“Allegiance to no faction”: The Indiana Daily Student

During the summer of 1979 a student journalist from Indiana University, Tom French, an Indianapolis native who had attended the Indiana State Fair for years, became intrigued by one of its more outlandish attractions—the World’s Largest Hog competition. He set out to write about it for IU’s Indiana Daily Student newspaper.

French had always considered the Largest Hog event “weird,” wondering why someone would take the trouble to raise an animal so enormous that its legs literally could not support its weight. His editors at the IDS, friends of his and excellent journalists, urged him not to do the story as it was not a serious subject. “By that point I had written hundreds of serious stories and had been bored to tears by most of them,” French recalled. “My question was: What’s wrong with once in a while writing something that people actually want to read?” He went to the fair, observed the winning hog and traveled to the farm in Elwood, Indiana, where it had been raised. Through his reporting, he learned that the story was “really about the American obsession with super-sizing everything. I became convinced that it had something to do with the vastness of the American landscape and American ambitions.”

The article won first place that fall in the features category in the Hearst Journalism Awards program for college students, earned French a trip to the championship that next summer in San Francisco, and helped him land a job with the Saint Petersburg Times, where French, today a professor of practice in journalism for The Media School at IU, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a Sigma Delta Chi award for “Angels & Demons,” a series that explored the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters. The article became a seminal piece of narrative journalism. Fellow Pulitzer recipient Anne Hull of the Washington Post said French’s series long dominated the craft and served as “a model for the rest of us to follow.” It could never have happened without French’s association with the IDS. “It was the best learning experience I ever had and one of the greatest times in my life,” said French, who also served as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. “I never really understood how much freedom we had to make mistakes, take chances and do outrageous things.”

Years before French’s investigation of the state fair’s odd attraction, another Daily Student reporter, and future Pulitzer Prize winner, Ernie Pyle, heard news that IU’s twelve-man baseball team had been invited to play a series of exhibition games in Japan. “I’ve just got to go,” Pyle, struck with wanderlust, told his friend Paige Cavanaugh. Pyle obtained permission from Dean of Men Clarence Edmondson, borrowed $200, and, with three of his fraternity brothers, secured jobs on the ship (the Keystone State) taking the baseball squad to Japan. Pyle wrote his parents that he possessed “a pretty level head, so there is not the slightest cause to worry about me. I have trotted around this old globe considerably, and I think I should be pretty well qualified to handle myself wisely.”

The junior from Dana, Indiana, made sure to mail articles about his experiences to the IDS, including pieces on a storm that sailors told him was “the worst they had ever seen on the Pacific with the exception of a typhoon,” and his duties as a bellboy, including carrying ice and water, shining shoes, delivering packages, drawing baths, and tending to the “innumerable queer wants of the passengers.” Pyle and his fraternity brothers even managed to help a young Filipino stowaway, Eugene Uebelhardt, evade detection and make his way onto American soil.

French’s idiosyncratic hog story and Pyle’s audacious Japan trip would no doubt have delighted the original editors of the university’s first newspaper, The Indiana Student, which appeared on February 22, 1867, the same year the IU board of trustees voted to allow women to attend classes. Although in its first issue its editors—Henry C. Duncan, Robert D. Richardson, and Henry C. “Sol” Meredith—solemnly proclaimed the publication owed “allegiance to no faction, subservient to no personal motives of exaltation, pure in tone, seeking the common good, partial and guided by a spirit of truth and justice.”

The editors invented for a front-page article in the newspaper’s inaugural issue a meeting in the upper room of the Fee Building on the northwest corner of the Bloomington Square where such luminaries of the time as President Andrew Johnson, writer Washington Irving, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, publishers James Gordon Bennett, journalist Henry J. Raymond, and editor George D. Prentice gathered to determine a name for the IU publication.

