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.”

 

 

Doctor Marjorie Nelson: A Hoosier Quaker in Vietnam

The knock on the door of the American teacher’s home came a few days after 80,000 North Vietnamese Army forces and their Viet Cong allies struck South Vietnamese cities and U.S. installations during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tet) holiday in an operation that became known as the Tet Offensive. The country’s ancient imperial capital, Hue, had been one of the major cities attacked.

Marjorie Nelson, a twenty-eight-year-old Society of Friends (Quaker) physician from Kokomo, Indiana, had been staying in Hue for the holiday at the home of Sandy Johnson, an American English teacher at the Dong Khanh school for the International Voluntary Services. “It was really scary: all the bombing, the shelling, the strafing,” Nelson remembered. “We didn’t know if we’d survive.” Sheltering under an improvised bomb shelter—a dining room table piled high with sandbags—as the bloody battle raged around them, the women were discovered on February 5, 1968, by NVA soldiers seeking to use the house as an observation post. Four days later, VC irregulars herded the Americans out of the city and marched them west into the mountains.

For nearly two months, Johnson and Nelson, a 1964 Indiana University School of Medicine graduate, were held as prisoners of war, eventually taken for safekeeping to a mountain camp. During the four months she had been part of a medical team treating horribly injured Vietnamese civilians at an American Friends Service Committee rehabilitation clinic in Quang Ngai Province, Nelson had learned enough Vietnamese to converse with her patients. During her captivity, she quickly developed a stock response when questioned about why she had decided to come to Vietnam. Nelson told the insurgents that she was a Quaker and a pacifist and came to their country because she “did not believe in the war. I told them I had come to help people suffering because of the war and that I wished all the soldiers, on all the sides, could go home. Well, the astonishing thing was that they believed me.”

Although several thousand South Vietnamese soldiers, government officials, and civilians were slaughtered by NVA and VC forces during Hue’s capture, occupation, and recapture, Nelson and Johnson were treated well during their captivity. When Nelson fell ill with dysentery, a “very competent” Vietnamese doctor trained in Hanoi traveled several hours on foot through the mountains to treat her. “The soldiers collected from the meager belongings such things as powdered eggs, a little sugar, and a can of sweetened condensed milk which they gave me ‘to help you regain your strength,’” Nelson recalled. The considerate treatment she received reaffirmed her belief that although nations had differences they could be settled without bloodshed. “Basically, people are the same everywhere,” she emphasized. “If it were left to the world’s peoples instead of governments, there would be peace.”

Released on March 31, Nelson returned to the United States for a brief respite. Being greeted upon her arrival at the Detroit airport by “a mob of cameras, microphones, and bodies” convinced her that she did not “ever want to become a celebrity.” During her time as a POW her mother Elda had died, only hours after Radio Hanoi had announced her daughter’s freedom. When Nelson visited her mother’s grave at a cemetery in Bad Axe, Michigan, the ground was still covered with flowers from the funeral. “I’ve always found cemeteries to be places of comfort and solace,” Nelson later said. “I cherish this one especially. Dozens of my relatives from both sides of my family reaching back at least four generations rest here. Now Mom was at rest here too.” 

Earl Nelson, Marjorie’s father, had been “greatly joyed” when he heard the news about his daughter’s release. “All along I have had confidence and faith in Marjorie’s safety,” he told a reporter. “This faith was based on my knowledge of the image which Quakers have throughout the world—the image of wishing to help human beings no matter who they are.”

Granted a leave of absence by the AFSC after her ordeal, Nelson remained determined to return to Southeast Asia to complete her assignment at the clinic, where she treated civilian victims of the war and trained Vietnamese as nurses, physical therapists, and prosthetists. Before releasing the Americans, the VC, Nelson noted, had asked them, “If we release you, do you promise to go home?” She remembered answering, “Well, yes, of course. We want to see our family and let them know that we’re okay.” She later pointed out, “I told them I would go home, I never said I would not come back. And they never said I couldn’t come back.” She returned to Quang Ngai, finally returning home in 1969 after fulfilling her two-year commitment for the AFSC.

Although Marjorie’s parents had both been teachers in Michigan, her father decided the couple could not raise a family on a teacher’s salary and moved them to Kokomo. Earl found work as a foreman in a newly built Chrysler automobile transmission plant. “He always preferred the midnight-to-morning shift,” Marjorie remembered. “He said he liked to watch the sun come up. For twenty years, he never missed a sunrise.” 

