Charlemagne’s City: Richard Tregaskis Reporting from Aachen

Peering through the flickering candlelight that offered the only illumination in a massive pillbox that helped make up part of the Siegfried Line near Palenberg, Germany, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis could barely make out the mud-streaked faces of the American soldiers in their olive-drab uniforms who now occupied the bunkroom of their enemies.

Outside that fall in 1944 Tregaskis could hear German shells landing in the woods and U.S. artillery hammering at Nazi positions in preparation for the continued advance through the four-mile breach of the fortified belt that had stretched from near Kleve in the Netherlands to Lorrach on the Swiss border. Although tired and dirty, the GIs, among the first to break through the Siegfried barrier beyond the Wurm River in Holland, had to “take turns in the cold and mud outside to man the foxholes guarding the approaches to this pillbox because of the menace of a German counterattack,” Tregaskis reported.

The soldiers of the Thirtieth Infantry Division Tregaskis followed for the offensive into Third Reich territory had witnessed their buddies being cut down by artillery, mortars, and machine-gun fire. Looking out from their shelter, they could see a grim reminder of what the battle cost—the body of an American GI, the International News Service correspondent recalled, sprawled face down in the mud and grass. “His wet canvas leggin[g]s,” Tregaskis noted, “stiff and inert, are sticking from under the raincoat thrown over his body.”

Nearby, a dead German lay face up, his body uncovered. “Guns were banging outside—our guns—sending metallic echoes dinning through the pillbox,” wrote Tregaskis. “There were a few score of crumping sounds coming from beyond the woods.” The tired soldiers had endured much but saved their biggest complaints for faulty news reports that they had faced only “slight resistance” during the breakthrough, as well as a familiar complaint, Tregaskis pointed out, that the “slogging infantry deserved more credit—which undoubtedly is true.”

In his time covering combat, from the jungles of Guadalcanal to the mountains in Italy, Tregaskis had learned that as one progressed from headquarters behind the lines “down the ladder to the regiment, battalion and company, the war becomes more personal, even though there are only ‘slight casualties.’” As he and the soldiers he gathered with in the pillbox knew, one of those casualties might well be a good buddy. That was also why the GIs were so eager to see their fallen comrades’ names cited in newspaper stories.

When Tregaskis tried to explain why he could not report on everyone, a private, Ralph L. De Roy of Pittsburgh, responded: “They deserve it, especially when they get letters like this.” De Roy showed him a letter from a girl back home, dated two weeks prior, that read: “I hope you are well if you are in that little tussle going on in the vicinity of the Siegfried Line. How do you think you will like the Pacific after having experienced the European theater of operations?” Hearing what the girl had written, the soldiers’ yelled, “Put that in the paper!” Tregaskis obliged.

After recovering in the United States from injuries he suffered while covering the fighting in Italy, Tregaskis, by late July 1944, had returned to action, reporting to the INS bureau manager in London, Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, with whom he got along well. Tregaskis wrote his parents that the “gang at the office has been very good, and all of my Army friends have gone out of their way to be friendly. Sticking at this foreign correspondent racket as long as I have does have its compensations.”

Tregaskis had arrived at an opportune time. Since the successful June 6 D-Day landings, Allied forces had been stuck battling German defenders in the dense, centuries-old hedgerow country, or, as irritated GIs described the bocage terrain, “this goddamn country.” The hedgerows provided perfect hiding places for the enemy, stalemating the advance before a July 25 massive bombing raid—Operation Cobra, involving more than 2,500 planes (fighters, medium bombers, and heavy bombers) dropping approximately 5,000 tons of high explosives—helped to open the way for American forces.

In his initial dispatch on his return to combat, Tregaskis had a perfect view of the death of a German panzer column, flying 200 feet above the town of Gavray, France, in a small reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Staff Sergeant Bernard Brown of San Antonio, Texas. From the small plane, he could see the results of an attack by P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers on a “closely packed fleeing formation” that stretched for as long as four to five miles. “As we shuttle back and forth over Gavray, I can see about 250 vehicles—tanks, trucks and command cars—in flames,” he reported. “This is only part of the destruction of German armored vehicles fleeing before the American advance south of Coutances.”

