The Press: Pleasant Ride

After covering the hard-fought capture of Kimpo airfield last week, TIME-LIFE Correspondent James Bell headed back for Inchon to file his story. With him in a jeep were John Davies of the Newark News and Lachie McDonald of the London Daily Mail. As Bell later reported, “We were all quite happy to have survived the rather horrid night and three hours of North Korean banzai charges. The driver proceeded along the road to Inchon very carefully. One of us remarked how pleasant it was to be riding with a careful driver after the numerous ‘army cowboys’ we had traveled with the past few weeks.” Then the jeep entered a thick cloud of dust and the next thing Bell knew he was lying on the road and hearing a Navy corpsman say, “This guy is pretty bad.” Whether the jeep had hit a mine or collided with an oncoming amtrac, no one knew. Bell had a broken arm as well as chest and leg injuries, Davies a severe concussion and McDonald two bad cuts. Lugged to the beach, Correspondent Bell dictated a story for LIFE to Photographer Carl Mydans before he was taken aboard a hospital ship.

Three other newsmen were wounded in Korea. Most seriously hurt was NBC’s 24-year-old cameraman, Gene Jones, who with his twin brother Charles was taking newsreel pictures of the Inchon invasion. Soon after he hit the beach, Jones was badly wounded by shell fragments. On the Han River with Marines driving toward Seoul, 23-year-old William Blair Jr. of the Baltimore Sun was shot in the back by a sniper. The New York Times’s Harold Faber was shot in the thigh while covering an Eighth Army assault across the Naktong River.

Casualties among war correspondents since June 25: eleven killed, 14 wounded and injured, two missing, one captured.