Born on June 24, 1939, Marjorie began her pacifism at an early age, though she would not learn about the term until much later. She remembered when she was five years old her parents had helped to initiate exchanges between their Courtland Avenue Friends Church and a local African Methodist Episcopal Church. One evening, after the service had ended at the AME Church, she heard her parents talking to another couple on their way to their car. One word caught her attention—war. “Daddy,” she asked, “what is war?” He told her war happened when people argued so much it led to them killing one another. Stunned that death would occur from something she and her brother, Keith, had engaged in, Marjorie thought, “What a horrible thing to do. Why would grownups be so stupid?”

The Nelsons instilled in their children tolerance for those less fortunate than themselves. Earl and Elda had worked to help migrant laborers who came to Indiana during the summer to pick tomatoes in local fields. “Several times we had gone as a family to visit migrant camps and share meals with them,” Marjorie wrote in her memoirs. Taking Spanish as her foreign language her first two years in high school, she practiced her skills with the children of the migrant laborers, who were entertained when she made mistakes, for example saying, “Listen to the hen crow” instead of “Listen to the rooster crow.” She remembered one morning when her father came into the kitchen with tears in his eyes. “An infant girl had just died in one of the camps we were working with and the family had no money for a coffin and funeral,” Marjorie said. After making a few phone calls, Earl left home, picked up the deceased child’s grieving father, and together they bought burial clothes and a coffin. “He also arranged for burial and a local pastor as officiant,” she recalled.

Marjorie loved reading, spending half of her childhood absorbed with long-forgotten novels, including Zane Grey adventure novels and Westerns. “My mother used to get so frustrated with me because I had my nose in a book every time she wanted me,” said Marjorie. A shy child, she described herself as having “a terrible inferiority complex,” finding it painful to recite aloud in class. Majorie also found it difficult to convince herself she was both socially and academically equal to her classmates, “even though I did very well in school.” She forced herself to overcome her shyness by participating in the school’s dramatic and speech clubs. “I was encouraged by a couple of teachers who took an interest in me, and it really made the difference,” Marjorie recalled. By the age of twelve she had already undergone a “definite religious experience,” interpreting it as “a call to mission—that is, to work overseas.” That sense of calling never left her.

Elda suffered from Multiple Sclerosis, a debilitating, chronic neurological disorder that eventually led to her being dependent on a wheelchair when venturing beyond her home. “Until she got sick, she was very energetic, a fastidious housekeeper who canned and sewed and cooked, did all those things, and still managed to be very active outside the home,” Marjorie remembered, including helping to run a church daycare center for the children of migrant farm workers. Marjorie often cared for her mother, sparking an interest in pursuing a nursing career. Her aunt Lola, Elda’s sister, worked as a nurse, and Marjorie recalled being “rather in awe of her and her skills. Particularly when I saw her in her white uniform with the stiff, starched cap that she pinned so carefully on top of her dark hair.” Marjorie’s career path changed, however, when a couple who attended her church, Bob Smith, a doctor, and his wife Mary Beth, a nurse, told her she should think about becoming a physician. “From that time on, I planned to be a doctor,” said Marjorie, who dreamed about life as a medical missionary.

After graduating from Kokomo High School in 1956, Marjorie attended Earlham College, majoring in chemistry. She had earned money for her education by working in the Delco-Remy transistor quality-control laboratory. She also attended classes at an Indiana University extension school in Kokomo before entering Earlham as a sophomore. The Quaker institution in Richmond, Indiana, became the “bedrock” for both her and her brother, Beryl. “It influenced the way that we thought about things and motivated us to do things that I’m certain we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t had the Quaker upbringing,” Beryl said. During her days at Earlham, Marjorie also supported her education by waiting on tables in the dining room, answering phones in the dormitory office at night, and selling postcards in the college’s museum.

Applying to attend the IU School of Medicine the year before she graduated from Earlham, Majorie had to withstand an intense interview before a committee of half a dozen men, who peppered her with such questions as, “Why do you want to go into medicine? Where will you practice? What guarantee do we have that you won’t quit the practice of medicine once you have a family—waste the investment we spent training you?” Nelson endured these queries, not posed to male candidates, and became part of a first-year class that included approximately 180 students, eight of whom were women. “One of the women dropped out in the first week,” she said. “The other seven of us bonded into a tight-knit sisterhood.” Nelson believed it took more stamina than brains to get through medical school. “You just have to work hard,” she pointed out. “You have to read a lot of books, and you have to be able to get by on very little sleep.”

