The Young Turks: Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and Horst Faas in Saigon

On a rainy day in June 1962, two newsmen who provided invaluable service for the Associated Press for many years to come arrived in Saigon to help bolster the efforts of AP bureau chief Malcolm W. Browne. The journalists were reporter Peter Arnett, born and raised in New Zealand, and photographer Horst Faas, survivor of a war-torn upbringing in Berlin, Germany, during World War II.

The three men would all go on to win Pulitzer Prizes for their work in Vietnam and reported about the war for many years (Browne left the country in 1966, later to return; Faas stayed until 1973; and Arnett remained for North Vietnam’s victory in 1975). “I was 27, a gadfly in the journalistic backwaters of Southeast Asia,” noted Arnett, who had worked for the Bangkok World newspaper in Thailand and Laos before joining the AP. He had already been kicked out of  three countries in a region, Arnett noted, “where you have not really made the grade with Old China hands until you have been expelled from at least six.”

The newcomers soon learned, as Browne later pointed out, that the main issues in covering the war centered on the issue of “whether a reporter should merely observe the scene and pass on what is approved by the commanding officer, or whether he should get himself completely apart from the local authorities and stick his nose where it was not wanted. Particularly for the news service reporter who must present an accurate, fair and balanced report, the dilemma poses terrible problems.”

Arnett had stuffed all his worldly possessions, including a red-tasseled ceremonial tribal sword from Laos that he hung on the wall of his room at the Caravelle Hotel, inside of two scruffy suitcases. It was not the first time he had been in Saigon. Four years earlier, Arnett and his girlfriend, Myrtle, had visited the city as “penniless” tourists. He did not expect to stay in his new posting for long. “There was still a desperate quality about the country and its people that I remembered from my first visit and that had unfolded in newspaper headlines since that time: the attempted coups d’état against the dictatorial family regime, and the ferocious guerrilla insurgency that made the chaotic events I had witnessed in neighboring Thailand, Laos and Indonesia seem mild by comparison,” he noted.

To Arnett, Saigon seemed a much more “Americanized” city than others in Southeast Asia. He could see young men in crew cuts—U.S. advisers on leave wearing civilian clothes—looking to grab drinks at bars and trying to find rooms in hotels. The families of the American diplomats, senior military officers, consultants, and civilian aid workers seemed to be prepared to stay in the country for a long time. Arnett picked up a pamphlet at the U.S. Embassy advising the “new arrivals to bring necessary items unavailable here, including ‘card tables with additional round folding tops, seating six or nine, available at Sears, $6.95; ice cream freezer, hand operated, Sears, $10.97; playing cards forbidden to be sold here; picnic equipment with portable ice chests; folding aluminum tables; Thermos jugs; beach umbrella (two and one-half hours to beach),’ along with other items.”

Arnett had heard disquieting comments from AP people based in Asia that Browne “was something of an intellectual bore,” who had “kept his own counsel” and appeared distant to those who had visited the Saigon bureau. While most AP stories were short, the news service’s management allowed Browne to send over the wires long, two-thousand or three thousand-word pieces “about his adventures going out with Vietnamese troops, going to the highlands,” Arnett recalled. Although Wes Gallagher, the man who hired Browne and the wire service’s new general manager and chief executive, believed the longer dispatches added great value to what the agency offered its member newspapers, the “regular AP guys are saying, ‘What’s a 3,000-word story doing on the wire?’” Arnett recalled.

When Arnett presented himself for work at the AP’s office the day after his arrival, Browne experienced some initial misgivings about his new associate, as the New Zealander seemed “a little bewildered.” Noticing Arnett’s small stature (about five feet, six inches tall), Browne worried that he might be someone who could be easily browbeaten by “all of the rotten stuff that went on in Vietnam those days, lying bureaucrats, lying military officers,” as well as being too polite to stand up for himself.

In about an hour, however, Browne’s doubts had melted away as Arnett started “swearing like a trooper and bawling into the telephone and getting on his combat togs and going out and doing the Arnett thing.” Later, one of his fellow newsmen noted that if someone had been asked to design the ideal reporter to cover the Vietnam war, Arnett would have met all the requirements. As for Arnett, he recognized, as some people had suggested, that he might have compensated for his small stature “with a pugnacious attitude,” but he had learned during his years in the journalism profession that “a shrinking violet doesn’t get the story.”