Among the possibilities considered included the “Bloomington Regulator,” with one of its principal objects to “regulate society, regulate literature, regulate students, regulate the faculty, regulate public exhibitions, regulate Bloomington; in short, it was to be a regulator in the fullest sense of the term.” The article noted that Raymond in particular believed “The University Lightning Rod” would be fitting, as it would be the “means of silently conducting all the superfluous gas generated in the fruitful craniums of certain ‘smart students,’ either to immortal glories in the skies, or . . . to its more appropriate place, the dominions of Pluto beneath the earth.” The men also pondered such names as “My Policy Gazette” (Johnson’s choice), “Collegian, “Review,” “Banner,” “Mirror,” and “Bummer.”

Finally, Raymond, “by a heroic stretch of imagination and herculean wielding of brain power,” came up with “The Indiana Student.” That first issue also included a puckish notice informing students they should bear in mind that marriage notices would be “inserted free of charge,” and a piece advocating for campus improvements (a familiar theme for subsequent IU student newspapers),  especially the building of a “walk from the campus gate to the college. Many of our citizens have been deterred from attending performances at the college, in consequent of the deep mud through which they were compelled to wade. This could be remedied at a small outlay, and should be attended to at once, if we desire to keep up our reputation; all it needs is someone to take hold and it can be put through. Who will make the move?”

Throughout its more than 150 years of existence, the IDS has changed with the times and technology, from the hot-metal typesetting days of the Linotype machine to scanners and computer terminals and reading breaking news on handheld devices that can be slipped in and out of a pocket with ease. The newspaper has fought to maintain itself economically and reflect the audience it was writing for as it evolved from a for-profit venture for its editors to one owned by the university and used a laboratory to train journalists at IU to an independent publication employing students of all types with its editor-in-chief selected by a publications board including professional journalists and students. “These are our students on display,” noted Trevor Brown, former dean of the IU School of Journalism. “Obviously at times they disappoint us. At other times they thrill us with the quality. But that’s no different from a professional newspaper.”

Mottos used by the IDS have reflected the changes in journalism over the years, with the paper in 1914 using “Best in the Middle West,” in 1929 “He Serves Best Who Serves the Truth” and “’Tis the Truth that Makes Man Free,” and in the late 1990s “You Are the News.” The work produced by the newspaper has often been honored with national awards, including numerous Pacemakers from the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and IDS alumni have earned for their articles and photographs more Pulitzer Prizes than graduates from any other active college newspapers.

Before the Indiana Student made its appearance in 1867, other universities had already started publications offering literary outpourings and news, including the Dartmouth Gazette in 1800, followed by the Asbury Review, the Yale Courant, and Harvard Advocate. The Bloomington campus had seen two other attempts at collegiate journalism, including publications from the 1840s titled The Equator and The Athenian, the latter of which was sponsored by the Athenian Society, a literary group.

The Indiana Student’s appearance on February 22, 1867, was not accident, as its editors might have taken advantage of the pomp associated then with commemorating George Washington’s birthday, including a campus tradition whereby students burned their Latin texts of Horace or buried “Calculus” in late-night ceremonies. Newspaper staff consisted of editors from the senior class, with junior class members as “associates,” sophomores serving as office boys. and freshman relegated to the printer’s devil role, doing the mundane and grubby jobs associated with the printing trade.

Although the first issue of the newspaper had lampooned its naming with its fanciful committee, the truth was more prosaic, with Duncan, Richardson, and Meredith, joined by three other unnamed students, pondering what to name their creation. Reminiscing about the newspaper’s start, Duncan noted that those gathered “puzzled our brains . . . in names beginning with ‘A’ and running to ‘Z,’ but no name appeared suitable until the big senior from Cambridge City—‘Sol’ Meredith—put his giant intellect to bear on the subject, struck an attitude, and sang out ‘Student’—‘Indiana Student!’ And so it was christened.”

The four-page, three-column, privately-owned newspaper struggled to find its way, alternating between monthly and semimonthly publication, and sometimes disappearing from view for months at a time; for example, not issues appeared from April 1870 to the following September. “It started out under rather unfavorable circumstances,” Duncan remembered, “but by hard work we managed to make both ends meet, barring a little deficit the members had to foot. But then the honor!” Meredith could always be counted on to provide local news, but sometimes he wandered afield in his writing into areas, Duncan noted, “not very suitable for a first-class paper.” Although Richardson possessed writing ability, and could beat anyone on staff “on criticism,” said Duncan, he could also be “inclined to be sarcastic.” As for his own contributions to the Indiana Student, Duncan would only say that they were often spurred Doctor Cyrus Nutt, the university’s fifth president, to invite the young student to his office for a talk.