For her internship year, Nelson worked at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia with dreams about becoming a medical missionary, working overseas, possibly in Africa. A surgeon at the hospital, Doctor Harvey J. Lerner, suggested she gain some experience by serving on the hospital ship SS Hope, which traveled around the world providing medical services to developing countries. Nelson spent two months aboard the Hope during its 1965 visit to Conakry, the capital of the Republic Guinea on Africa’s west coast, working most of her time at a hospital clinic on shore.

During Nelson’s time studying to become a physician, the war in Vietnam had begun to dominate newspaper headlines. On March 8, 1965, U.S. Marines dressed for battle from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Force stormed onto the beach outside of Da Nang, South Vietnam. The United States had sent advisers for many years to aid the South Vietnamese government in its fight against VC guerillas supported by Communist North Vietnam, but the March 8 landings represented a major escalation when it came to American troops engaging the enemy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that if the marines were shot at, they would, of course, return fire. A few months after the marines had landed, an editorial in Time supported the growing American presence in South Vietnam, saying the struggle there was “absolutely inescapable for the U.S. in the mid-60s—and in that sense, it is the right war in the right place at the right time.”

Nelson had known for a couple of years that Vietnam “was where I was really supposed to be.” She believed the war was wrong, as it was not “at all according to the way we are to treat our fellowman,” and the United States could not justify its intervention there either on “moral or historical grounds.” Nelson wondered if her Quaker faith might stand up when exposed to war’s ferocity. “Well, I felt I had to find out. I didn’t want to be an armchair quarterback—talking about the way things ought to be, but doing nothing, is too easy. That was a very important issue for me,” she recalled. 

While Nelson prepared to leave the United States in late September 1967 for a two-year commitment working at an AFSC rehabilitation center in Quang Ngai, her brother, Beryl, following his own personal convictions, had sailed away, serving as first mate on a fifty-foot-long ketch, the Phoenix, delivering $10,000 worth of medical equipment for North Vietnamese wounded by American bombing, a mission sponsored by the Quaker Action Group.

Beryl joined the Phoenix crew despite warnings from U.S. government officials that he risked losing his passport and citizenship. He and his sister had discussed the risks involved. “We spent many hours talking about this and agree that we must help people,” Marjorie explained to a reporter from the Kokomo Times. “We are trying to relieve suffering wherever we find it—across political lines.” Beryl believed it was easy for Americans to be a hawk or dove about the war while sitting safely in the comfort of their homes. “But, let them come over here and they may not feel as they do,” he pointed out. “I am only doing something about the way that I feel.”

Before leaving for Vietnam, Marjorie had gone on a sailing trip in Canada with her father. Feeling regretful, she realized she had never asked him how he felt about her journeying into a potentially dangerous spot, with a chance she might never return. Taking her hand, Earl reminded her he and her mother had raised her to “do what you think is right. Now, go ahead and do it and don’t worry about it.”

Nelson arrived at Quang Ngai in October 1967 to start work at the AFSC clinic, which accepted patients without regard to their religious or political affiliation. She had believed that being in a war zone meant normal parts of life stopped, but that was not what she experienced. “Although you could always hear bombing, and there were always planes and helicopters around and army trucks and soldiers everywhere, you came to realize that life does have to go on in spite of the war,” she noted, “and people still fall in love and get married and have children and have to figure out how to raise them, and people still die naturally, and there are funerals and all the rest.”

Although the clinic had opened five months before Nelson came to Vietnam, she was the first doctor to work there. It served 125 to 150 patients per month, of which 80 to 95 percent suffered from wounds caused by the war, including land mines, shrapnel, grenades, and booby traps. Nelson noted that the nearby hospital had no rehabilitation facilities, resulting in many patients being released “permanently crippled who need not have been—either because they lost a leg and couldn’t get an artificial leg or because they had suffered an injury and then did not get proper exercise or physical therapy thereafter.”