Arnett also changed his initial assessment about his bureau chief. He realized that Browne possessed an intensity and directness that made him stand apart from the “easygoing attitude of the American journalists I had met up to that time.” The two men worked smoothly together, with Arnett enjoying Browne’s intellect and how he held governmental officials accountable for their actions. “He was into the story,” Arnett noted. “He gave me fascinating documents and books to read about the Viet Cong and the history of the war.”

The young reporter quickly became enamored with a twenty-four-page guide to news coverage in Vietnam Browne had prepared to help acclimate him to his new surroundings. Arnett had heard of the guide through the AP rumor mill, with most of the comments about it negative, especially from veteran newsmen “who figured they had nothing left to learn.” Arnett, however, believed that Browne’s pamphlet contained the finest journalism instruction he had ever received and added that if “the military had anything similar it would be classified!” Poring over the manual, he paid great attention to the pointers it offered for how to cover guerrilla warfare. Browne advised those who went out into the field the following:

"Try to keep in good physical condition so you can march or run for a reasonable distance. You might have to save your life doing this at some point. You should know how to swim. Canals and ditches often are above your head.

If you hear a shot and think it’s not from your own side, don’t get up and look around to see where it came from. The second shot might get you. Lie prone under fire, and move only on your belly. Look for cover and move toward it.

When moving with troops DO NOT stay close to the head of a column or the “point man” in a formation. Professional soldiers are paid to do this. DO NOT stand or march next to a radio man or an aid man. They are prime targets. Stick close to the commander, who is generally in the safest position available. The whole idea of covering an operation is to GET THE NEWS AND PICTURES BACK, not to play soldier yourself.

When moving through enemy territory (a good part of Viet Nam is enemy territory) watch your feet. Spikes, mines, concealed pits and booby traps are everywhere. When possible, step in exactly the same places as the soldier ahead of you. If he wasn’t blown up, you probably won’t be." 

In his memoirs Arnett remembered that after reading Browne’s extraordinary document, he looked up to scan the items decorating the AP office’s walls. What came next encapsulated the personalities of the two journalists. Arnett spied what he believed to be a twig hanging on one part of the wall. Upon another glance, however, he saw that it was a “blackened human hand,” which he later learned had been discovered at a Viet Cong ambush and returned to the office by part-time AP photographer Le Minh. Another macabre souvenir Arnett recalled was a bamboo water container stained with a red liquid that office assistant Bill Ha Van Tran told him was human blood.

Browne’s memory had less-sensational details for the office’s battlefield mementos. He admitted to having a photograph of a severed hand stuck to the wall, but not the real thing. “And yes,” he noted, “there was a bamboo-log canteen . . . that I had brought back from an ambush, but it was stained with rotting sugar water, not blood.”

Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler came to power, the husky Faas was familiar with the “dangers of war and the effects of war and bombing and shooting.” Hired as a photographer by the AP in late 1955, he had been exposed to the dangers of combat in both the Republic of the Congo and Algeria, as well as the pressure of being a wire-service employee. “Working for the AP it was always that you worked in fear,” Faas remembered, including fear about events that have not yet happened, and when they did they “invariably happened at three in the morning.”

The AP sent him to Saigon to bolster the quality of photography issued by the bureau. (Faas learned that a stringer cameraman had been reusing film he had shot on previous military operations and passing them off as new engagements.) Arnett had worked with the German in Laos and found him to be very competitive and single-minded about completing his assignments. Arnett remembered Faas responding to a compliment from him about one of his photographs with what could have been his motto: “Great photographers are not born, they just get up earlier in the morning.” Faas considered Browne to be quite different from any of the people he has come across working for the AP: “Very serious. Very studious. . . . And very good sources.” Staffers sometimes had to vacate the office so that Browne could talk with his informants about sensitive matters in private, according to Faas.

Despite his bulk (more than two hundred pounds), Faas believed in pursuing a story no matter where it occurred. “If something is happening somewhere, get there—by foot, or bus, or boat,” he advised. “If you’re not fast you’ll miss it all.” Faas blanched at relying on Saigon photo shops to develop the bureau’s film. He decided to commandeer the AP office’s single bathroom, the only water source available, and turned it into his darkroom. He filled the cramped space with the equipment he needed, sometimes improvising, using, for example, large clay pots to hold the chemicals for developing film. Faas also convinced Pham Van Huan, the bureau’s office boy, to assist him in the darkroom.

