A NOTE BY EVAN OSNOS
N THE SPRING of 1941, as America braced for war, Harold Ross wrote to E. B. White to lament the “present emergency” and to offer a note of reassurance. “War, after all, is simple. It’s black and white,” he wrote. “It’s peace that is complex.” The war was not simple, but the strange new peace that followed was every bit as vexing as Ross had predicted. In a comment in 1945, six months before the bombing of Hiroshima, White wrote, “We feel like a man who left his house to go to a Punch-and-Judy show and, by some error in direction, wandered into Hamlet.”
The fifties presented The New Yorker with a planet that felt larger and more navigable, but also uncertain and inescapable, riven by ideology and energized by an atomic age that carried the prospect of transformative change or unspeakable harm. Members of the staff who had gone to war as greenhorns—St. Clair McKelway, writer and editor, had entered the Army knowing only the three-fingered salute of a Boy Scout—returned with knowledge and curiosity about the world beyond. E. J. Kahn, Jr., had joined the magazine straight from Harvard, but, after he was drafted, he wrote The Army Life, which narrated his experience from boot camp to battles in the Pacific. When the Americas and their allies went off to Korea, Kahn followed, in 1951, staying close to the front to describe battles like that of Gloster Hill, in which the surviving members of an outgunned British battalion crawled to safety beneath machine-gun fire in “a ditch about a foot deep.”
By age and disposition, Ross was of an earlier era. His instincts were isolationist, but as a newsman he greeted the postwar world as a vast buffet. To W. Averell Harriman, he wrote, “We may sound provincial to you, but we seem like the International Gazette to me. We got started on the wide world during the war and can’t quit.”
For The New Yorker, the fifties brought some dividends: advertising had never been more abundant, and a miniature edition of the magazine distributed free to GIs had cultivated hundreds of thousands of new readers. But the decade also brought painful political pressures. E. B. White, Richard Rovere, and others raged in print against Joseph McCarthy’s bullying and fearmongering. Critics nicknamed the magazine “The New Worker,” and J. Edgar Hoover opened files on the staff. Privately, Ross worried that Janet Flanner, his Paris correspondent, was too congenial to socialism, and, in 1950, she was summoned to New York for some “reorientation.” Thomas Kunkel, in Genius in Disguise, his biography of Ross, writes that Ross and Flanner met for coffee at the “21” Club and the conversation went poorly. He spoke anxiously about the rise in Europe of “the Commies,” as he called them, and urged her to be skeptical of the French, according to her recollection. She offered her resignation, which he rejected, and she eventually returned to Paris and her writing.
There were other accusations. A couple of years later, shortly after William Shawn became the editor, Kay Boyle, a contributor of journalism and fiction, who had signed petitions and donated small sums to Communist-front groups, was called before a “loyalty hearing.” Shawn wrote a letter; it attested to her “extraordinary character” but generally offered a muted defense, and he wouldn’t pay her legal fees. She had last been published in The New Yorker eighteen months prior, and he declined to renew her accreditation as a correspondent in Germany. She blamed that decision for her being blacklisted from American magazines for years to come.
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Beyond the reach of America’s political turmoil, the magazine ventured into new territory. Traditions had to adapt. Because of an instinct for secrecy, Shawn was generally reluctant to commit his editorial notes and instructions to letters. But his newly far-flung writers left him no choice but to deliver his notes to Mary McCarthy in Venice by Western Union, in the argot of cable-ese: “EYE ALSO SUGGEST THAT YOU MIGHT CONSIDER RECASTING LAST TWO OR THREE SENTENCES.”
The new frontiers created opportunities for new voices, writers with no New York pedigree but the language skills and the local knowledge to get to stories that others could not. Joseph Wechsberg, born in Czechoslovakia, knew only a few hundred words of English when, in 1938, he arrived in America. He had trained as a classical violinist, played in Paris nightclubs, and commanded a machine-gun unit on the Polish front, but he had never written. He soon discovered The New Yorker and resolved to write for it someday. Within four years, he had been drafted into the U.S. Army; on his way to Europe in a psychological-warfare division, he dropped by the New Yorker offices and offered to send the magazine a piece about his hometown, if he ever reached it. He did, and over the next three decades he published more than a hundred stories, mostly from Europe, where he could capture the often hidden dramas of private life under authoritarianism. To relay the story of East Germany’s first popular revolt against Communist rule, in 1953, he recounted one day in the life of Friedrich Schorn, an accountant in a chemical factory, who awoke one morning so cowed by Soviet rule that he was afraid to listen to an illegal radio station. By nightfall, through the improbable chemistry of rebellion, he had emerged as a leader, a fugitive, and a Barrikadenstürmer—“a barricade fighter.”
