From a low ridgeline above the Kum River last week, three U.S. correspondents watched an outnumbered, outgunned battalion of G.I.s fight a desperate delaying action. Only one of the newsmen, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart, got back to write about it. The others, Ray Richards of Hearst's International News Service and Corporal Ernie Peeler of Stars and Stripes, were killed as they ran for a jeep when the battalion was cut off. Richards was shot through the head, Peeler through the chest. They were the first newsmen to die in the Korean war.*
Both were war veterans. Richards, 56, a...