Browne marveled at Faas’s efficient operation, finding him to be a “delightful guy, very friendly and warm and a terrific sort of person, but still, he could be an awful kraut [German] sometimes.” Faas also equipped himself for his work by visiting Saigon’s black market to purchase army trousers and a jacket, replacing the insignias with a nametag that also emphasized his affiliation with the AP, as well as a jungle cap, backpack, hammock, and several water bottles. “This was when everything on the market was still old French or Vietnamese source, Vietnamese supplies; they didn’t have all that fancy, fancy gear the Americans came with later on,” Faas noted. 

Faas always wanted to be properly equipped so he did not have to “depend in any way on troops in the field.” Arnett remembered that Horst set himself off from other photojournalists, who had been transitioning from using the clumsy Speed Graphic cameras of the Korean War to the smaller Rolleiflex models. “Horst used the 35mm Leica series, small finely machined cameras that he hung around his neck like Hawaiian leis,” Arnett reported.

Browne learned that Arnett and Faas were “absolutely fearless” when it came to visiting the most violent combat zones, complete with fire coming from all directions and “people dropping like flies.” Although intrepid, Faas, who came to be considered one of the best photographers to document the war, proved to be prudent when it came to risking his life, believing that no picture was worth being wounded or killed. “If there is a good chance, an overwhelming chance that you are about to get hurt by doing something,” he later explained, “don’t do it.”

Faas made it a habit to always be the first person to exit a helicopter, as he believed that the excitement of the first encounter caused the enemy’s aim to be inaccurate. He also tried to check the quality of the troops he accompanied into battle, avoiding those armed with poorly maintained weapons or displaying other signs of ineptitude or bad leadership. “I thought he was the smartest of us,” recalled Richard Pyle, later Saigon bureau chief for the AP. “We would be thinking of what was going to happen and after that happened, what would happen next, but Horst was always thinking what would happen after that. He was always one or two steps ahead of the rest of us.”

Arnett and Faas developed into a superb team, so much so that Charley Mohr, who covered the Vietnam War for Time magazine and later the New York Times, lamented that if he heard about a big battle in the Central Highlands and managed to make his way to the area on a plane or helicopter he would inevitably “find that Peter and Horst had already been there and were back in Saigon filing [their story].”

Everybody in the Saigon AP office did what was required to fill the agency’s rapacious appetite for news. Luckily for Browne, the office in Saigon was different from other AP bureaus. While bureau chiefs in other locations had to sometimes spend more time on “member relations, contracts and so forth as on news,” he did not have to deal with such bureaucratic tasks. “Things tend to run themselves,” he said, “thanks to the very high caliber of our people here.” Browne maintained a policy that “all correspondents should take pictures whenever possible, and all photographers should gather material for stories.”

On operations Faas snapped “superb” photographs with his Leica cameras, and gathered material that, when he returned to the office, he would work on with Arnett to fashion into a story they could send out on the wires. Both Browne and Arnett took cameras with them and used them, bringing back images that, if fuzzy, underexposed, or overexposed, Faas could use his darkroom wizardry to produce a decent photograph. Faas advised the reporters on the proper shutter speed and f-stop (aperture measurement) to use and told them: “Set the distance at six feet. Don’t move the camera; don’t focus. Just look through the viewfinder and—click! Click only when things are moving. Don’t click when people are standing still and looking at you.”

Even with the added manpower, Browne realized that his bureau could not be everywhere, and he had to manage his resources with great care. “There is no single front anywhere in Viet Nam, but a hundred battlefields, where the war flickers on and off like summer lightning,” he said. “Coverage means a seven-day week for everyone.” Daily Browne could never tell where the next attack might come from, either from the ARVN or the VC. He had to “gamble constantly” when it came to picking areas to cover.

In addition to hitching rides into battle on U.S. Army helicopters, Browne and his staff had access to a battered, but “very serviceable,” British Land Rover, one of his first purchases he had made as bureau chief. The vehicle’s off-road capability saved AP staffers’ lives more than once, as they did not have to stick to main road when encountering “a road block or some kind of nastiness up ahead, we could always sort of swivel off. Even through swamps if they weren’t too mushy, we could get through them,” Browne remembered

A not-so-dispassionate observer, David Halberstam of the New York Times, who arrived to cover the Vietnam conflict for the paper of record in September 1962, commented that Browne imparted an important tone to the bureau in two ways. First, he stood behind his staff when they were “challenged by the Saigon officialdom, something which was very important, and which greatly liberated those who worked for him to give their best work,” Halberstam noted.