Back on the ground, Tregaskis joined the Third Armored Division and the First Infantry Division for the breakout beyond Mortain, which the correspondent described as “a blitzkrieg—American style.” Looking down from a rise of ground on the seven-mile-wide escape route, Tregaskis, early in the morning, had observed a platoon of enemy soldiers heading down a dirt road. “They thought they were in safe territory for their helmets were off and they were barely able to walk along,” he recalled. “Suddenly they were blasted by our shellfire and their trucks were destroyed. A few minutes later a German motorcyclist rolled along the road and was potted.”

The action became so intense that the contending forces sometimes confused one another, usually to the detriment of the enemy. One night four enemy trucks pulled up in the moonlight alongside four American trucks and a jeep, “apparently thinking they were German,” Tregaskis noted. “The German vehicles were destroyed and about twenty-five Germans killed or captured.” The carnage pleased one American officer, who commented to the reporter that the enemy was “finally getting [a taste of] some of his medicine.” Tregaskis also talked to a German prisoner, a clerk from a headquarters supply corps, who complained: “You Americans move too fast. There’s no safe job in the German army any more.”

Tregaskis next covered the attempt by the First Infantry Division and Third Armored Division to capture the German city of Aachen. The correspondent had been particularly impressed with the speed of the Third Armored’s tanks, half-tracks, and self-propelled artillery as in just ten days they had driven across Belgium, crossing the Belgian-French border on September 2 and reaching Roetgen, Germany, located a few miles southeast of Aachen, on the afternoon of September 12. The division had averaged about twenty-five road miles per day. “Men and officers whipped themselves forward although fatigue dragged every motion,” Tregaskis wrote in one dispatch. “They knew the war would end more quickly and with fewer casualties if they kept the enemy off balance.” One corps commander admitted to the reporter that in its advance the division had “violated every known principle of the maintenance of armored vehicles and hoped they’d hold together. They did.”

The armored units had been ably supported by big P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, which acted “as a kind of winged artillery.” While riding in one of the division’s Sherman M-4 tanks, Tregaskis could listen in on the radio traffic between the armor on the ground and the planes in the air as they coordinated attacks on the Germans blocking the division’s advance. He offered a sample of the radio traffic to his readers:  

“You see that tank down there? It’s shelling our men.”

            “Okay, I’ll go down and take a look. I see him.”

            “Okay, then get him. That’s got him.”

“There’s a lot more down there. There’s four armored vehicles going down the road. We can get all of them.”

“I just got another—that makes about 16, doesn’t it.”

“Maybe we can get some artillery on those babies.”

The radio operator in Tregaskis’s tank responded to the last message, passing it along with the proper coordinates. “Artillery picked it up in temp,” he recalled, “and the whole woods ahead now are topped with a fat, far-spreading cloud of smoke and dust, and forward elements were moving again.”

Tregaskis remained with the Third Armored as its tank columns rolled into Roetgen, a border town located approximately nine miles southeast of Aachen; it marked the first Nazi city captured by American troops. Those who had entered the city expected to be met with fear that would quickly turn into cold hostility. After just twenty-four hours, however, the tankers were astonished, noted Tregaskis, that several townspeople had smiles on their faces, displayed the “V for Victory” sign with their fingers, and gave them gifts of green apples. One soldier told the reporter: “Now that they know us they’re beginning to cuss Hitler.” Another member of the division said he had expected to see some “rough looking faces,” but the enemy now seemed as happy to see them as the French had been.

As he had continued traveling with American forces in northern Europe, Tregaskis began to realize that, since his wounding in Italy, he had undergone quite a change in attitude. He had become quite sensitive to the dangers involved in covering combat, making the sounds of battle “crushing and unbearable” to him, and he experienced “a succession of bad ‘nerve shakes.’”

Tregaskis decided to test himself by plunging into covering the U.S. attempt to capture Aachen in early October. Originally, American commanders had hoped to bypass a direct attack on the city, instead having the First Infantry Division surround from the south and the Thirtieth Infantry Division from the north, link up, and convince the enemy to surrender without a fight. Of the approximately 165,000 civilians in Aachen 145,000 had been evacuated, leaving only about 20,000 seeking shelter. Recent American and British bombing raids had also reduced many of the structures to rubble.

The correspondent described Aachen as a typical American city—that is, if it had “every house—every house—smashed to some degree by shellfire or bombs, with rubble, building stone, trolley-car wires clogging the street.” Despite the damage, the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, refused to abandon a city that had been the birthplace of the emperor Charlemagne and had served as a critical symbol for the greatness of Germany, especially the Third Reich. Hitler ordered the approximately 5,000 troops of the 246th Volksgrenadier Division to hold Aachen no matter what the cost in men and equipment.