Taken over in 1870–71 by the by the Athenian and Philomathean Literary Association, two literary societies, the Indiana Student went out of business in 1874, beset with financial problems and supposed pressure from university president Lemuel Moss, who believed that IU should be a school of arts and no more.  For the next eight years students had to rely on Bloomington newspapers for news about campus activities. That changed with the arrival on campus of a transfer student from Butler University, Clarence L. Goodwin, who sought to revive a campus newspaper. He sought a partnership with a former IU student, William Julian Bryan, then teaching in Virginia and later the university’s president from 1902 to 1937. “He brought with him the courage and conviction to start new things,” Bryan said of Goodwin. “And since reawakening the professional schools would have been a bit out of line for him as a student, he brought baseball, The Student, and lecture bureau to the campus.” 

With help from William W. Spangler, university librarian, who served as the newspaper’s business manager, the monthly, twenty-eight page Student set out to not only provide “some means of recording the doings of the alumni,” but also giving “an esprit de corps to our students which they would not otherwise possess.”

After being revived by Goodwin and Bryan, the publication underwent some rocky times, with ownership changing hands among various editors, as well as being taken over by the IU Lecture Association and the university librarian for a time. The university did finally offer a class in reporting in 1893 taught by Professor Martin W. Sampson, with four students being instructed for two hours a week on “accounts of fires, accidents, crimes; reports of lectures, entertainments, public meetings; interview; study of daily and weekly newspapers.” The class had disappeared by 1898. IU’s paper finally got on solid footing under the editorship of Salem, Indiana, native Walter H. Crim, who, in the fall of 1898, received permission from the board of trustees to change the name to the Daily Student (it did not become the more familiar Indiana Daily Student until 1914) and publish it five afternoons a week; printing was done in the Bloomington World-Courier building.

In the 1900s student editors received fifteen credit hours for the work, but the university dropped the policy in 1906, and applicants for the job suffered a considerable drop. Journalism courses were offered at IU in 1908 by Fred Bates Johnson, a former Indianapolis reporter, and at the end of the 1910–11 school year, Joseph W. Piercy, formerly of the University of Washington, came to IU as head of the Department of Journalism, finally retiring in 1938. (Piercy was succeeded by John E. Stempel, who had worked on the IDS as a news editor with Pyle and later serving as a copy editor at the New York Sun.)

On May 5, 1910, after years of squabbling among editors over finances, most of the student and faculty stockholders of the Daily Student donated their holdings to the university’s board of trustees. By this time, newspaper had become a laboratory for journalism students, with a cast of rotating editors. In September 1914 the newspaper operation moved into new headquarters on campus, occupying half of what had been the university’s power plant. (After World War II a quonset hut provided room for the news staff and the journalism department and newspaper finally moved into Ernie Pyle Hall in 1954). Four pages of six columns each were published every morning except Sunday; during World War I, to conserve paper and power, the IDS halted publication on Mondays.

By 1920 the IDS added news from the Associated Press, which came every night via a fifteen-minute phone call from Indianapolis; full AP service came in 1931. Also in the early 1920s, the newspaper established an Indiana State Fair edition (Pyle served as one of the first editors-in-chief), with ten thousand copies printed and distributed free to those attending the goings-on at the fairgrounds in Indianapolis. 

Reflecting on the publication’s centennial in 1967, Marjorie Blewett, a former IDS editor-in-chief and a 1948 IU graduate, noted that the State Fair edition ended due to financial difficulties in 1955, but those who worked on it were fond of recalling “the week of dusty typewriters, finding features among the many fair personalities, covering the horse show, and the livestock competitions, watching the style show in the Women’s Building, and carrying on a running banter with Purdue students working in that school’s building down the street.”