Conditions at the hospital were primitive by American standards, with a shortage of doctors (nurses had to do a lot of the surgeries) and no running water in the emergency room. “There were two American military doctors and a Spanish-speaking surgeon full time and two Canadian doctors part-time,” she remembered. “That was it, for six or seven hundred patients in a four-hundred-twenty-bed hospital.” Conditions did later improve, as the South Vietnamese government began to assign military doctors to province hospitals and assistance came from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

There were times when what she saw became too much for Nelson. She made rounds at a temporary ward established for patients selected for rehabilitation, surgical wards, and, for a time, the burn ward. Patients in the burn ward included those injured in domestic accidents involving cooking fires and spilled pots, as well as those horribly disfigured from napalm, phosphorous bombs, and general explosives. “Maybe, during a firefight, the thatch of a house would ignite—we didn’t call them firefights for nothing, I guess,” Nelson said. Because of inadequate facilities, most of the burn patients were left in bed to see if they might get better on their own; many did not. She estimated that treating ten burn patients would have exhausted all their resources, which otherwise could have cared for fifty or seventy-five amputees or orthopedic cases. “In short, it was a very depressing situation. I finally realized I was not going to be able to function if I continued to go into that burn ward, I could not help all of those people,” Nelson confessed. “I found the suffering so overwhelming that I was simply immobilized. So I quit going. I had to.”

With the hospital emptying with the approach of the Tet holiday in early 1968, Nelson accepted an invitation from a Vietnamese woman she worked with to visit her in Hue. “I was very interested in visiting this woman’s family, also in seeing some of the cultural aspects of this country that I was getting to know,” she recalled. “Certainly, nobody I talked to knew there was going to be Tet offensive.” The NVA soldiers who took Nelson and Johnson prisoner were quite well organized, knowing the names and locations of all the foreigners that lived in Hue. Nelson remembered that their captors told them they were going to be taken to the mountains “to study,” and when there was peace they would be returned to their families. “That sounded sort of ominous,” she said, “and we really thought we were in for the duration of the war.”

Nelson and Johnson spent about ten days at a small mountain camp with twenty-five American men (some military and some civilian) captured at Hue. Nelson provided medical treatment to some of the prisoners, who were eventually taken to Hanoi. The VC separated the women from the other prisoners and took them to another mountain camp, assigning them to a small house built out of bamboo, saplings, and jungle leaves, and equipped with a bomb shelter. “We were frequently shelled or bombed, so it was tense,” Nelson said, “but we were not confined in any way. We were free to move about.” The number-one rule, they were warned by Bon, a veteran of the fight against the French, was simple: “Don’t Escape!” 

Both Nelson and Johnson laughed heartily when they heard Bon’s order. “I didn’t want to walk anywhere in those mountains without an armed escort and a guide who knew where we were,” said Nelson, who remembered Johnson telling her about one of the soldiers seeing a tiger. The VC occasionally gave the Americans books and pamphlets with their version of the war’s history to read but made no attempt to indoctrinate or threaten them in any way, according to Nelson.

Often asked by the VC if she had any requests, Nelson responded by saying she wanted to be able to write her family, so she could tell them she was safe. She also asked to continue to study Vietnamese. Finally, Nelson wanted to continue to help wounded civilians. “I explained that I wasn’t willing to work in the military but that I was willing to work in Communist Vietnam if I could work in a civilian setting,” she said. The VC allowed her to write her family and continue studying Vietnamese, but declined her offer of medical assistance, telling her, Nelson remembered, “We would never ask you to live under such difficult circumstances. We appreciate your offer, but we don’t need your help.” 

At first, Nelson believed the real motive for turning down her last request had been “a polite way of refusing an offer that was politically unacceptable, that they did not want to admit they needed help.” Later, she learned that the Vietnamese had some “bad experiences” with the Americans they kept in captivity who wanted to collaborate. “Americans just didn’t survive very well under jungle conditions,” Nelson noted. “They got malaria, they needed more calories than a Vietnamese, their resistance was very low.”

Just before the VC released Nelson and Johnson, the Americans met with the ten or twelve soldiers then in the camp for a goodbye party. One of the men brought a dishpan filled with peanut brittle and a few canteens of tea, which they ate and drank and discussed life in America. The camp’s commander was particularly interested in whether Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy might win the election and, if so, would end the war. Nelson shared her belief that Kennedy might well end the war, but for the wrong reasons. “I think he will end the war not because he thinks America is wrong, that we shouldn’t be in Vietnam,” she explained, “but because he thinks the war is costing too much. The American people are not willing to pay the cost—you know, the casualties and the money both are beginning to wear on people.” The commander listened and agreed that her explanation made sense. Finally, he asked them if instead of using the word “prisoner” when they returned home, they would “consider ourselves to have been their guests,” Nelson recalled.