On October 10 Tregaskis waited a couple of hundred feet away from railroad tracks that marked the boundary between the suburb of Aachen-Forst and Aachen. Three U.S. soldiers—Lieutenant Cedric Lafley of Enosburg Falls Vermont, a former teacher; Lieutenant William Boehme of New York City, who served as interpreter; and Private First Class Kenneth Kading of La Grange, Illinois, who carried a large white banner made from pillow covers. The trio took with them a surrender ultimatum to Oberstleutnant Maximilian Leyherr (later relieved by Colonel Gerhard Wilck) warning him that he had until 10:55 a.m. to surrender his garrison or face sustained air, artillery, and ground attacks. “There is only one choice,” the communique noted, “honorable and immediate surrender or complete destruction.”

Tregaskis recalled that American guns had hurled 12,000 leaflets, printed in German, Polish, and Russian, into the city that repeated the message. When he and his comrades returned, Boehme recalled that none of the Germans they encountered seemed happy to see them. When they finally reached the enemy command post, delivered their message, and received a receipt in return, one of the German officers, a lieutenant, told them: “I can see you have good intentions and want to do the right thing. I will convey the message to the commandant through the proper channels.”

The Germans rejected the American offer, and, after a couple of days of pounding by bombs from P-47 and P-38 aircraft and shelling from the artillery, grounds forces—two battalions of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry regiment—assaulted Aachen on the morning of October 13. Lieutenant Colonel Derrill M. Daniel, the Second Battalion’s commander, noted that he and his men had come up with the slogan for the upcoming fight: “Knock ’em all down.” After all, Daniel pointed out, Aachen’s defenders would not be able to “deliver accurate fire with buildings falling about their ears.” They had also determined to clear everyone out, civilians and soldiers, “from each building before passing to the next. We planned to search every room, every closet, every cellar, even manholes in the streets, to be absolutely certain that no German was left behind our front lines.” It would be slow, he noted, but the “only alternative was to be subjected to sniping from our rear.”

For the advance, Tregaskis found himself with the infantry of Easy Company of the Second Battalion, which had pushed across the railroad tracks into the city’s center at about 9:30 a.m. on October 13, throwing grenades to clear the path before them. The correspondent followed the company into Aachen at noon to the sounds of sniper bullets and small-arms fire as the GIs, supported by Sherman tanks, M10 tank destroyers, and antitank guns, and resupplied with ammunition by M29 Weasel cargo carriers, engaged the Germans.

From his lookout inside a former school building, Tregaskis could see that the buildings in the vicinity all had their windows broken and many were “crushed in from the roof down.” To him Aachen appeared as “a mass of burned, broken buildings, great craters—some of them so old the grass had grown back into them—and the streets glitter with broken glass that crunches and protests under the thick soles of advancing Americans.”

According to Captain Ozell Smoot of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the commander of Easy Company, the initial opposition was “not as rough as we figured,” adding that the Germans had not been resisting “as stubbornly as had been anticipated and were surrendering at every chance they got.” The captain did warn that the Americans still had to “go through every damned building where snipers are hiding and dig ’em out.” As he moved farther into Aachen, Tregaskis witnessed smoke billowing up from the city’s center; it enveloped the Aachen cathedral’s dome and spire and he could not determine if the historic monument had been hit, but noted that it “will be a wonder if it escapes all the destruction being hurled into the town.”

The destruction only got worse and casualties mounted for Easy Company as it made its way farther into the city. Tregaskis learned that street fighting had much in common with the combat he had seen in the Pacific jungle. “In the civilized jungle which is a contested city or town, windows are bushes, houses are trees,” he pointed out. “Every one of the thousands of windows, like every tropical bush or plant in the jungle, is a potential source of danger. And every house in a city, like every tree in the jungle, must be checked for enemy soldiers—probed by high explosive or an American foot soldier.”

The GIs blasted their way through the middle of a block of houses when they could, Tregaskis wrote, just as one would carve a path through a jungle’s tangled growth with a machete. The agreed-upon technique involved blowing a hole through a wall large enough for a solider to walk through. “You see, when engaged in the war of the streets, you are supposed to stay out of the streets when you can; an anomaly when you consider it’s called street fighting,” he wrote. Streets, however, were dangerous to a soldier, as they were straight and relatively open. “A man walking down an avenue is a good target for a machine gunner or sniper sitting at any one of the hundreds or thousands of windows commanding the open stretch,” said Tregaskis. Instead, he noted, squad leaders took their men through backyards and over fences and roofs; if they came up against a wall too high to climb, an officer would call for a bazooka team to blast it down.

