1951. Downs Reflects on the Korean War, One Year Later

The Situation in Korea

"An American mortar crew fires on North Korean positions at Chochiwon," July 11, 1950 (source)

From the Congressional Record, submitted by Rep. Paul Kilday on July 10, 1951:

Bill Downs

CBS News

July 8, 1951

A year ago today I was one of the most frightened men in the world. The Korean war was less than 2 weeks old. CBS had just rushed me to the Far East, and I was spending my first day at the fighting front near Chochiwon.

I've spent a lot of time covering a lot of different kinds of armies, and a reporter learns that fear is as much a part of war as is noise.

But just 365 days ago today, it seemed different. And when I say I was one of the most frightened men in the world, I mean I had a lot of company.

The United States Army in Korea at that time consisted of one regiment. Its only friends, the South Korean troops, had broken. Our GIs at the time were outnumbered 100 to 1. And there seemed to be nothing that anyone could do about it.

The American soldier of that day were kids who had joined the Army for the soft touch. They were soft and badly trained. Someday there will be an investigation as to why they were allowed to sit on occupation duty in Japan and grow all the wrong calluses in the wrong places. Many of them didn't even know the importance of digging in. They knew more about comic books and Japanese women than they did about their own weapons. Many of the early American casualties can be laid directly to neglect of the men by the officers who were supposed to have trained them in Japan.

I had a chance to think these things over under fire, a year ago today, in a Korean ditch nuzzling an odiferous Korean rice paddy. And as I said, I was extremely frightened and filled with despair. At that time I would not have given a plugged nickel for our chances of staying on the peninsula.

You know the rest of the story. I have gone into this because in weighing the results of the past year's fighting at this time of imminent cease-fire, it is well to remember the deplorable state of readiness in which the United States found itself when the Communists marched in Korea.

In the 12 ensuing months, the revival of American power has been miraculous. It is something you have to remind yourself to remember.

And it may be that historians will some day record that Josef Stalin made his greatest strategical mistake when he sent his North Korean puppets across the thirty-eighth parallel and thus aroused the American military and industrial giant into action.

There has been much argument as to whether the Korean campaign has been worth the cost in blood to the United States. I admit that I was one of those who in the early days did not think it was. Korea was of no military value to us; it looked like we were headed for a disastrous defeat; we were forced into battle at the time and place of the enemy's choosing. And no one here at home, including some Congressmen, seemed to care.

Events have changed my mind. Fourteen other United Nations joined us in the fighting. Their contribution was token, but it was there. The Communists have paid a tremendous price for their adventure. The free world has proved that a deliberate breach of the peace can be disastrously costly.

And most important, the United States is becoming strong. Strong enough to prove that the ideal of freedom backed by strength can defend itself against totalitarianism.

You will not hear much argument about whether or not the United Nations achieved a military or diplomatic victory in Korea.

What we have really won is a measure of future security for the kind of world we stand for. The dangers still exist, but the men who fought and died in Korea have given us these priceless things, the time and ability to defend ourselves.

We will betray the trust of the men who died in Korea only if we waste this time or dissipate this ability through petty partisan politics at home or a relaxation of our vigilance at other danger areas around the world.

1944. War Correspondents on the Battle of Arnhem

Eyewitness Accounts of Operation Market Garden

Canadians of the British Second Army during the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944 (source)

From the BBC's The Listener magazine, September 28, 1944:

The Battle for the Rhine Bridges

Despatches broadcast by eye-witnesses

THE ARNHEM BATTLE FROM THE AIR: Through binoculars you could see the ferocity of what was going on down below. Smoke curled up all along both sides of the main avenue of advance, you could see flashes of gunfire everywhere. At one time you could see our guns spitting angrily like alley cats, firing at an incredible speed. Away in the distance in front of us huge clouds of smoke seep lazily up to the sky. Today I was looking at one hour of what our airborne troops have been going through for nearly six days. You felt as though you wanted to swoop down and push our ground troops along the fire-raked corridor but, believe me, the men of the Second Army are not the sort that need any pushing.