As to why they were freed, Nelson supposed it had happened due to several reasons. She credited it to the will of God, as well as because of the excellent relationship Quakers had established with the Vietnamese. She pointed out that she and others involved with Quaker projects in the country “had always been assured that no harm would come to members of the Quaker team.” Nelson also credited Beryl for his efforts on her behalf, including flying to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to talk with North Vietnamese officials at their embassy. “Another explanation might be that the local people who got to know me sent a report up and said they thought it would be in the best interest of North Vietnam to let us go,” Nelson noted.

Upon returning to the Quang Ngai rehabilitation clinic in September 1968, Nelson took up her old duties as well as providing medical treatment to inmates at a local prison. Originally built by the French to house 500 inmates, the prison, during the time Nelson worked there, had a population ranging from 800 to 1,300, a number that included 150 to 300 women. “Many of these women had their children with them—40 to 120 children,” she remembered. According to the inmates, about 80 percent of them had been incarcerated for such “political” crimes as having improper or incomplete papers, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or, for many women, an “inability to account for the whereabouts of their husbands, who were therefore assumed to be guerrillas.”

Nelson also regularly examined inmates who had been tortured, not at the prison but at the nearby Province Interrogation Center, which she said a U.S. adviser told her had been a project begun by the Americans to teach “enlightened intelligence and interrogation procedures.” Nelson later testified before a House Committee on Government Operations that she saw dozens of patients suffering from bruises of varying severity, as well as those “who had coughed up, vomited or urinated blood after being beaten about the chest, back and stomach.” She went on to accuse South Vietnamese officials of torturing people with electricity by attaching wires “to ears, nipples and genitalia; by being forced to drink concoctions containing powdered lime and other noxious substances, and by being tied up and suspended by ropes upside down from the rafters for hours.” A South Vietnamese province chief, a Colonel Khien, Nelson remembered, acknowledged to her that some beatings had occurred at the center, but some of the prisoners were “‘very hard’ and refuse to talk, and in such situations physical force was necessary and was employed to get information.” The colonel did add: “There are limits.”

Although Nelson admitted it was difficult decision for her to leave Vietnam, she left to return to the United States to marry Robert Perisho, a Yale University graduate student studying physics. They married in 1971 and had a son, Christopher Robert. In 1975 the family moved to Salt Lake City, where Robert died from encephalitis. After working as the medical director for Planned Parenthood in Utah, Marjorie and her son moved to Athens, Ohio, where she eventually joined the faculty of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Up until and after her retirement in 2009, she returned to Vietnam, doing volunteer work for the nonprofit Madison Quakers Inc. Nelson acknowledged that a part of her heart would “always remain in that patch of land and water—Quang Ngai.”

Before her death from a stroke on December 29, 2022, Nelson had been selected for inclusion in the Howard County Historical Society’s Howard County Hall of Legends. She had remained committed to her Quaker pacifism throughout her life, protesting paying U.S. taxes for military spending, especially when it came to nuclear war, by writing “war tax deduction” on her tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service responded by fining her $500 for filing a “frivolous tax return.” Nelson believed the fine had been a way for the federal government to place limits on her free speech rights. “It seems to me the government’s main purpose should be to collect taxes, not to stifle a statement of conscientiousness,” she told an Associated Press reporter in 1984. “I get the feeling the government is trying to chill dissent, to intimidate people so they won’t speak up over issues of conscience.”

Her actions seemed true to the character of what Nelson’s father once described as a person always looking “for ways to live out her belief that war is wrong and that the lives of all people are to be valued.”
             

A Ship for Peace

In the early afternoon of December 4, 1915, a crowd estimated at anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 braved the brisk weather at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, in order to witness the sailing of the Scandinavian-American ship Oscar II. The ship was set for a scheduled ten-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean to Christiania (today Oslo), Norway.