Tregaskis had an intimate view of what an infantry platoon went through in Aachen during a few days of fighting before Wilck finally capitulated on October 21. He attended a briefing one morning at a platoon headquarters in the tiled kitchen of a wrecked house; one of several such posts that day as the soldiers moved inexorably through the town. Lieutenant George Tragnitz gave some advice to his platoon: “I want you to clear out those basements even if you have to use a lot of thermite grenades. Give them a chance to come out. Yell down into the cellars and demand that if anybody is down there he must speak up. If you don’t get an answer, throw the grenades in there.”

About fifteen minutes later, the platoon’s squads began their push, which was signaled, Tregaskis recalled, by an intensification of noise, including the snap of M1 Garand rifles, the regular “tac-tac-tac” of Browning automatic rifles, and the louder explosions of bazooka shells and tank cannons. As a conscientious commander, Smoot circulated among his men, followed closely by Tregaskis, who joined him near the front lines. “Large guns were firing, swelling the clamor,” the reporter wrote. “After another block, we saw two Sherman tanks squatting back to back in a little square. The muzzle of one of them was flashing out yellow fire, and the firing was filling the air around the tank with a mist of dust and smoke.”

One incident typified the bloody battle for the city for Tregaskis. As he crouched for cover with Smoot, two grimy soldiers hustled up carrying a badly wounded officer, the right side of his chest “an ugly blob of blood and red-soaked uniform ‘Jesus . . . Jesus,’ the wounded man mumbled.” The correspondent noted that Smoot tended to the lieutenant, carefully cutting his torn clothing away from his gaping wound, feeding him sulfa tablets, offering “the tender, unprintable things that one brave man will say to another,” and, now and again, shouting out profane words to someone to “bring up a stretcher, a jeep, a medic.” The captain also had the presence of mind to notice that his men were bunching up, “as human beings instinctively will do in a time of danger,” and yelled at them to spread out.

A litter squad finally arrived and hoisted the wounded officer on their stretcher, promising him they had a “powerful” jeep ready to whisk him to the rear. As the aid men carried their burden away, the other soldiers returned to action, with Tregaskis noticing a machine gun firing to cover the soldiers’ movement and a tank, “snorting and clanking like a pre-historic monster,” pausing to fire five rounds at the house thirty feet away that had held the sniper. “Clouds of smoke, rosy with brick dust, ballooned out from the house’s wall, smothering all sight of the place,” Tregaskis wrote in his dispatch about the incident. “Then the tank went on about its day’s business and when the smoked cleared there was no house, just more wreckage to add to the most-wrecked city I ever saw.”

Two days later, Tregaskis had a detailed view of another destructive phase of the fighting. He followed Tragnitz’s platoon—veterans of the campaigns in North African and Sicily—on one of its bazooka team’s “block-tunneling” missions. The correspondent had spent the night before with the first squad of the first platoon in the cellar of a German home, stopping first in the kitchen for a supper of scrambled eggs, a staple dish prepared for him by Private First Class Ed Gaetke from Saint Paul, Minnesota. One of the few advantages of fighting in Aachen was that soldiers discovered that kitchen larders were well stocked with such items as home-canned vegetables, hen and goose eggs, bread, cakes, and preserves. “Two or three members of the squad sat watching and whispering among the debris of the elaborate kitchen,” Tregaskis remembered, “and periodically one of the men standing guard outside poked his head in and shushed us, reminding us that there were Germans on the other side of the street.”

The reporter and the squad retired to the basement, where the previous occupants had erected a makeshift shelter under arches of whitewashed bricks and equipped with three beds with sheets and blankets. From a tiny piece of paper, Sergeant Julius Oster, a veteran from Borough Park, Brooklyn, read the names of those taking successive three-hour watches. “They’d work in pairs: Kroll and Lawrence, Smith and Gaetke, Vereroni and Murphy, and so on,” Tregaskis wrote “The sergeant said that things would probably be O.K. for the night; if a Heinie patrol jumped us, there was another cellar room beyond this, with windows.”