Back at our airfield my pilot and I were discussing the battle, and I think he hit the nail on the head when he said, 'When you think of what those airborne types are going through, and are still holding on, you and I are awfully lucky citizens'. Think of those men, encouraged even with a slight increase in the signal of a wireless set, surrounded and pounded on all sides and still they go on. How right he was! These airborne lads in the Arnhem area are in a class by themselves.

— Stewart Macpherson, September 22

IN THE 'POCKET' WITH THE AIRBORNE: On this sixth day in this mortar and shell riven pocket the airborne troops are hourly becoming more amazing to me. This morning enemy loud speakers again blared out in clumsy English asking them to surrender. It was a silly thing to do. It made these chaps hopping mad. You should have heard their language. Then the whole area was intensively shelled and mortared for the rest of the morning. Our commander walked around among his men as coolly as though it were their regimental sports day, enquiring and and encouraging. The guts of these airborne chaps is wonderful. . . . The hate has started again. As I write it seems that there is no point of the compass from which we cannot get mortared or shelled or machine-gunned or sniped. One part of the perimeter is held by sergeants—the glider pilots, every one of whom is a sergeant or a staff sergeant. The medical corps are on the job right round the clock. Theirs is a particular sort of courage. Some 943 prisoners have come in today, just Germans who have had enough and are stunned by the cold ferocity of men who don't know what quit means. The artillery of the Second Army has come into range and engaged enemy targets today. It was sheet music. We hope the orchestra swells. We are pretty sure it will.

— Stanley Maxted, September 23

GETTING IN SUPPLIES: We knew the boys down there would be hard up for news, so before we set out we collected all the newspapers we could from the mess and dropped 'em for the chaps below. I'd like to say one thing about the glider pilots. We were towing a glider and as we set off the pilot reported he had difficulty in keeping his left wing down. Both he and his second pilot had to hang on to the stick together to keep the craft steady. We asked him if he'd like to be cast off at base. He said no . . . they'd carry on. And they did. . . . Jerry had light flak close up and heavy flak from a good way off. It was not like bombing a large town where you can weave in and out of it. Jerry knew we had to go that place . . . they had it taped. Tuesday was the first night I saw any real anxiety in the mess. The boys who got back went straight to the mess for a drink. Then they were ringing up control tower . . . asking 'Is so-and-so back?' . . . It was the first day we'd any real losses. On Wednesday I saw five kites go down in two minutes. There were others burning on the ground that we hadn't seen go down. Visibility was zero that day. . . As kites were being shot down you'd hear your bomb-aimer say 'There goes "Q Queenie"', and so on. . . .

— Pilot-Officer R. W. Passingham, September 23

ALONG THE ROAD TO ARNHEM—JOTTINGS FROM A DIARY:

3 p.m. More reinforcements and supplies coming in by a few hundred more gliders over us. I am going out to a landing zone to watch them arrive, although a pretty sticky fight is going on at one of their zones.

3.30 p.m. It was a highly successful supply mission in that the gliders reached the right zone, but flak took a pretty heavy toll of the tug planes, two of which crashed within 500 yards of us. There is no sense in trying to describe that spectacle—no one would believe you. Two parachutes blossomed out early on. Out of the second glider a body hurtled as the plane screamed earthward, but the parachute apparently was shot up by flak and failed to open.

4 p.m. I decided to move up towards the fighting a mile or so away, but suddenly Jerry brought our woods under heavy artillery fire and I spend the last half-hour in a not nearly deep enough drainage ditch. Shells are still popping in here, within a few dozen yards, but we are going to try to make a run for it in a jeep and get to hell out of here.

4.30 p.m. Our driver really put the jeep through its paces down a path through the woods as shells continued to crack. We couldn't tell exactly where they were hitting.