Furnishings were by no means plush in the newspaper’s editorial offices in the printing plant. Martha Wright Myrick, a 1932 graduate whose father, Joe Wright, helped run the journalism department with Piercy, recalled a cluttered city room with a “horseshoe shaped desk for rewrite men and headline writers. I remember sitting on those rickety wooden folding chairs in front of an equally rickety typewriter batting out my story for the next after a concert or recital or whatever I had covered that night.” Students could be interrupted at any time by a faculty member storming into the office to point out an error in someone’s copy. Glen Stadler, a 1936 graduate, never forgot one day when J. Wymond French, the newspaper’s faculty adviser, stormed out of his office to tack on the bulletin board a notice pointing out a gross error: “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER write ‘TURN DOWN’ when you mean ‘REJECT!’”

Seeing an article with a byline appear in print for the first time was a memory cherished by many IDS alumni. J. E. O’Brien, who went on after graduating from IU in 1937 to work at the Indianapolis Times and Indianapolis News, achieved his first byline as a freshman after receiving a tip from Henrietta Thornton of IU’s publicity office. O’Brien interviewed Charley Hornbostel, the university’s famed middle-distance runner, about one of his ancestors, who had also been a runner. With “some trepidation,” O’Brien took his story to French. “He read it without changing a word, marked the paragraphs and penciled my byline atop the story,” O’Brien recalled. “I then asked if I could join the staff. To my surprise, French said I could.” 

O’Brien spent three years at the IDS, working in a variety of jobs, including editor-in-chief. His most satisfying was serving as night editor, effectively the paper’s managing editor, as that post selected what stories appeared on the front page and which receive the biggest play. Although French never questioned the night editor’s news judgment, “the marked-up front page he posted on the bulletin board the next morning usually made the night editor wince,” remembered O’Brien.

As part of her journalism education under Stempel, Blewett and others on the newspaper staff had to learn how to set hand type. “There were always stories about people dropping a drawer full of type, because Stempel always had to put it back,” she recalled. The process seemed almost miraculous to G. Patrick “Pat” Siddons, who, after serving with the army in the Pacific, had enrolled at Purdue University to study electrical engineering before realizing his writing skills were a better fit for IU. Siddons fondly recalled the heady feeling he “got from putting words on paper, the thrill of watching the Linotype operator create words in metal, and of watching that old flat-bed press crank out copies of a paper that actually contained stories I had written.” 

The days of the flatbed press ended in 1964, when the IDS became an offset newspaper. By the middle of the 1970s, computers arrived, and reporters typed their stories on special typewriters before feeding them into a scanner that transferred the information to a file in the computer that could then be edited before being sent to the production room for layout. In October 1996 the IDS entered the Internet age with the appearance of an online version on the World Wide Web.

Among the major changes to the newspaper, none may have been bigger than the one that occurred in 1969, when, as part of a change in the curriculum, journalism students were no longer required to work on the IDS. Also, the IU board of trustees approved a charter making the newspaper an enterprise of the university, still owned by IU, but without offering financial support. “It was a time of activism on campus,” said Blewett, who had joined the journalism department in 1965. “Everyone was trying to get their hands on it—student government, every kind of side group, every activist group. You really realized how valuable it was when you saw that all those people wanted it. . . . We had to fight to hold on, to mold the paper as an independent paper.”

Jack Backer of the Niles Star became the IDS’s publisher. A student who worked on the IDS under Backer’s tutelage, Dennis Royalty, a 1971 graduate, often told them, “Progress is crisis-oriented,” and gently pointed out what the fledgling journalists “could have done better while championing our success.” Following Backer’s death from cancer in 1976, Siddons, Bloomington bureau chief for the Louisville Courier Journal, accepted the publisher. Siddons said that Backer had put “the Daily Student on the lips of all the college media advisers around the country. . . . Jack Backer built the ship. All I had to do was make sure that it was steered in the right direction.” 