The sergeant’s statement had the reporter having visions of six to eight Americans attempting to find their way through the pitch dark and through the windows as enemy soldiers followed and shot at them. After a late night of sharing stories about “characters” who had been in the squad but had been killed, the men finally went to sleep, only to be awakened by enemy shells landing around the building, with “two landing practically on top of us,” noted Tregaskis. He listened for the loud cries of a wounded man, but none came. “Everyone woke up, and after a pause somebody said something about being afraid the beer bottles upstairs would break,” he wrote. “That released the tension.”

Early the next morning, Tregaskis followed the first squad of the first platoon through hallways, kitchens, two gardens, over an iron fence, over two garage roofs, through an alley, and a school all in order to travel just one block. On approaching a wall too high to surmount, a bazooka team knocked a hole through the wall so the GIs could push ahead. Although they had been able to outflank the streets, soldiers still had to investigate each house they had bypassed. Tragnitz’s squads had developed a procedure for handling Aachen’s buildings, Tregaskis wrote:

The men moved fast, running most of the time, keeping under cover when possible, for they knew that they might run into enemy fire at any time, from any house. The technique was this: the G.I. would run up onto the front porch, place the muzzle of his rifle at the lock, blow off the lock, kick in the door, rushing in with the rifle at the ready; then you’d hear him yelling from inside as he presumably banged on every door and checked every room. I listened to one soldier bawling steadily, “Let’s go! Come out, come out, you —— Heinies!”

Occasionally, there’d be a blast or two inside the house, like a muffled cannon, as the men shot off locks or tossed grenades into suspicious rooms. First, however, they gave plenty of vocal warning to any possible civilians inside, in accordance with instructions.

And once, in this line of houses, they did unearth civilians. There was a commotion, a blur of sobbing voices, and out came a short, fat, bespectacled German, a very scare[d] man wearing a tweed suit and stiff white collar, his stubby arms elevated in token of surrender. His sobbing Frau followed, her arms similarly raised. Desperate fear marked their faces, as if they expected to be shot. The German propaganda leaders had forecast that the Americans would be looters, beasts and rapists.

The worried fat man in the tweed suit trotted down the middle of the street, with an occasional apprehensive glance to the rear to see whether he was going to be murdered. He and his wife passed the corner where I was standing, and hurried half a block beyond; and then, when they found out they were not going to be shot, they stopped, carefully lowered their hands, and the man straightened his vest and reassumed his dignity.

The strain of street fighting in Aachen took a toll on Tregaksis, who worked, as he wrote his parents, day and night, having little time for anything else except for a walk in the evening before bed when the “sky isn’t pouring rain” in order to satisfy his employers’ call for stories about the battle. He had endeavored to keep pace with the other news services, organizations such as the Associated Press and United Press, each of which employed two men to tackle the assignment. “I’m alone and must watch news breaks night and day, on all fronts,” he told his parents.

Tregaskis had asked his editor, Barry Faris, to send someone to assist him so he could take a little time off or even return to the United States for a rest. “The office is very reluctant to let me go home,” he noted, “but I can always just get up and go if I want to; that’s one nice thing about not being in the Army. And perfectly proper, provided I give notice that I’m leaving.”

In addition to being overworked, Tregaskis had been shaken by a tragedy involving one of his colleagues, David Lardner, the son of the famous writer and humorist Ring Lardner. David had just been accredited to cover the war for The New Yorker; his brother, John, had been writing about the war for Newsweek for some time and had been with the first American troops sent to Australia. “More introverted than John, Dave was also a more skillful and unique writer,” Tregaskis noted.

On October 19 Lardner, Tregaskis, and Russell Hill of the New York Herald Tribune had gone up to the front; Tregaskis was set to stay in Aachen, while Lardner and Hill talked to him about the road back to Eupen, the site of First Army headquarters across the border in Belgium, where they were headed to write their stories. “I advised against following the main highway,” Tregaskis recalled. “There were too many areas marked with engineers’ tape, the route hadn’t been demined. It was better to follow the more tedious, intricate back-road pattern which the tank columns of the Third Armored had taken.”

Lardner, Hill, and their driver, however, took a jeep down the main highway and on the way hit a German Teller mine on Aachen’s outskirts. “Lardner sustained severe wounds from fragments, and, without regaining consciousness, died at 9:10 p.m. in a field hospital, five hours after the accident occurred,” Tregaskis wrote in an article about the accident. The driver was also killed, while Hill suffered a broken right arm and a forehead laceration. “I should have been more insistent,” Tregaskis later lamented.