5 p.m. Decided to go back to Eindhoven and check communications facilities.

6 p.m. We took nearly an hour to make the six miles south to Eindhoven, over the canal ferry and past a solid convoy of British armour and supply trucks. In Eindhoven the tidy city streets were stacked from kerb to buildings with cheering throngs. Flags and pictures of the Queen hung in front of every house.

7 p.m. Found Press headquarters of the Second Army. Just as we are about to turn into the headquarters a lone twin-engined German bomber, flying high, drops flares immediately overhead.

8 p.m. The last hour has been the worst of my life. We tried to get away from the centre of the city, but only managed to get a short way off the main street when the bombers came. We were alongside the city park so we pulled our jeep under the trees when the first of a stick of bombs dropped and crunched right up on us. We stuck there and the rest of the stick walked towards us, until the last burst across the street just 50 feet away. Then a few ammunition trucks began going up in terrific explosions, and there was the high whine of screeching shells.

— Walter Cronkite, September 23

MESSAGE FROM ARNHEM: The area in which we are dug in can be best called a garden city, pleasant straight streets with modern houses in their gardens. Now the trees are stripped, the houses smashed, the well-paved roads fitted and littered with equipment, jeeps and improvised German transport, smashed Bren carriers and torn tramlines. Our troops hold position in some of these gardens and houses and I wandered among them during a lull at dusk last night. In the uncanny silence I could hear two paratroops joking and laughing, while a garden wall away a German soldier was asking his companion to fetch some water for cooking. This formation has got its teeth into the German defence position on the northern Rhine and, like the proverbial British bulldog, it won't let go.

— Guy Byam, September 24

1945. Edward R. Murrow's Account of Buchenwald

"If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry."

Edward R. Murrow

CBS News

April 15, 1945

Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you had been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio.

For I propose to tell you of Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last.

As we approached it, we saw about a hundred men in civilian clothes with rifles advancing in open order across the field. There were a few shots. We stopped to inquire. We're told that some of the prisoners have a couple of SS men cornered in there. We drove on, reached the main gate. The prisoners crowded up behind the wire. We entered. And now, let me tell this in the first person, for I was the least important person there, as you can hear.

There surged around me an evil-smelling horde. Men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over that mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were plowing.

A German, Fritz Kirchheimer, came up and said, "May I show you around the camp? I've been here ten years."

An Englishman stood to attention saying, "May I introduce myself? Delighted to see you. And can you tell me when some of our blokes will be along?" I told him "Soon," and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.

When I reached the center of the barracks, a man came up and said, "You remember me, I am Petr Zenkl, onetime mayor of Prague." I remembered him, but did not recognize him. He asked about Beneš and Jan Masaryk. I asked how many men had died in that building during the last month. They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book, nothing more—nothing of who had been where, what they had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242—242 out of 1,200 in one month.

As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies, they were so weak. The doctor's name was Paul Heller. He had been there since '38. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others—they must have been over sixty—were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it but will not describe it.

In another part of the camp they showed me the children—hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. D-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die.

An elderly man standing beside me said, "The children—enemies of the state." I could see their ribs through their thin shirts. The old man said, "I am Professor Charles Richet, of the Sorbonne." The children clung to my hands and stared. We crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to me to speak to me and to touch me—professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all Europe. Men from the countries that made America.

We went to the hospital. It was full. The doctor told me that two hundred had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said, "Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult." Dr. Heller pulled back the blankets from a man's feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.

As we left the hospital I drew out a leather billfold, hoping that I had some money which would help those who lived to get home. Professor Richet from the Sorbonne said, "I should be careful of my wallet if I were you. You know there are criminals in this camp, too." A small man tottered up, saying, "May I feel the leather, please? You see, I used to make good things of leather in Vienna." Another man said, "My name is Walter Roeder. For many years I lived in Joliet. Came back to Germany for a visit and Hitler grabbed me."