One of the lessons Siddons attempted to impart in the IDS staff from the beginning was that “you may be young, you may be students, you may be nonprofessionals, you may still be learning the tricks of the trade, but I want this to be as professional a paper as it can possibly be. I think they took pride in seeing how professional that they could make it.”

Controversy, of course, has been part of the IDS since its inception, and has included everything from angry Iranian students demanding the newspaper drop its AP service for Reuters International, accusations that the newspaper did not reflect the diversity of the student body, and (change to Media School).

With all the changes in journalism and at IU since the IDS first appeared in 1867, one thing has remained constant—the dedication of the students who have chosen to offer their talents working for the newspaper. It has been that way from the 1920s to the 2000s. For example, in the spring of 1929 reporters and editors were working on the next day’s issue when, at about 10 p.m., the lights in the newsroom went out. “The power house, which was right adjacent to the Daily Student office, was on fire,” said Robert Pebworth, who worked as the night editor. “We went out and by that time, the fire fighting equipment had come, and inquiries of what the devil to do.”

 Eventually, the staff gathered all the type and moved it to the Bloomington World to be printed. Pebworth recalled that the staff finished making up the paper at 7:30 in the morning and, despite the fire, it was out and delivered by 8:30. “We had a sense of a team concept,” he said. “We came from different backgrounds, with different interests, but we got swept up in trying to put out a good newspaper.”

Seventy-nine years later, another IDS editor, Carrie Ritchie, a 2008 graduate, arrived at Ernie Pyle Hall on her first day as spring editor to discover that the building’s electricity had gone out. “This presented a sizable challenge considering we did everything on computers,” Ritchie said. “I remember huddling on the back steps of the building with my staff members, trying to think of a viable alternative.” They ended up squeezing into a computer lab at the IU Memorial Union for several hours until power was finally restored at Ernie Pyle Hall.

Ritchie noted that a number of students, not too happy about being back at school after a long break, would have “complained about being in cramped quarters, trying to put out the first paper of the semester. But not this group. Instead, my colleagues were laughing, working with writers who had come in to edit their stories and genuinely enjoying each others’ company.”

Ritchie’s experience that day proved to her (as Pebworth’s adventure probably had in 1929) that she had made the right choice in choosing journalism as her career. “I wanted to be part of a profession that proved people can accomplish anything with a little bit of teamwork,” she said. “I think of that day often, especially when I hear people question the future of journalism. I know it will survive as long as we all work together, like IDS staffers did that day and for more than a century before that.”

           

                                   

           

             

              

Operation Cleanslate: Richard Tregaskis in the Russell Islands

 As the last of the exhausted and starving Japanese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in early February 1943, Richard Tregaskis, a correspondent with the International News Service who had reported on the action with the U.S. Marines during their first seven weeks on the island, prepared for another trip onboard a naval task force—this one aimed at the Russell Islands, codenamed Operation Cleanslate. American military officials planned to strike another target, New Georgia, in the future, and the capture of the two large islands in the Russells, Banika and Pavuvu, would provide the necessary space for supporting airfields and naval bases on islands best known to many for the coconuts harvested by its approximately 350 inhabitants for plantations owned by the Lever Brothers.

The islands in the Russells had been described by those who had visited as a land of “rain, mud, and magnificent coconuts.” Still, at least Banika Island seemed an appropriate location for American forces to construct the facilities needed to support future operations, as reports indicated that it had such positives as “well-drained shore areas, deep water, protected harbors, and lack of malaria.”

As he had before for the Guadalcanal operation, Tregaskis sailed with the master of amphibious warfare, Admiral Richmond K. Turner. Although Turner, the commander of Task Force 61, expected limited opposition on the ground, he warned the correspondent that the Japanese would do all they could to strike the American forces with numerous air raids once they had landed at the Russells and started setting up bases there. “Those b------- are going to react and do a lot of bombing here,” Turner prophesized. “There’s no doubt about that.” The admiral also worried about a response by the Japanese navy against the limited forces at his disposal—destroyers, fast transports, minesweepers, and motor torpedo boats. Jack Rice, an Associated Press photographer who accompanied Tregaskis on the expedition, had the same fears as the admiral. Rice had experience being under enemy bombing, and said he planned, once on solid ground, to dig a foxhole and “pull the top in after me.”