 

The Innocent and the Guilty: John Bartlow Martin and a Case in Pittsburgh

The letter arrived at the home of John Bartlow Martin in Highland Park, Illinois, without fanfare in 1957. As a nationally respected freelance reporter whose prize-winning work about crime often appeared in the pages of one of the country’s top magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, Martin received “a fair number of letters from convicts, most of whose complaints are without merit.” 

This letter was different. It came from Mary Simon whose son, John, had been convicted for a series of robberies and assaults from April 30 to May 28, 1942, in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood. The case became notorious in the local press, which dubbed the suspect the “Blue-Hooded Bandit” for the disguise he donned to hide his identity from his female victims.

Mary begged Martin to help free her son; she believed him to be innocent. John, who had learned to read while incarcerated at the Western State Penitentiary, had read one of Martin’s stories in the Post and asked his mother to write him about his case. While Martin noted that every prisoner who wrote him asking for help claimed to be innocent, one thing in Mary’s correspondence caught his attention. “Her letter said her son had been convicted without a lawyer,” Martin recalled. “I thought if true this was worth looking into.” Over the years in his work about crime, he had seen “innocent men convicted, guilty men convicted but convicted wrongfully, guilty men set free.” Martin decided to investigate. From his research, he produced a four-part series for the Post about how the criminal justice system sometimes went wrong. Of the cases he researched for the series, the Simon one meant the most to him because “I myself became involved.”

The Indiana-raised Martin, a graduate of DePauw University, had honed his observational skills as a police, city hall, and rewrite reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s. He escaped the endless grind of newspaper work and left Indianapolis for Chicago and a career as a freelancer, first earning his living writing stories for such sensationalistic true-crime magazines as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime. During its heyday from 1935 to 1945, the true-crime genre attracted millions of readers across the country, with consumers having their pick of as many as seventy-five different periodicals on the average corner newsstand. A host of notable names in American literature wrote for these magazines, including Dashiell Hammett, Earle Stanley Gardner, Jim Thompson, Harlan Ellison, Ellery Queen, and Nunnally Johnson.

Martin said that while writing in the true-crime genre he learned the uses of such techniques as “description, dialogue, characterization, and perhaps above all narrative pull—that mysterious invisible force that pulls the reader onward.” He eventually found success by writing for such respected national magazines as Harper’s and especially the Post, which touted him on its cover as “America’s No. 1 Prize-Winning Reporter.” The magazine pointed out that in the five years the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Awards were given, Martin had been cited four times for book-length stories on crime, prisons, mental health, and segregation. He had also won two Sigma Delta Chi honors (today the Society of Professional Journalists) and a prestigious Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Crimes, Martin had learned through long experience, did not happen by blind chance—something caused them. “Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both,” he said. “Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society. Crime in context.” Stories Martin tackled for the Post including the senseless slaying of a nurse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by three juveniles; the revenge killing of a crooked landlord by a distraught father who lost his children in a Chicago tenement fire; the strange and dangerous life of an informant; and what life was like in prison for a notorious murderer, Nathan Leopold.  “I am basically a serious person,” Martin told a reporter. “I don’t like to do frivolous stories.”

For a time in the 1950s, Martin’s name became synonymous with the subject of penology. On one occasion Martin’s wife, Fran, who served on the Illinois board of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote to Washington, D.C., for research material on prison management and criminal rehabilitation. She received back a letter suggesting a book on prison reform, Break Down the Walls—the book by her husband based on the series he had done in the Post on Jackson Prison.

As he ranged over the country from San Antonio, Texas, to Gainesville, Georgia, researching the half-dozen cases he used for his Post series, titled “The Innocent and the Guilty,” Martin discovered that injustice “knew no geography.” Matters could go awry in myriad ways, including overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, and misidentifications by supposed eyewitnesses, which he described as one of the most common reasons for wrongful convictions. Martin experienced this phenomenon while attending a coroner’s inquest during a Chicago murder trial. A druggist testified that he had seen the defendant, Duncan Hansen, on the day of the murder. 

The coroner asked the druggist to point to the man he had seen. “Hansen was sitting almost directly in front of the witness and I was sitting about twenty feet directly behind Hansen,” Martin remembered. “The druggist made an indefinite gesture toward Hansen and me, when Hansen’s lawyer, Charley Bellows, said in effect, ‘Let’s see who he’s pointing out.” The witness left the stand, walked past Hansen, and pointed straight at the reporter, who stood about a foot shorter and twenty years older than the defendant. “A funny feeling,” Martin reported.