Additionally, Halberstam recalled that Browne never “big-footed the story,” which prevented any “pettiness and back-biting” among the staff. Browne was able to do this, Halberstam added, because he believed hogging the story was “morally wrong, and because his own philosophy which soon became the philosophy of Arnett and Faas as well, was that there was going to be enough here for everyone—plenty of war, plenty of heartbreak, plenty of stories.”

  

Richard Tregaskis and the Road to Tokyo

The evening before the USS Ticonderoga’s July 24, 1945, strike mission against the ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Kure Naval Arsenal on the island of Honshu, one of the men scheduled to fly with Torpedo Squadron 87 a Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber had a visitor in his cabin. The squadron’s safety officer, Lieutenant Algie Stuart Jr., regaled the crewman with unsettling stories about pilots who had been shot down, had ditched their planes in the Pacific, and had been imprisoned by the Japanese.

The two men agreed that fundamentally there were two possibilities facing those making the flight the next morning—either they would be back aboard the carrier tomorrow afternoon, or they would not. The Avenger crewman thought about the risks he faced and went to sleep with surprising ease in his stuffy cabin. “But I woke up at regular intervals during the night, automatically, to check the luminous dial of my watch, to be sure I wasn’t oversleeping,” he recalled.

One unusual aspect of the mission was that the crewman had not been carefully selected and trained for the task ahead. He was, in fact, a civilian war correspondent, Richard Tregaskis, who was covering the final days of action in the Pacific for his “Road to Tokyo” series for the Saturday Evening Post. The reporter, best known to readers for his best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary, had returned to the Pacific after witnessing the breakout from the Normandy Beachhead in Europe, and experiencing brutal street fighting with the U.S. Army’s First Division in Aachen, Germany.

Before joining the Ticonderoga, Tregaskis had flown five missions on a B-29 Superfortress bomber based on Guam—missions that had included strikes against the Japanese Homeland. Back onboard a carrier at sea and reviewing his notes in his hot cabin located just under the flight deck, Tregaskis could hear a “Stravinskian concert of sound,” including the “periodic, melancholy roaring of the planes taking off from the deck just over my head, one after another—the hornet-like drone of the fighters, the deeper toned bass of the dive-bombers and torpedo planes; rough blobs of sound strung like beads of an abacus on the background of the whirring of fans.”

Tregaskis had observed a few changes in the naval air war since the last time he had been on a carrier, observing the Battle of Midway from the deck of the USS Hornet. Some of the obvious changes included larger, more powerful aircraft; “mules,” small tractors used to haul the planes around the flight deck, “replacing the muscular effort expended in the old days by deck crewmen who manhandled the planes into position”; and improvements in the ship’s navigational techniques and radar equipment.

Lieutenant Commander Walt Haas, an early navy ace now second in command of the ship’s air group, also pointed out to the reporter that there existed a basic change in the whole feeling of the war. “A lot less never-wracking [sic] now,” Haas noted. In the early days, he added, U.S. forces were sometimes exceeded in numbers and skill by the enemy, but now the Americans overwhelmed the Japanese both in quantity and quality.

The Ticonderoga was one of the carriers, along with the Essex, Randolph, Monterey, and Bataan, that made up Task Force 38.3, which also included the battleships North Carolina and Alabama and several screening destroyers. On his fourth day aboard the Ticonderoga, Tregaskis took his first flight, a warm-up to get the feeling of flying from a carrier, onboard a Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber, the largest of the carrier aircraft. It proved to be quite different from what he had experienced with the bomber crew in the Marianas. “I learned how small and relatively slow the carrier planes are; learned the feeling of insecurity that comes from operating from a moveable airfield, with only water, elsewhere, to land in,” he recalled.