In one story or another, the magazine was struggling to make sense of a world in which some of our allies had survived the war only to lose control of their own countries. In 1953, four years after Chiang Kai-shek fled mainland China, defeated by Chairman Mao, Emily Hahn ventured to the island of Taiwan. She found Chiang, the Generalissimo, in reluctant repose—brooding, fussing over ill-fitting dentures, plotting his revenge with aging generals, aching “for the great day of glorious battle they hope will come.” Every evening, she watched him pace the hills “in a long gown and a pith helmet,” trailed by a fleet of creeping black Cadillacs, poised for the moment when the great man, or his cocker spaniel, had walked enough and the pair would slump into the limousine. Like her subject, Hahn was unsuited to the sedentary life. Brought up in St. Louis, she published her first piece in The New Yorker in 1929 and embarked on a foreign adventure that eventually encompassed eight decades and fifty-two books. She wrote of crossing Belgian Congo on foot, of her addiction to opium, of diamonds, and of D. H. Lawrence. She kept her trips to the office in New York to a minimum; on a rare visit to the city, she met the twelve-year-old Roger Angell, who later became an editor and writer, and handed him a monkey—“a small, solemn-faced, greenish-brown” macaque, he recalled. She instructed Angell not to let the monkey bite. “If she does,” Hahn said, “bite her right back—bite her on the ear—and she’ll never do it again.” When Hahn died, in 1997, at the age of ninety-two, the magazine titled its remembrance “Ms. Ulysses.”
Six decades later, the Taiwan that Hahn captured—low-slung, rural, remote—has vanished into a blur of high-speed trains and glass-walled skyscrapers. But other portraits that appeared in the New Yorker of the fifties astonish us today not because they are unrecognizable but because they are unfathomably unchanged. In 1957, A. J. Liebling visited a novelty of postwar geography, a “thin leg of coastal land now known to the world at large as the Gaza Strip.” Nine years after the creation of Israel, the sliver of parched land abutting the Sinai and the Mediterranean was, in Liebling’s estimation, already an orphan. To the south, Egyptians offered no citizenship to the Gazans; to the north, a checkpoint on the border with Israel was “a gateway to nowhere for three hundred thousand people.” By the end of the century, the population of Gaza had ballooned at least sixfold, to 1.8 million, but its land was no larger, and its predicament endured. Its people remained, much as Liebling had found them, “trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea, with an uncertain air supply and no means of egress.”
The dispatches of the fifties carry a sense of wonder and apprehension at a world “changed utterly,” as Yeats had put it in 1916 in the midst of earlier convulsions. One doesn’t find many predictions in the pieces here; rarer still are the predictions that proved to be true. In the spring of 1958, Norman Lewis, a nomadic British writer, set off for the Sierra Maestra in search of Fidel Castro, the young lawyer and intellectual who had gone to the mountains wi
th his band of largely middle-class guerrillas. As a writer, Lewis liked to downplay his own significance; he once said he was as forgettable as “a minor character in an El Greco picture.” (His peers disagreed. Auberon Waugh judged him “the greatest travel writer alive, if not the greatest since Marco Polo.”) Castro’s early experiments in rebellion had been “farcically mismanaged,” Lewis wrote. In one battle, the guerrillas were “butchered out of hand by government troops.” But, as Lewis stayed on in Cuba, he sensed that the government’s confidence was misplaced. When he filed his dispatch, he acknowledged that the regime was determined to hold out. But, he added, “Castro might contrive to hold out even longer.”
FROM
E. J. Kahn, Jr.
MAY 26, 1951 (ON A KOREAN WAR BATTLE)
T IS HARD to tell at this date which battles of the Korean war military historians will ultimately single out for special mention, but it is doubtful whether they can overlook a recent two-and-a-half-day engagement that, whatever name the historians may settle on for it, is known now to those who went through it as the Battle of the Imjin, and that has already been officially characterized as “epic” by the Eighth Army. The battle began, just south of the Imjin River and some twenty-five miles northwest of Seoul, on the night of April 22nd, as the Chinese were launching their spring offensive all across the front, and it continued, without letup, until midafternoon of April 25th. The great majority of the United Nations troops who participated in it were British, of the 29th Brigade, but it was nonetheless a fittingly multinational affair, involving Belgians, South Koreans, and Filipinos, as well as Americans from both the continental United States and Puerto Rico. The 29th Brigade, with a total strength of sixty-six hundred and a front-line fighting strength of four thousand, suffered more than a thousand casualties during that bloody span of time.
Out of something like sixty thousand Chinese who assaulted the seventeen-thousand-yard sector the brigade was holding when the battle started, it is widely, if unofficially, believed that between ten and fifteen thousand were dispatched. And what is perhaps more important—since hordes of dead Chinese were almost as commonplace as hordes of live ones in Korea that particular week—is that the steadfast resistance of the British to this massive assault was very likely the most influential single factor in the dashing of the Communists’ probable hope of celebrating May Day in the capital city of the Republic of Korea.