I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge had been a Communist, had been at Buchenwald for nine years, had a picture of his daughter in Hamburg. Hadn't seen her for almost twelve years—and if I got to Hamburg, would I look her up? He showed me the daily ration: one piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall—very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each ten men who died. He had to account for the rations, and he added, "We're very efficient here."

We went again into the courtyard, and as we walked, we talked. The two doctors, the Frenchman and the Czech, agreed that about six thousand had died during March. Kirchheimer, the German, added that back in the winter of 1939, when the Poles began to arrive without winter clothing, they died at the rate of approximately 900 a day. Five different men asserted that Buchenwald was the best concentration camp in Germany. They had had some experience in the others.

Dr. Heller, the Czech, asked if I would care to see the crematorium. He said it wouldn't be very interesting because the Germans had run out of coke some days ago, and had taken to dumping the bodies into a great hole nearby. Professor Richet said perhaps I would care to see the small courtyard. I said yes. He turned and told the children to stay behind.

As we walked across the square, I noticed that the professor had a hole in his left shoe and a toe sticking out of the right one. He followed my eyes and said, "I regret that I am so little presentable, but what can one do?" At that point, another Frenchman came up to announce that three of his fellow countrymen outside had killed three SS men and taken one prisoner.

We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall was about eight feet high. It adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could, and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than five hundred men and boys lay there in two neat piles.

There was a German trailer which must have contained another fifty, but it wasn't possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation—they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?

As I left that camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came up to me and said, "You will write something about this, perhaps?" And he added, "To write about this, you must have been here at least two years, and after that...you don't want to write any more."

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. Dead men are plentiful in war, but the living dead, more than 20,000 of them in one camp . . . and the country round about was pleasing to the eye. And the Germans were well-fed and well-dressed. American trucks were rolling towards the rear filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations, as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald received in four days.

If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry. I was there on Thursday, and many men in many tongues blessed the name of Roosevelt. For long years his name has meant the full measure of their hope. These men, who had kept close company with death for many years, did not know that Mr. Roosevelt would, within hours, join their comrades who had laid their lives on the scales of freedom.

Back in '41, Mr. Churchill said to me with tears in his eyes, "One day the world and history will recognize and acknowledge what it owes to your president." I saw and heard the first installment of that at Buchenwald on Thursday. It came from men from all over Europe. Their faces, with more flesh on them, might have been found anywhere at home. To them, the name Roosevelt was a symbol, a code word for a lot of guys named Joe who are somewhere out in the blue, with the armor, heading east. At Buchenwald, they spoke of the President just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.

Note: Some of the names as transcribed are from Murrow's notes on Buchenwald.

1947. Omaha Beach, Three Years Later

Returning to Omaha Beach

"Normandy, June, 1947: Three years after the World War II D-Day invasion that led to the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, rusting landing craft and other remnants of war litter Omaha Beach, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war" (source)

From the "Special Issue: A Report to America Two Years After V-Day," This Week magazine, August 10, 1947, pp. 20-21:

OMAHA BEACH

By BILL DOWNS

The scene of the Normandy landings is lonely and eerie—three years later

What does a soldier feel when he walks back through the battlefield and finds grass growing in the foxholes and butterflies flitting over the pillboxes? Correspondent Bill Downs, who landed on the Normandy beachhead with the British on D-Day, 1944, went back to find out. He took along a portable recorder.

The result is something new in reporting. For this is no straight account of events and people. Bill Downs looked inwardly and reported the thoughts that marched through his mind—as he walked alone through Omaha Beach. This is how he put them down on the recording tape:

I'm on Omaha Beach, where, not very many months ago, I saw bodies stacked like cordwood—American bodies. Behind me lie the remains of the Mulberry Docks, the improvised harbor that meant so much on D-Day plus. The sea is very quiet today. Battered ghost ships ride low in the surf. This morning—when the sun was just coming out—the moisture on the beach came up in small clouds of steam.