Lieutenant Commander Bill Miles, the skipper of the torpedo squadron, made sure the correspondent flew with a competent pilot, assigning him to his wingman, Ensign Paul R. Stephens of Topeka, Kansas, known as Steve to his friends on the ship. Tregasis would be taking the place of one of the three-man crew; the enlisted man onboard had to do double duty with both radio and gunnery. Aviation Radioman Third Class Eugene Egumnoff, age twenty-one, from Vineland, New Jersey, joined Tregaskis on the Avenger, while its other usual crew member, Bob Pierpaoli, only nineteen, who had been in school before the war in Yuma, Arizona, flew with another Avenger pilot for the Kure attack.

“He was always attentive in the pre-mission briefings,” Tregaskis said of Stephens, “sitting in one of the first few rows of the overstuffed airline chairs in the ready room where instruction sessions were held; always paying attention and making careful notes.”

The twenty-four-year-old pilot with thinning hair was so conscientious about his duties that he passed up participating in card games—practically the sole source of amusement among the young pilots—in favor of getting a good night’s rest. The carrier’s air group were “eager beavers,” Tregaskis remembered. They were new to war, coming out from Hawaii three months before. Since then they had flown only a few missions, including practice strikes against Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands and supporting ground operations in the final stages of the Battle of Okinawa.

Although single-minded and determined when it came to combat, Tregaskis found Stephens to be pleasant company off duty. The pilot possessed a “pleasant voice and modest way of speaking, with his head held rather low. He had a winning way of giving you all of his attention while you were talking; while he looked at you with level, wide-spaced light blue eyes. He also smiled easily—an ingenuous, sidewise smile.”

Before launching from the Ticonderoga’s flight deck for his mission with Stephens and Egumnoff, Tregaskis remembered that the squadron had its main target changed three times. “Almost always, in my experience, there seem to be such last-minute changes in a military or naval operation; especially in a job as big as the one they were planning for us,” he noted. Rumors abounded that the squadron would be attacking antiaircraft positions, then came reports that they would be hitting Japanese ships, but with torpedoes. The last mission sounded to Tregaskis like “a fairly efficient way to commit suicide; skimming in a slow-speed, cumbersome torpedo plane through a land-locked harbor with all the guns of Japan’s great naval arsenal shooting at you.”

Gallows humor abounded among the pilots. When one, very young-looking ensign, said he did not mind getting hit by enemy fire, but did not want to be shot down, one of his friends joked: “Hell, they [the Japanese] only cut your head off—that’s a quick way to die.” Finally, the squadron learned that it would be carrying four 500-pound bombs instead of torpedoes, and their target would be the battleship Hyūga, which had been adapted for use as an aircraft carrier with the addition of a flight deck to its stern. The enemy ship was berthed off the island of Nasake Shima, just outside the harbor, in shallow water. To Tregaskis, the changes meant that the chances for his survival seemed far better than they had been just a few days before.

Tregaskis awoke for the July 24 mission at 5:00 a.m. and went to the wardroom for an early breakfast of eggs, bacon, oranges, apples, toast, and coffee. He found himself thinking as he ate, as he always did on such occasions: “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.” Egumnoff suggested that he and Tregaskis go up on deck and get into their plane. They ducked through the carrier’s low hatches, climbed onto the flight deck and into the morning sunlight, and, after some investigation among the close-packed aircraft, found the Avenger they had been assigned for their day’s work.

A few minutes later, Stephens arrived from the ready room and climbed into the pilot’s cockpit. “He seemed harassed and serious,” Tregaskis remembered, “apparently his usual mental attitude before a flight.” The reporter swiveled, twisted, and shoved his elbows, knees, shoulders, and feet into the cramped position in the rear turret, where he would sit during the Avenger’s approach to the target. When the plane began its descent before making its final dive on its target, Egumnoff would leave his radio position, in the lower section (the bilge), and take Tregaskis’s place in the turret in case any enemy fighters jumped them. “And as we lost altitude and ran in to drop our missles [sic] on the Hyuga, I’d climb up into the middle cockpit, whence a good view of the target and our drop on it, would be afforded,” Tregaskis noted. He felt lucky that there was always a need for making such mechanical arrangements before an attack, as it “helped to keep one’s imagination from working too hard.”