Major General John H. Hester, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Forty-Third Infantry Division, tasked with taking the Russells, was confident that his men would be successful whatever opposition they faced. Although his soldiers had yet to experience combat, they had trained hard and appeared eager to get into action. Hester said about twenty-five men had broken out of the hospital when they heard the outfit was getting ready for the Russell offensive. “It cured ’em,” the general informed Tregaskis. “There were a couple, though, who had appendicitis. It didn’t do anything for THEM.”

Ambling about the deck of his ship before the February 21 landing, Tregaskis had the opportunity to compare the soldiers of the Forty-Third with the marines he had come to know on Guadalcanal. In general, he noted, the soldiers were much more varied in appearance and age than the marines (one from Pittsburgh was reputed to be forty-four years old), which he expected, as about half of the army troops were draftees (the marines had all been volunteers). 

An officer said that the men in the division represented every state in the Union, but that most came from Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, along with Mississippi and Georgia and Swedes from Minnesota. A former automobile mechanic from Mississippi told Tregaskis he thought that the outfit was glad to finally end its training and finally see some action, with most of the soldiers feeling as he did—the job had to be done and the sooner it was the sooner they all could return home to their families. “These people were not as wild or youthful or exuberant as the Marines,” Tregaskis said. There was grousing from some involved in the operation, conceived by Turner and grudgingly approved by Halsey, who had told Turner, “go ahead, as some kind of action is better than none.”

One of the engineers, responsible for constructing the facilities on the Russells, complained to Tregaskis that those in charge “just put an X on the map and want us to build a base there. They never stop to think about terrain or anything like that.” The correspondent attributed the nitpicking he heard to the usual “beefing that you find anywhere in normal military or naval circles.” The army men passed the time shipboard in similar ways to what the marines had done on their way to Guadalcanal, Tregaskis remembered—playing cards, reading books and magazines, writing letters to loved ones, sharing photographs of their sweethearts, cleaning their weapons, and painstakingly reviewing their orders. Plans called for three simultaneous landings—on the north end of Pavuvu Island’s Pepesala Bay (a task to be handled by the 800 men of the Third Marine Raider Battalion), on the east coast of Banika Island’s Renard Sound, and on the southwest coast of Banika Island’s Wernham Cove.  

Whatever tension there may have been about the impending action lessened when a reconnaissance team of six American and Australian officers that had explored the area before the February 21 invasion found no Japanese troops on any of the islands except for a dead fighter pilot lying beside his crashed Zero. On Bycee (also called Baisen) Island at the northern edge of the Russells the officers did find evidence of a recent large concentration of Japanese, estimating that anywhere from 500 to 1,000 had established a camp and started work on a base. “But now all the enemy were gone,” Tregaskis reported. “The Japs had left large stores of supplies, including rifles, ammunition and medical items, behind them. They had evidently gone in a hurry, for even such items as packs and helmets were abandoned.” Still, the Japanese did not let the operation go completely unchallenged.

On the evening of February 17 a convoy of transports and escorting warships heading to the staging point for the invasion came under attack by a group of twelve to fourteen enemy torpedo planes. A naval officer who experienced the attack, Commander Charles O. Camp of Omaha, Nebraska, told Tregaskis that he could see one of the Japanese came right at his ship and it seemed like a long time before the ship’s gunners hit and destroyed the enemy. “I found myself squeezing, saying to myself, ‘I hope they hit him pretty soon.’ Finally, he burst into flame and there was a splatter of fire when he hit the water.”

The other torpedo planes made their attack runs at intervals of about four or five minutes, Camp added. “Our destroyer screen would pick them up and shoot at them and then the transports would join in,” the officer recalled. “It was like the Fourth of July. At one time there were five patches of flame on the water when the planes hit. As they struck the water in flames the planes looked like a mess of burning pieces. The ships kept turning to avoid the torpedoes and the attack was over in about 15 minutes. We had been unhit.”