As the ship prepared to leave, the crowd sang and cheered as bands played such rousing songs as “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The biggest cheers, however, were reserved for the sponsor of this unusual adventure: famed automaker Henry Ford. The previous summer Ford had declared his willingness to devote his fortune to ending the fighting in Europe between the Allied Powers, led by Great Britain and France, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Unable to discover any just reasons for the war, Ford believed that some nations “were anxious for peace and would welcome a demonstration for peace.” With the encouragement of Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian author, lecturer, and peace advocate, Ford had secured passage on the Oscar II for about sixty delegates in support of his mission. These delegates would attempt to halt the bloody trench warfare being fought with such deadly weapons as the machine gun and poison gas through the establishment of a neutral commission that would offer negotiation among the nations then at war.

Indiana educator and woman’s rights leader May Wright Sewall was one of the more than a hundred people, including such famous individuals as inventor Thomas Edison, reformer Jane Addams, and former president William Howard Taft to receive invitations from Ford to join him on the voyage. The first word of the trip came to Sewall in late November when she received a telegram from Ford, followed three days later by a letter in which the automobile maker spelled out in more detail his reasons for asking her to join him and others on the trip. “From the moment I realized that the world situation demands immediate action, if we do not want the war fire to spread any further,” Ford wrote, “I joined those international forces which are working toward ending this unparalleled catastrophe.”

In describing her fellow delegates for her friends in Indianapolis, Sewall agreed that no one had an “exalted position; not one bearing the stamp of worldwide recognition.” Through their work, however, Sewall said the delegates hoped to accomplish three goals: to secure the public’s attention, turning it from war to peace; to stimulate other private efforts and encourage workers to seek peace in every country; and confirm on all those involved their resolution to work for a permanent peace.

Before embarking on his peace crusade, Ford had met with President Woodrow Wilson to try to convince him to appoint an official neutral commission, which Ford was willing to back financially. Although noting he agreed in principle with the idea of mediation to stop the war, Wilson skillfully avoided endorsing Ford’s proposal.

Press reaction to Ford’s mission had been, at best, mixed. Some newspapers gave the automobile tycoon high marks for his good intentions, but most were skeptical about his chances at accomplishing his mission. The New York Evening Post boldly predicted that Ford’s plan would “be acclaimed by thoughtful hundreds of thousands the world over as a bit of American idealism in an hour when the rest of the world has gone mad over war and war preparedness.” Other newspapers were unstinting in their scorn, calling the effort “one of the cruelest jokes of the century” and “an impossible effort to establish an inopportune peace.”

When the Oscar II steamed away on December 4, it had onboard peace delegates described as “negligible” in standing by some observers. The group, however, included a respectable number with solid reputations, not only Sewall, but magazine publisher S. S. McClure, Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and Judge Ben Lindsey. Also on the ship were approximately 25 students representing institutions as diverse as Vassar, Princeton University, Purdue University, and the University of California at Berkley. There were also fifty members of the press, including reporters from United Press, the Associated Press, and the International News Service.

In assessing her fellow delegates for her friends in Indiana, Sewall acknowledged that no one in the party had an “exalted position; not one bearing the stamp of worldwide recognition.’ [I would argue she missed one person—herself.] She added, however, that none of the delegates were “hair-brained lunatics bent on a fool’s errand—but rather a company of clear-headed but simple-hearted men and women, with no illusions in regard to ourselves but with the faith that any one of us, much more all of us with God, constitutes a majority in the council where each next stop along the path of human progress is determined.”

Through their work, Sewall said the delegates hoped to accomplish three goals: to secure the public’s attention, diverting it from war to peace; to stimulate other private initiatives and encourage workers for peace in every country; and confirm on all involved their resolution to work for a permanent peace.

Once at sea, the delegates attempted to establish a regular routine. Each day at 11:00 a.m. the students met to learn more about the attempt to bring an end to the fighting in Europe. Each session opened with a talk by one of the delegates on a subject in which they were regarded as an expert. The delegates themselves listened to similar speakers daily at 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., becoming better acquainted with each other through such gatherings.

Sewall’s optimism and dedication to the peace process impressed other delegates. One of them, John D. Barry, an essayist, poet, and critic, said that in spite of Sewall’s age she proved to be one of the “most useful members of the party, keen, and quick of mind, bubbling over with information and observation, humorous, kindly and above all human.”

Ford’s goodwill to all on the voyage tamed the hearts of some of the cynical newspapermen. Florence Latimore of Survey magazine later related that a reporter had confided to her that his employers had told him to produce satirical articles about the trip, but after seeing Ford’s face he could not bring himself to follow their orders. Still another newsman told Latimore: “I came to make fun of the whole thing, but my editor is going to have the surprise of his life. I tell you I believe in Henry Ford and I’m going to say so even if I lose my job for it.”