The entire 29th Brigade saw action in the Battle of the Imjin, but the worst assault fell upon one unit, the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, informally called the Glosters. Of the six hundred and twenty-two Glosters who were in the most advanced of the brigade’s three echelons when the fight got under way, just five officers and thirty-four other ranks were available for duty three days afterward, and they only because they had made a near-miraculous withdrawal through enemy fire so intense and enveloping that they subsequently said they felt like human targets in a shooting gallery.
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During the daytime of April 22nd, there were no particular signs of trouble to come. All along the front, to be sure, the United Nations had for several days been awaiting the Chinese offensive, but no one could anticipate precisely when it would be launched, nor did the British seem more or less likely than any other troops in the line to bear the brunt of the attack. On the twenty-first, the British, who had the 1st Republic of Korea Division on their left and the American 3rd Infantry Division on their right, had sent an exploratory patrol across the Imjin. It had travelled ten thousand yards beyond the river and had encountered only a scattering of enemy troops. A British intelligence report took note of a “large undetermined number of enemy north of the river,” but concluded that nothing more worrisome than strong enemy probing patrols could be expected on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. The brigade troops in the line were getting hot meals and, assuming that they would continue to get them, had no combat rations along. That turned out to be unfortunate, for the most any one of them had to eat during the battle was one hard-boiled egg and a slice of bread.
Shortly after midnight of the twenty-second, when Saint George’s Day was only half an hour old, Able Company of the Glosters was attacked. By four o’clock, the whole battalion was engaged, and by six the whole brigade. The enemy came in three waves. In the first rush, Able Company lost its commander and two other officers. One walkie-talkie operator, running out of ammunition, used his rifle as a club, swinging it at the Chinese as they came into his foxhole and shouting, “Banzai, you bastards! Banzai!” A few minutes later, the radioman regained his hereditary reserve and called into his transmitter, with finality, “We’re overrun. We’ve had it. Cheerio.” By midmorning, the Glosters had at least a regiment in front of them and, because the South Koreans on their left had been driven back several thousand yards, an indefinite number on the hills behind them. By midday, the Glosters hadn’t been budged from the high points they had instructions to hold, but they were completely separated from the rest of the brigade, and the Chinese had penetrated so far back that the battalion’s supply echelon was overrun, too, and nine of its men were taken prisoner. Quantities of the things the Glosters needed most desperately—machine guns, ammunition, and medical supplies—were packed into straw-lined bags and dropped to them by six light observation planes. A larger-scale airdrop was set up for the following morning. At dawn on the twenty-fourth, three Flying Boxcars were poised high over the Glosters’ positions, waiting for the morning mist to lift so they could descend close enough to drop their cargo accurately. But when the mist rose, the pilots found the Glosters, and not a few Chinese, fighting literally inside a curtain of falling shells that the brigade’s gunners and mortarmen were throwing around them. The planes couldn’t dip down unless the shelling was halted, and the decision was up to the Glosters. The Glosters waved the hovering Boxcars away.
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There had been three air strikes on Saint George’s Day. On the twenty-fourth, there were so many that at noon a young American Air Force lieutenant who was serving as liaison between the brigade and its tactical air support stopped keeping track of individual strikes, as he had been conscientiously doing up to then. Probably some fifty planes gave the brigade a hand that morning. There were plenty of targets available to them. So many Chinese had infiltrated around the Glosters’ flanks, both of which were by then exposed, that one air observer spotted some seven hundred of them standing around nonchalantly in a single group, in the open. One dive-bomber seared a Chinese-held hill with napalm. The nine Glosters captured the day before were on it, along with their guards. Several of the guards caught fire, and while they were frantically trying to beat out the flames, seven of the Glosters, who had somehow contrived to avoid being more than uncomfortably warmed, ran down the hill and escaped into the lines held by the Fusiliers and the Rifles. This was a particular relief to one of them, who had spent five years in a Nazi prisoner-of-war enclosure. The Fusiliers and the Rifles were better off than the Glosters, but they were having no picnic, either. There were Chinese behind them, too, and brigade headquarters organized a makeshift reinforcement party to help them out. It was composed of what little could then be mustered for the purpose: eight tanks from the Hussars, some Royal Engineers acting as infantry, a few Royal Army Service Corps lorries—which under normal circumstances wouldn’t be sent too near the enemy but whose drivers in this instance volunteered to lumber along behind the tanks right to the front—and forty green replacements who had reported to the brigade that day and had been assigned to the Fusiliers. Some of them never got to report to the Fusiliers. There were so many enemy wandering around the countryside by then that the headquarters was under small-arms fire, and mortars were being lobbed out at the enemy from behind brigade headquarters—which, as a major in charge of the mortars later remarked, was a most ungentlemanly way to wage war.
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