In the days leading up to the February 21 landings, Hester and Turner were busy reviewing plans with their officers. Tregaskis recalled there were numerous last-minute changes and “an infinity of details” to be cared for. Turner’s headquarters thronged with high-ranking army and naval officers—admirals, generals, colonels, and commanders. “That’s the most gold braid I ever did see in one place,” a solider observed to Tregaskis. On the rainy night before the landing, soldiers had to jockey for space to sleep on deck. “The destroyers which formed a large part of our fleet had barely enough space below for their own crews,” Tregaskis recalled. “And in the large troop-carrying lighters which spread around the destroyers and auxiliary transports like ducklings around their parents, there was no hope of cover. The boats were open to the weather.”

On the destroyer to which he was assigned, the correspondent noted that the troops had no shelter except for the scanty cover of torpedo tubes and gun mounts, and these spaces were crowded “by a fortunate few.” Although reconnaissance had shown that there would probably not be any ground resistance in the Russells, some onboard, he noted, were sure that before the morning was over “we would be bombed: that the Japs might tackle our ships as they were unloading their cargoes of men, and our landing boats as they were striking for the shore; or at least, that we would be intensively bombed after we had landed.” Tregaskis overheard one of the soldiers holding forth to that effect in conversation with a circle of his friends and sailors. He asked them an unanswerable, it seemed, question about bombs being unleashed on them: “When you see the son of b------ comin’ right at you, what the f--- you gonna do, where the f--- you gonna go?”

No enemy projectiles fell on Tregaskis and the members of the Forty-Third Division the morning of the invasion. Because no Japanese had been unearthed, there was no need for a preliminary bombardment, and the ships’ guns were silent. The soldiers had calm weather, which made for an orderly landing—except for, that is, the landing barge, on which Tregaskis traveled, which had some trouble at Wernham Cove at the southern end of Banika. “We had thought our boat would be one of the first ashore,” he remembered. “But we soon changed our minds: suddenly our craft thudded against a coral reef, and bumped its way solidly aground. The soldiers looked silently over the side, watching the schools of small, bright blue fish daring amongst the vari-colored coral formations.”

Tregaskis noted that when one of the men asked their officer, Lieutenant Jackson S. King of Colusa, California, what they should do if the Japanese suddenly showed up, he had a straightforward solution: “We’d just dive in and try to swim for shore.” The craft’s skipper, Bosun Charles T. Howard, directed a mass movement to the stern and port side and, finally, the weight shifted, the engine churned furiously, and the boat began to “shudder its way off the reef.” It finally reached the beach, its ramp clanked down “like a medieval drawbridge, and our troops poured out,” reported Tregaskis.

All along the edge of a coconut grove Tregaskis could see the “tangled impediments and bustling crowd of the typical landing. There were piles of blue, soggy barracks bags, rifles stacked and in piles, wooden boxes of small arms ammunition and the black cardboard cloverleaf cases of artillery shells in great dumps.” At the water’s edge he could see additional landing boats running ashore and disgorging their troops, as well as soldiers rolling loaded trucks down the ramps of huge landing barges. “Platoons and companies were forming up and setting out up the hill to reconnoiter neighboring woods,” he said. All of this would have made a perfect target for Japanese bombing, but the enemy “literally ‘missed the boat,’” Tregaskis recalled. “Either they were intimidated or unaware of our operation.”

Wandering over to a nearby plantation house, Tregaskis came across a coastwatcher, Lieutenant Allan Campbell of Sydney, Australia, who sat calmly on the porch and looked out over the peaceful green lawn rimmed with frangipani trees and hibiscus bushes bearing crimson flowers. Campbell had been in the Russells for the last three months, reporting to U.S. headquarters by radio about Japanese ship and troop movements in the islands. “A dangerous job,” said Tregaskis, who asked Campbell if he had any close calls with the enemy. “Yes, they’ve been about,” Campbell said. He had seen them on the other side of the island, wandering about, but they had fled from the Russells the day after American forces had mopped up on Guadalcanal. The Australian officer noted that the Japanese had counted on building an air base in the Russells and having another crack at dislodging U.S. forces from Guadalcanal. Another coastwatcher joined the duo on the porch and asked Tregaskis if he would like a cup of tea. “It was an unexpectedly polite welcome to this island where we had expected a hot reception from Jap aircraft,” the correspondent said.

