At the Cannon's Mouth

The Japs had already offered to surrender when the New York Herald Tribune's solemn, bespectacled Homer Bigart last week climbed into a Japan-bound B29. He wanted to see how the flyers felt on such a mission.

Before the take-off he heard the men moan as the radio picked up a San Francisco announcer shouting: "I hope all you boys out there are as happy as we are at this moment. People are yelling and screaming, and whistles are blowing." Outbound, the crew prayed for a message that never came, ordering them to dump their bombs into the sea and return to base. They roared in over blacked-out Honshu, weathered the flak of fire-bombed Kumagaya.

When Bigart stepped out of the B-29 after a 15-hour flight, he was in a world at peace. From Guam he filed what may have been the last eyewitnesser of the war.

Second Wave. War Correspondent Bigart was almost a prptotype of the second wave of newsmen to cover World War II. The first wave, of big-name glamour boys, mostly wound up as radio experts-- or dashed into a war zone to get enough material for a quick book and lecture tour. The second wave were real war babies.

Professorial-looking Bigart, who talks with a slight stammer, joined the Herald Tribune in 1929 as an office boy, in 1933 began writing church news, finally worked up to fires and murders. In early 1943, when papers began converting young police reporters into war correspondents, Bigart was sent to England.

From the start, he was no communique commando. He made his first flight into enemy territory on the same Eighth Air Force raid on Wilhelmshaven in which the New York Times's Bob Post was killed. At Anzio the Germans shot out his bathtub when he wasn't in it; after Dday, planes strafed a rubber boat he was in, and missed again.

Bigart was with the Seventh Army in Sicily, saw the Fifth Army liberate Rome, and watched MacArthur land in the Philippines. He was in action at Leyte, and invaded Okinawa with the Tenth Army. Other correspondents learned to respect him as a reporter who was "trying to build his reputation at the cannon's mouth." His dispatches appeared in only one paper, so his by-line was not as well known as many; but he was one of the war's best reporters.

One at a Time. Homer Bigart, and many a city-room veteran like him, now wanted to return to assignments where one person getting killed at a time was news. Said Bigart at Guam last week: "A lot of foreign news is going to sound dull after the war. I wouldn't mind writing murder stories for a while--if I could pick the murders I wanted to cover."

He did not know it then, but the Herald Tribune had other ideas. His postwar assignment: Japan.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.