To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013
“This is a ghost city,” I cabled Life magazine’s editors in New York on October 29, 1948. “Most of the government’s troops are camped near the rail sidings waiting evacuation. In the heart of the metropolis freezing blasts whistle down the broad empty thoroughfares. Shop fronts, and even army pillboxes at the main intersections are boarded up. Jagged walls in factory areas, built by Japanese invaders, blasted by American bombers during World War II, and later pillaged by the Russian occupation forces, stand silhouetted against the steel- gray sky. Mukden, the capital of China’s richest industrial area, looks as ragged as the half-frozen refugees picking their way through the debris on the few streets where people can still be found.”
Just a few days earlier in Beijing, in a rare interview, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek told Life photographer Jack Birns and me that the strategic city would be defended to the last man. Now, it was obvious that it and the rest of Manchuria, a chunk of China bigger than California, Oregon, and Washington state combined, were being wrested from his control. Remarkably no other reporters or photographers were there, a situation hard to imagine with today’s media saturation of even the smallest most remote war.
We started up the road to Tieling, only to discover that the troops of Communist General Lin Biao, once General Chiang Kai-shek’s star student at Whampoa Military Academy, were coming down the other way. Surplus U.S. army tanks and howitzers abandoned by retreating Nationalist troops littered the fields. A freight train chuffed by, packed with fleeing soldiers. Those that couldn’t squeeze inside sat shivering atop the train.
By the time we returned to the city, business and traffic had come to a halt. We stopped at Tshurin Co. Ltd., the Soviet-subsidized department store. Still fully staffed, its display counters were filled with canned delicacies, chinaware, boots, furs, jewelry, and other luxuries. But not one customer appeared.
Most of the city’s activities centered around the railroad station. An enormous crowd of would-be ticket buyers had wedged themselves between the station and the 100-foot-high Russian victory obelisk topped with a Soviet tank. Some of the people were selling their belongings to raise money for a ticket, though most of the trains were already filled with soldiers.
At the U.S. Consulate we found everything moving in reverse. Instead of preparing to evacuate, Angus Ward, the 56-year-old consul general, and his staff were busy digging in for the long winter, barricading themselves behind a year’s supply of canned food and flour. Out in the courtyard, an Army major was chopping up a shortwave radio transmitter with an ax. All the files had been flown down to Qingdao for safekeeping. But the State Department had ordered the consular personnel to stay put. The hope was that they might start a dialogue with Mao’s hardliners that had been broken off two years ago when an exasperated General George Marshall finally gave up trying to mediate a peace agreement between Mao and Chiang.
Ward had also served in Vladivostok and had come to know the Russian Communists intimately. He welcomed the chance to stay behind in Mukden, which he called “an unusual opportunity to make contact with China’s Communists as well.” Fluent in both Russian and Chinese, this large imposing man with a white goa tee could have stepped out of a Hollywood spy thriller.
Ward’s attempts at mediation failed abysmally. He was held under house arrest at first, and eventually slapped in jail. A year later he was deported.
Racing to South Field, Birns and I found thousands of civilians waiting their turn to board one of the C-46 and C-47 cargo planes shuttling back and forth to Tianjin. As soon as an arriving crew finished tossing out the cargo of rice, a wild human phalanx would surge towards the plane’s open hatch. Kicking, punching, and clawing, men, women, and children would then try to fight their way aboard. The pilots had to stomp their cowboy boots on the outstretched fingers of those still trying pull themselves up into the already overloaded planes. Fortunately for Birns and me, pilot Neese Hicks let us board.
Some 24 hours later, we were back in Shanghai. The Central News Agency still hadn’t announced the fall of Mukden. Even more surprising, none of our reporter friends at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club had caught wind of the disaster.
The challenge now was to get the pictures and exclusive eye-witness account into the issues of Life scheduled to be put to bed that night in New York. My eyewitness account that went by cable posed no problem. But Birns’s dozen rolls of undeveloped film had to go by plane. And the transpacific flight on Pan-Am’s propeller-driven DC-4s took 40 hours, minus the 13 hours of clock time gained by crossing the International Date Line.
Fortunately our editors in New York refused to let the almost impossible logistics deny us a scoop, even if it meant the expense of holding the presses for 24 hours. They ordered a portable photo lab set up in the San Francisco airport. Processed between planes, the wet negatives were then couriered in jars of water to Chicago, where Life‘s printing plant was located. But Chicago was socked in and the plane landed in Cleveland. A charter pilot was persuaded to fly the courier to fogbound Chicago. Holding the now-dried negatives against the window of a taxi, the managing editor, who had flown out from New York, was able to select five pages of pictures on the way to the printing plant.
People looking at Life the next day had no idea of the extraordinary effort that it took to get those pages into their copy of the magazine—and probably couldn’t have cared less. But knowing that millions of Americans were seeing those pictures and reading that story made Birns and me feel pretty darn good.