For his Post series about criminal justice gone wrong, Martin unearthed several procedural problems with the justice system: suspects who were illegally detained, whose confessions were coerced by the police, who were denied the right to counsel, and underwent illegal searches and seizures. While laymen saw these errors as “mere technicalities,” Martin believed they lay at the “heart of the Bill of Rights and so at the heart of freedom in our democratic systems,” as even guilty people had the right to due process. “How we convict matters more than whether we convict,” he argued. “Due process is society’s truly fundamental protection because it is the individual’s only protection. Due process is more important than the incarceration of men, however dangerous.”

The case that meant the most to Martin involved Simon, who had a rocky childhood growing up in Pittsburgh’s slums. Suffering from a learning disability (his IQ tested between 55 and 61), Simon had left school after only about five years, unable to read and only able to write his name. “Johnny couldn’t learn very good,” said his mother, who had only three years of education and could barely read herself. The young Simon had endured an abusive father who used to chase him while armed with an axe. Martin learned that Simon had appeared in juvenile court several times as a suspected bicycle thief and had been committed at the age of twelve to the Polk State School, established by the State of Pennsylvania to house what were then considered “feeble-minded children.” The school, however, proved to be overcrowded; Simon remained at home.

Although he had worked on a Works Progress Administration sewer construction project for a time, Simon had been fired after being absent from worth due to an illness. Afraid to let his mother know, he had left home each morning and faked going to work, instead wandering around the city looking for a new job. This was the during the same time, Martin noted, that a series of assaults by a man in a blue hood occurred in the woods on the city’s West End. Despite promises from police that they would soon capture the perpetrator, concerned mothers banded together to escort their children to and from West Liberty School.

On June 2, 1942, police arrested the teenaged Simon, whose age was cited by newspapers as either eighteen or nineteen. Patrolmen John Onderko and John Peyton had spotted him walking on the Shaler Street Bridge spanning Saw Mill Run from their patrol car. The officers noticed that Simon wore a blue sweater and light-colored dirty overalls—clothing victims had told authorities the bandit wore. “I’m just walking around,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Simon telling the police. 

Officers told reporters that when they tool Simon to Police Station Number 9, they had found a blue-denim hood with slits ripped in it to see through in his pocket, and later found more incriminating evidence in his room at his home. The Post-Gazette included in its report on the bandit being captured photographs of Simon with the hood on and off.

Simon disputed the police’s account, telling Martin that the hood had not been in his pocket when he walked into the police station. “The fat one [officer] stood back and the one in the straw hat punched me in the stomach,” Simon recalled. The authorities refused his request to speak to his mother, telling him, “When you sign a confession then we’ll let you see your mother.” Simon also alleged that the police took him down to the station’s cellar, beating him, knocking him to the ground, and continually telling him, “Make it easy on yourself—confess.” Simon broke down and signed the confession. “The police held him [for] four days. Nobody told him he had a right to have a lawyer,” Martin reported, “to telephone his mother, to be arraigned before a magistrate. He asked for none of his rights, being ignorant of them. He says he did not read the confessions and that no one read them to him.” In addition, police failed to follow standard procedure in the lineup, with Simon in a room by himself and the women brought in for the identification. Martin pointed out that usually police put a suspect in a lineup with other men, not in a room alone.

At his June 18 trial, which lasted, at most, a half hour, Simon, who pled guilty, stood alone, with no attorney or family member present. Simon’s mother had done all she could to ensure that her son had a lawyer. She decided to cash in an insurance policy to pay John J. McGrath to represent her son in court. McGrath, however, denied being Simon’s attorney. While he was present in court the day Simon was sentenced, McGrath claimed to be there “only as a spectator. I went there out of curiosity.” While the lawyer maintained he had not talked to John or Mary Simon, or anyone else, about the case, Martin discovered that McGrath had endorsed a check from the Monumental Life Insurance Company of Baltimore for $108.76, the cash-surrender value for Mary Simon’s policy.

While stuck in jail before his trial, John Simon had been visited by a psychiatrist from the Behavior Clinic of the Allegheny County Criminal Court. The confidential report given to the judge at Simon’s trial, William H. McNaugher, concluded that the defendant was “a potentially dangerous individual and will repeat similar offences in the future,” further recommending that he receive “prolonged or indefinite institutionalization such as the School for Defective Delinquents at Huntingdon.” McNaugher later told Martin he gave Simon such a severe sentence—twenty to forty years at the Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh instead of the School for Defective Delinquents—based on the Behavior Clinic report: “I was left with nothing else but to give him a life sentence for the protection of society—of course, subject to change, as all sentences are. And I’d do the same today.”