Tregaskis heard his Avenger’s engine roaring full blast and the plane was rolling down the deck. “I braced against the headrest of the gunner’s seat, saw the busy figures of the deck crews slide by, and in a second knew that we were off the deck, away from the ship,” he remembered. “The floating island which had been our home and base became a ridiculous toy, with increasing distance—a model ploughing a white, high bow wave in the clear blue water.” As his Avenger gained altitude, he could look out on a score of warships that were part of the task force, strung out to the horizon, as well as numerous dots of planes rising everywhere from the many carriers. The Avengers led the Ticonderoga air group, with the Helldiver dive-bombers and the Hellcat fighters (“our guardian angels,” noted Tregaskis) that would escort them into the target falling in behind.

Approaching Japan, Tregaskis could hear garbled voices in his headphones, with reports about American bombers making their runs. He heard something about enemy airfields being open and presenting themselves as good targets, and another voice, clearly stating, “I don’t know what it is, but I hit it.” Looking down he spied through a rift in the clouds a group of rock islands—Japan. Over the intercom came Egumnoff’s tenor voice: “In about five minutes we can attack, Mr. Stephens. We’re about nine minutes from our target.”

Passing over a large city, heading for the Inland Sea, Tregaskis imagined the panic below as the Japanese spotted the American planes and knew they were about to be attacked. “Once I had sat under Japanese bombers, on Guadalcanal, and watched them line up for a deliberate run in bright sunlight,” Tregaskis noted. “The wheel had turned full circle, now. And I wrote, impetuously, in my notebook: They know by now they’re under attack, by God.” Switching positions with Egumnoff, the correspondent saw smoke rising from the surrounding rugged land, possibly from antiaircraft positions that had been hit.

When Tregaskis’s plane neared its target, bursts of flak smudged the sky around them, and he could see the “flashes of the guns on the ground, blinking like lights.” A plane next to them discharged silvery sheets of some material from a side port, “strings of something like Christmas tree rain,” he noted, which was chaff, thin pieces of aluminum scattered in the sky to confuse Japanese radar.

As his Avenger flew through the spent bursts of antiaircraft fire, Tregaskis felt the aircraft diving, rushing headlong toward the water below, causing him to gasp for air as the g-forces built up. The experience was overwhelming. He later wrote:

 I couldn’t get enough air; my mouth reached out wide for air, as if I were shouting and couldn’t shout, and the force of the dive pushed me forward until my forehead was pressed against the back of the pilot’s headrest. Things were going too fast. I couldn’t think. Were we under control? Was this right? Would I know if we were hit? Whatever we were going to get, whatever was going to happen, this was it. Then I saw the ship down there, the width and the great bulk, the gray color of it. It seemed smooth on top—the flight deck? The Hyuga? I saw a tall geyser of a bomb splash in the same instant, a tall column springing from the water, close to the ship. Beyond it, a shorter, smallish splash, a green geyser. I tried to shout and get air; couldn’t. Our dive went on. Down and down. Too long? Was Steve alive? Had he been hit?

Then we were pulling out of our dive, turning sharply. I saw the enemy ship behind us over a wingtip; saw one, two, three, four bombs spring geysers, the green water, straddling the gray hull, sandwiching it. Violent single columns of water were striking around it, explosive fingers stabbing towards the sky. Another brace of four violent fingers, four bombs, smashed from the water around the ship, the innermost fingers striking her sharply at her edge, turning up smoke, churning the shallow water green and brown. They were braces of bombs from the planes of our squadron: four bombs for each plane. Another brace struck the water, one in the water, the second a blast of quick fire, a direct hit, that glared in the middle of the steel hull; the others, over, splashing on the other side. And then we had turned so far, and were jinking, vacillating, turning so sharply that I could see no more of the target.

 The squadron rendezvoused farther out into the bay for the return to the Ticonderoga. One by one, the Avengers, Helldivers, and Hellcats joined up, while Tregaskis nervously scanned the surrounding land masses and harbors straining to see if enemy fighters would appear seeking vengeance. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, the group set off for home, with the fighters weaving back and forth over the Avengers’ tails to offer protection.

Scrambling down into the bilge to talk to Egumnoff, Tregaskis heard him shout over the roar of the engine that he had seen a couple of “good hits” on the Hyūga. As they neared the Ticonderoga, the weather worsened. A low, gray rain squall grew so thick that “we lost sight of our ship each time we swung in a landing circle. I saw Steve slide his canopy back so that he could see better through the driving rain, felt the drops whipping through the small openings between his cockpit and mine,” Tregaskis wrote.