Later that afternoon, Tregaskis trudged for miles over a rough trail, stumbling constantly over coral extrusions, to reach the camp where he would be sleeping. He, Rice, and a handful of army officers struggled a bit to set up a tent to shelter them for the evening, but eventually succeeded. “Marvel of marvels,” said Tregaskis, “we had folding cots too and did not have to sleep on the ground. Which was well because in the night the rain began to pour down and kept on pouring.” Before they went to sleep, those staying in the tent made sure to pick out a nearby gully where they could seek shelter if, “as we expected,” Tregaskis said, “the Jap bombers came over during the night. But they did not come.”

With the landings a success, Tregaskis spent the next few days, accompanied by Rice, traveling the waters around the Russells, including checking in with the Third Marine Raider Battalion, which had been responsible for seizing Pavuvu Island. En route Tregaskis used his swimming prowess to investigate a downed Japanese Zero lying on a coral bank in shallow water about ten feet down. As everywhere else in the islands, the water was crystal clear, and he could see the plane’s markings and the bullet holes in its wings as he peered down from his boat above. “I dived in and swam about the cockpit and around the tail of the of the plane. The cockpit was intact, untouched by bullets,” he reported. Evidently the Zero had been struck in its engine or lubrication system and had made a forced landing—an observation Tregaskis later verified with occupants of a nearby village. According to their account, the Japanese aviator had survived, been captured by Australian coastwatchers, and sent on to the Americans on Guadalcanal.

Upon reaching Pavuvu, Tregaskis met with the men and officers of the Marine Raiders. Although the Raiders had discovered no traces of the enemy on Pavuvu, on the nearby Bycee Island they had uncovered the remnants of a Japanese camp. “There were shelter caves dug under plantation house, there, and machine gun positions, more than 100 drums of fuel oil, and some foodstuffs,” Tregaskis learned, along with medical supplies, machine-gun ammunition, and hand grenades. One of the unusual items they unearthed was a bottled, honey-tasting liquid. “It seemed like concentrated food to me,” Lieutenant Murray Ehrlich of San Diego, California, said to the correspondent. “It’s quite palatable when take with something else and washed down with a hot drink. It tastes like mineral oil with a very sweet flavor.”

While his traveling companions left to check on the items left on Bycee, Tregaskis stayed behind with the Raiders on Pavuvu to “work furiously” on a typewriter. “I was anxious to get some copy aboard ships which were leaving in the afternoon,” he noted. Tregaskis’s party had a pleasant return trip to Banika, but had a rocky night, as the camp was “full of disturbing shadows and misgivings. It seemed weird that the Japs had not yet attacked.” Sentries were on edge and were quick to call out “Halt!” if they heard or saw any movement in the jungle, Tregaskis recalled. “We had an alert in the middle of the night, but no planes showed up,” he said. Rain did appear, however, falling hard enough to flood the earthen floor of Tregaskis’s tent.

On the afternoon of February 25, it seemed as if the attack everyone had feared had finally happened. Two signalmen came running into Hester’s headquarters clad only in trousers. They told everyone that their group had been fighting with a Japanese patrol in the jungle, and they had abandoned their position when they feared they might be surrounded. Officers scrambled to organize a platoon to send out, with the expectation, Tregaskis noted, that a pitched battle would be joined. The correspondent joined the soldiers as they marched off, with the remaining troops yelling “Give ’em hell boys!” as a farewell as they shoved off on a landing boat for the rescue mission. “We were ready, and had made the same grim mental adjustment for a fight which would have been necessary if we had actually run into one; but the Japs turned out to be phantoms,” Tregaskis said. “We found, on landing, only a badly scared signal company and some croaking bullfrogs in the thick jungle; nary a Jap, as yet.”