Other reporters remained unconvinced and treated the voyage with derision. A London newspaperman even went as far to send a fake story about Ford being held prisoner in his cabin, chained to his bed by his staff. But when the Oscar II’s captain, J. W. Hempel, who reviewed all messages sent from the ship, took some of the more insulting stories to Ford, he responded kindly, telling Hempel: “Let them send anything they please. I want the boys to feel perfectly at home while they are with me. They are my guests. I wouldn’t for the world censor them.”

Legend has it that one delegate became so upset about what he viewed as an inaccurate report from Hoosier Elmer Davis, covering the voyage for the New York Times, that he called him “a snake in the Garden of Eden.” Davis responded by forming what he described by a Snakes in the Garden of Eden Club.

The real blowup came when the ship received a wireless report about a speech to Congress by Wilson calling for increased military preparedness. In trying to craft a response to the speech, sharp disagreements erupted among the delegates, with some calling for immediate disarmament and others arguing that countries should have the necessary means to defend themselves. Although the argument ended in a compromise, the incident prompted reporters to wire stories back to their newspapers about “mutiny” and “war” breaking out on the peace ship.

Early in the morning on December 18, the Oscar II docked in Christiania, Norway. Physically, Sewall said, Norway gave the delegates a cold welcome, as the weather was reportedly the chilliest in more than a hundred years. The peace expedition had barely had time to settle into its new setting when it received a bitter blow: Ford had decided to go home. Unable to shake the cold he had caught on the voyage, and encouraged to do so by his staff, Ford had decided to leave in time to catch a ship bound for America.

According to Louis P. Lochner, Ford’s private secretary, who had been “deeply shocked” by his boss’s appearance when he visited Ford in his hotel room, the automaker told him: “Guess I had better go home to mother [his wife Clara]. You’ve got this thing started now and can get along without me.” Lochner attempted to convince Ford to stay with the expedition, but failed.

Upon his return to America, Ford told the media he had not deserted the Peace Ship and offered no regrets for sponsoring the expedition. He noted that “the sentiment we have aroused by making the people think will shorten the war.” With Ford’s departure, the delegates turned for leadership to a committee. Policy matters were handled by Schwimmer and finances were the responsibility of Ford staff member Gaston Plantiff. (Ford is estimated to have spend a half-million dollars on the expedition, approximately $15.5 million today.)

The peace expedition spent a week in Stockholm, developing a regular schedule. Each morning at 10:00 a.m. the delegates met to discuss the day’s activities. From 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., the group hosted a reception at the hotel open to the public. The delegates had time to themselves until 4:00 p.m., when the expedition hosted a second public reception.

Sewall observed that visitors to the receptions seemed to fall into four categories: teachers, feminists, social reformers, and students. “I was particularly interested in the university students,” she said, “who, although it was their holiday week, called in great numbers. I was amazed by both the intelligence, and by the lively interest in serious subjects of these young people, whom I was mentally comparing with my young countrymen and countrywomen of student age to the distinct disadvantage of the latter.”

In order to reach the group’s final stop, the Netherlands, the delegates had to travel, via a sealed train, through German territory, a feat accomplished through the help of the American minister to Denmark. Once in the Netherlands, the group selected delegates for a proposed Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation, which had its headquarters in Stockholm and worked to negotiate an end to the war.

With this final task completed, the delegates and students could finally return home. On January 15, 1916, the delegates left port aboard the SS Rotterdam for the voyage back to America (the students had left four days earlier on another ship).

For Sewall, the “spectacular pilgrimage” had been a success, as it had “concentrated the thought of the distracted world upon this hope with a force that assures its achievement.” She felt proud of the work done by her and her fellow delegates. “To have advanced its [peace’s] arrival by one hour,” Sewall said, “is adequate compensation for the cost in money, time and sacrifices of the Expedition if multiplied a thousandfold.”

Sewall’s view was shared in part by one of the reporters aboard the Oscar II, Elmer Davis. Although he considered the trip a “crazy enterprise,” Davis, looking back on the voyage in an essay published in 1939 as Europe seemed on the brink of another war, said that any effort, “however visionary and inadequate, to stop a war that was wrecking Europe, appears in retrospect a little less crazy than most of the other purposes that were prevalent in Europe in 1916.”