The Avenger circled the ship twice, finally making its approach on its third try and jolting to a stop. As they came even with the carrier’s island structure, the correspondent saw the “sad, sunken form of a Helldiver which had crashed on deck,” an obstacle that Stephens had just enough space to pass. Upon climbing out of his cockpit, Stephens, Tregaskis recalled, took a deep breath of air before commenting, “That was pretty rugged,” squatting down to fondly pat the wet boards of the flight deck. “We wouldn’t know the full story of the success or losses of our group until later when results were compiled, but at least we were certain of this: we, Steve, Gene and I, were home,” noted a relieved Tregaskis.

That evening Lieutenant Bill Kummer, one of the ship’s flight surgeons, passed out “medicinal” whiskey to the pilots, jigger by jigger, with ice and water. Tregaskis sat with Stephens, who declined the alcohol, saying he did not feel like it and besides, he was scheduled to return to Kure the next day and wanted his head to be clear for the mission. Tregaskis decided not to accompany Stephens and Egumnoff, instead hoping to fly with them on a planned future sortie against airfields and other installations near Tokyo. After the Ticonderoga spent some time refueling and giving its crew a rest, the attack on the airfields was scrapped in favor of another go at Kure and the ships still afloat in the harbor; Tregaskis decided to remain behind.

The Ticonderoga had lost pilots and crewmen on the mission. As he had noticed when he was on the USS Hornet for the Battle of Midway, those who survived appeared to react to the death of their colleagues with little or no emotion, adjusting “without noticeable effort, when suddenly there were empty chairs at the table,” Tregaskis noted. Someone might comment about an absent aviator, saying he had been “a good guy,” and there would be a moment of soberness, but then the conversation would return to “where it had been before, and if there was humor in the conversation, that was not sacrilegious or disrespectful.” Deaths were expected in war and it was best, the correspondent pointed out, to “put the thing in the back of your mind, and not allow yourself to feel badly about it; at least, not to say so, for the sake of the morale of the others who were also still alive.”

For the return mission to Kure on July 28, Stephens flew with his regular crew, Egumnoff and Pierpaoli. Tregaskis watched them prepare for the mission in the ready room, with Stephens working industriously over his plotting board, as usual, while the others gathered their flight gear. In the back of the room, the correspondent saw a group of radiomen/gunners kidding each other about the danger they faced, as they had just heard over the speaker system from the combat intelligence center that the task force’s fighters, the first to reach the target, reported “plenty of bogies (enemy planes) in the air and some of them were being shot down

At lunch the officer who usually sat across the table from Tregaskis told him that he had heard that one of the torpedo bombers had spun in and crashed during the mission. The reporter asked what crew it had been, but the man said he did not know. After finishing his meal, Tregaskis wandered down to the torpedo squadron’s ready room. Most of the squadron’s members were being interrogated by the intelligence officer, Lieutenant Charlie Bartlett. Some had finished answering questions about the mission and were gathered in a pantry equipped with coffee, sandwiches, and ice cream. Tregaskis scanned their faces and could not find Stephens. “I wondered if he had been here, finished with his interrogation, and gone to his sack to rest,” he recalled.

Asking what had happened, Tregaskis learned from a shaken pilot, Lieutenant Dick Gale, that he had seen the Avenger with Stephens, Egumnoff, and Pierpaoli aboard crash into the sea. Apparently, while climbing through a thick overcast, both Stephens and Gale had lost their bearings, suffered vertigo, and fell into tight spins. Gale recovered from his spin; Stephens had not. After regaining control of his aircraft, Gale had seen Stephens, about two miles away, and watched as the other Avenger’s wing started to disintegrate. “Then it broke off,” Gale told Tregaskis. “The plane went straight in. I orbited the place and had my radioman look, but there were no survivors; only some smoke bombs and some dye marker. They must have broken loose when the plane broke up.”

Later that evening, Tregaskis sought solitude on the flight deck. His reverie was interrupted by one of the torpedo squadron’s radiomen, who said to him that he wanted the correspondent to know how badly they all felt about Stephens’s death. “Bob and Gene were good boys,” Tregaskis responded. “It’s a damn shame.” But he realized that there were no words he could utter that would “really make it better,” except that perhaps those who paid the ultimate price, by dying while engaged in combat overseas, became important, much more important to history, in fact, than “any individual would normally be if he lived and died normally: and that furthermore, that they died as any man should, with honor.”