George Weller - Wellers War: A Legendary Foreign Correspondents Saga of World War II on Five Continents

W arfare profoundly changes not just its combatants but also its eyewitnesses. A war correspondentthe professional eyewitness whose task is to get as close as possible and report as much as possible while surviving as long as possibleis in a peculiar position. Neither victim nor killer, he still risks injury and death. Meanwhile, he must stand aside as portions of the truth he attempts to convey to a readership back home are siphoned off by censorship. It is, ultimately, a frustrating profession that one way or another can destroy many of its bravest and most honest practitioners.

George Anthony Weller (1907-2002) was among the eminent American correspondents of his era, recipient of a 1943 Pulitzer Prize and a 1954 George Polk Award, both for foreign reporting. He first made his name as a courageous reporter during World War II, one of the few to cover every principal theater of war on all the continents. To revisit his diverse work now, sixty-five years later, is to be reminded of how very much the foreign correspondenta vanishing professioncan and should provide, and how much has been lost along with the reading public: not just the skill, in wartime, to evoke unforgettably a battle large or small, but also the rigorous ability to analyze the politics that lies behind it, and give voice to the rich personal stories and complex levels within any human struggle.

One self-flattering aspect of a purely contemporary viewpoint is to imagine that correspondents today are more daring or endangered than in the past. This detailed look at a single reporter's World War II odyssey should put such notions to rest. It is also a chance to follow the effect of five years of continuous war on an exceptional man. Here he is in 1943, after seven months of steadily worsening malaria in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, writing to his editor from a portable hospital near the front about when he might be coming home for a much-needed break: You may wonder why it takes me any time at all to cut loose from this war, when others are able to flit from one theater to another like swallows. It is because I have been deep in it. It takes time to free oneself and get ready to come back.

When George Weller left New York by ship in December 1940 to report from Europe for the Chicago Daily News, he was professionally successful and well prepared for the task at hand. At thirty-three, he had managed to survive the Depression as a writer. He was a mature, highly praised novelist and sometime translator, fluent (albeit with a Boston accent) in German, French, modern Greek, and Italian, conversant in Spanish and Portuguese. He had placed more than a hundred articles and short stories in the leading magazines, including a dozen pieces for the New Yorker. He had spent much of his twenties in Europe, writing two novels and working as a Balkans stringer (1932-1936, a dollar per day) for the New York Times.

Widely published yet still barely solvent, once he left America behind for good and became a full-fledged foreign correspondent, he was immersed in nonstop war. In the opening year alone he endured at close hand a series of upheavals as the Axis took over the world. From Portugal and Spain he moved to more-familiar terrain and watched the Nazis seize Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. His baptism of fire came as his beloved Greece fell to German assault. As the last reporter out of a burning Salonika (by fishing boat), he was quarantined by the Nazis in Athens and taken to Berlin. Freed after nine weeks, he headed south. He tramped to the heart of Central Africa to find tribesmen who had fought the explorer Stanley in the prior century. In Brazzaville he managed a controversial interview with General de Gaulle, head of Free France, who soon tried to deny the overtures he had just made behind Churchill's back.

From there Weller followed Belgium's Congolese army on an obscure campaign against the Italians in the highlands of western Ethiopia. He met Haile Selassie on his recovered throne and, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was sent east by his editor to Singapore. For six weeks he covered the doomed British colony, strategic key to Asia's sea lanes, as the Malay Peninsula fell to the Japanese. He got away on one of the final ships through Bomb Alley and spent the next month covering the collapse of Java, fleeing under heavy strafing and shelling on the last boat to escape. (Time magazine called him the much machine-gunned George Weller) Reaching Australia, he sent out the first account of the epic Battle of the Java Sea, an Allied disaster. All these classic stories are in this book, seen through his skeptical, sympathetic, and fiercely intelligent words.

That was his opening fifteen months; the rest of his war was equally eventful. Amid bouts of malaria he covered the struggle for the Pacific, principally from New Guinea, the Solomons, and Australia. He trained as a paratrooper, the first reporter to do so, and received his Pulitzer for the account of an appendectomy performed by a pharmacist's mate aboard a submarine in enemy waters. After home leave he returned to the Pacific via Italy; a violated Greece in the early throes of civil war; across the Middle East through Palestine, Iran, Iraq; a spell with guerrillas behind enemy lines in Burma; by tumultuous road to China, thence the Philippines, finally Japan. The relentless struggle pared and galvanized his writing, and shaped his vision of the world. In sending back not only the guts of war but the thinking behind it, too, the dispatches transformed him irrevocably.