A distraught Mary remembered visiting her son after his incarceration:

He said, “Mommy, look what I got, from twenty to forty years. No lawyer, nobody helped me. I was an orphan boy and I was punished like an orphan boy. Nobody helped me. Nobody.” I said, “Son, I didn’t know. They didn’t let me know.” He said, “I know, mommy.” He just went like that.

Seeing her crying, the police had laughed at Mary’s distress and threatened to put her in jail after she complained about their behavior. “Go ahead—I’ve had a miserable life anyway,” she told the officers. “God will punish you.”

The pleas for aid from Simon’s mother convinced Martin to not only to investigate the case, but also to seek assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union. Although the Pittsburgh ACLU declined to help, a young attorney connected with the organization, Martin Lubow, agreed to represent Simon at a token fee of $200 (the Post later agreed to pay Lubow for his time and expenses). Talking with his new client, Lubow found him “so embittered” that the only people in the world he trusted were his mother and Martin. “I was surprised to find that when I broke through John’s defense and hostility, that he seemed not only a reasonable person but a fairly shrewd and intelligent one,” Lubow wrote Martin. “This suggests a possibility to me, in the light of his home background . . . that perhaps his difficulty vis a vis, his alleged deficient mentality, may have been an emotional block.”

Martin and Lubow hired a private detective agency to help track down the eyewitnesses used by the police in the Simon investigation. Questioning the witnesses, the reporter discovered that several of them had been unsure about identifying Simon as the perpetrator, with one woman saying the man who had attacked her had been older, taller, and sharp-featured. The detective agency also found a man who reported he had wrestled with an unmasked bandit in the area Simon supposedly committed his crimes. Martin interviewed him and he told him “he had not been taken to the lineup—a fact that had always puzzled him.”

Lubow’s initial efforts at commuting Simon’s sentence failed, with McNaugher denying the attorney’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that his client had not been represented by a lawyer. The U.S. Supreme Court had not, at that time, established the constitutional right to counsel in state prosecutions for felony offenses. The Court did so in 1963 in its Gideon v. Wainwright decision. Although Martin’s August 13, 1960, article about the Simon case concluded that he had probably committed some of the crimes, the method in which he had been convicted raised, the journalist argued, “serious questions about the administration of criminal justice. For even a guilty American is not to be imprisoned except by the just processes of the law.” In Martin’s view, Simon’s case came down to this: “Society got the right man (probably) by the wrong methods and then had no proper place to put him—and now is determined to keep him forever in the wrong place.”

With the Gideon v. Wainwright decision establishing the right to counsel, Lubow tried again, using the federal courts to try to free Simon. Although a federal judge granted Lubow’s habeas corpus petition, Simon remained in prison, awaiting a retrial by the Pittsburgh district attorney on four of the five counts for which he had been originally indicted. “In my opinion, the motivation for various judges’ and district attorneys’ consistent opposition to my efforts has been the fear that John, after release, might commit some other crime and thus embarrass them,” Lubow wrote Martin in May 1964. 

The attorney pointed out that Simon had been a “model prisoner for twenty-two years; has taught himself to read and write; and to be a tailor.” Simon, however, had not helped himself. Martin noted that state officials had hinted the prisoner might win parole. Simon refused; he did not just want to be released, he wanted “vindication,” as did his mother, Martin wrote. “People, all people, know when they have been wronged,” he noted.

On June 12, 1964, Lubow informed Martin that after meeting with officials from the Pittsburgh district attorney office, an agreement had been reached whereby Simon would agree to plead guilty and then would be put on ten years’ probation on one of his sentences, with the others suspended. “John Simon is accepting this, although not without some reservation,” wrote Lubow. “All of this agreed that this was best for John and society and to play Russian roulette with John’s future life, whatever John’s own inclinations might be, would not be well advised in my opinion.” Finally, on June 22, Simon was free.

Reflecting on his criminal justice series, Martin found it astonishing that his articles were published, not in a liberal publication like The New Republic, but in the conservative Post, a periodical “not noted for liberal crusading,” and during a time when Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “poison still infecting the body politic.” Writing his memoirs in the 1980s, during a time when “cries of ‘law and order’” were dominant, and with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government “climbing aboard,” Martin believed it would have been “inconceivable that such a series of articles could be published anywhere.”