* and crawled into the belly of a British bomber. The plane took off, heading north over shadowy peaks toward an Albanian port. Soon they ran into heavy mist, then a rainstorm moved in from the sea. When the pilot realized he was off his course, he dropped a flare that lighted up the hills, showed the sheer rock face of a bluff looming ahead. He dropped one bomb to lighten the plane, had no chance to release another. On a desolate peak near Danilovgrad, in neutral Yugoslavia, Ralph Barnes died in action with three men of the R. A. F.

*Called a "Mae West" by British airmen because of the luxuriant curves which keep fliers afloat if they come down at sea.

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