I'm standing at the entrance of an American assault boat. There are about 50 here—some holed by shells, some by collisions. They're old and rusted, down at the stern, half-buried in sand.

Directly in front of me, over the open landing ramp, I can see the rise of treacherous ground the Germans held for so many hours while American troops fought their way up inch by inch. But now this rise is green and has a sort of military smallpox where naval bombardment drove the Germans back and enabled our troops to land.

It gives you an eerie, unreal feeling to be here, to see these sunken ships of the Mulberry harbor; and you wonder if perhaps sailors don't come back sometimes, and maybe soldiers, too, to man these assault boats of that exciting hour.

I walked practically the entire distance of Omaha Beach this morning, starting with the south end, where there are a half-dozen German pillboxes. In one there's a destroyed 88-millimeter gun which, even in destruction, still looks plenty tough.

All along, the hillside by the beach is marked by shellholes. Grass is beginning to grow back into them. Walking alone—there's no one around—you can find old "C" and "K" ration cans rusting in piles, shell casings, an occasional canteen or canteen cup—usually with a bullet hole through it.

Every day except Sunday, German prisoners come down and dig up the mines. Most of them have been dug up successfully, and there have been few casualties—postwar casualties—on the beach itself. Occasionally, from over the horizon, you can hear the far rumble of an explosion—fortifications or recovered mines being blown up inland by German prisoners. Over the high hill that faces the beach you can see smashed pillboxes with the steel rods that reinforced the concrete forming a pattern of deadly lace against the sky.

Two Frenchmen are riding along the beach now. It's Sunday, and the French tourists come up here quite often. The beach used to be a vacation place, and you can still see the wreckage of some summer homes. They are now roofless, shattered and windowless. They give you a sort of blank, stark stare, as if they have not yet recovered from what they saw on that fateful June 6, 1944.

After three years, you find yourself forgetting entire towns which lie inland, back on the beach. Trips that in your memory took about 10 minutes really take a half-hour or longer. Airfields that used to be there are now only wheat fields, and cattle graze on the site of your Command Post.

Almost every farmer has taken advantage of the material left behind by the armies to patch up his place. It seems to be a kind of poetic justice, remembering how our tanks knocked down fences and the corners of houses trying to get through the narrow lanes.

Incidentally, the Normandy cattle are back on their four feet. There are as many cattle now, the farmers tell us, as there were before the war, and there is no sign of those bloated things with legs in the air that populated the fields when we were there.

On the beach, the only things you hear are the singing of the birds—and you probably didn't have time to hear them when you landed, even during lulls when the artillery was quiet. And there are butterflies hovering over the pillboxes and the good, clean smell of plowed earth in the air. But you want to talk about the smell of the swollen cattle, the grim song of the flying shells, and the noise and confusion that goes with an amphibious operation.

But there's no one to talk to because you're here alone.

Maybe you plan to bring the wife and kids and try to show them the exact place where you landed. And the rim of the white, sea-washed stones that saved your life—you show them that. And maybe you try to point out the "88" position that was giving you most of the trouble.

But the explaining and the pointing out has no real meaning for anyone but yourself—and the memory is so deep inside that it needs blasting to bring it out.

I was sent by This Week and CBS to go back over this ground. There was nothing I wanted more—all those exciting, glorious days when you lived by the hour, when every story was worth doing because men were writing that story in their blood for an honest cause.

If you were in on the D-Day landings, I don't think you'd like coming back to beaches like Omaha. There's something grim and ghoulish about it. You stand and you look at the foxholes where men hid desperately. Then you go to the graveyard and read all those names—the Smiths and the Joneses and the McCloskys and the Weinsteins—and it just makes you plain mad. You think how quickly people forget, how you forgot—until you came back.

You look at these shells and this beach, this silence, and you wonder what it was all about. You wonder if you and the rest of the world will remember the terrible sights and sounds of that day three years ago—and try to make its sacrifices worthwhile.