• U.S.

The Press: Inside Yugoslavia

3 minute read
TIME

Into the Manhattan headquarters of the Associated Press one evening last week came a flash from Bureau Chief Edward Kennedy at Algiers that made A.P. eyes pop: “DE LUCE MADE TRIP INTO BAL KANS WHICH ARRANGED ITALY. WILL WRITE SERIES STORIES. DE LUCE DESERVES HIGHEST CREDIT.” Then came the first De Luce dispatch. The astonishing dateline: “A Partisan Brigade Headquarters, in Yugoslavia.”

At week’s end the A.P. at home was still in the dark about how tall, blond, able and amiable Daniel De Luce had got into Yugoslavia, how long he would be able to stay, how he was getting his dispatches out. Good guess was that he had gone in with some Allied officers who are known to have reached Partisan Army headquarters; that Allied torpedo boats probably tote his dispatches across the Adriatic Sea to Italy.

But clear was the fact that De Luce had scored a notable news beat.

Bombing Miracles. Pipe-smoking Arizona-born Dan De Luce, 32, worked a 48-hour week in A.P.’s Los Angeles bureau while attending University of California at Los Angeles. He graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1934, soon set out on the kind of career newsmen dream about. He was in the Balkans with his handsome wife when Germany invaded Poland. From Lwow he sent one of the war’s first air-raid eyewitness dispatches: “As I write . . . 21 German bombers are raining heavy bombs. . . . The table under my hand is shaking like something alive. If [the hotel] holds together until I can get this off to Rumania then I will believe in miracles.”

Commented the Baltimore Sun’s Editorialist Henry L. Mencken after that: One De Luce “is worth all the gaudy journalistic wizards who sit in the safe hotels of unbombed capitals, and tell us, not what has happened, but what they think.”

Bombing Missions. Chased out of Poland by the Nazis, De Luce was later chased from Greece. He was in Persia during the 1941 fighting, then went on to India, Burma. He rode on bombing missions against the Japs, sent grim stories about Allied inadequacies: “Boys with matchless courage are being slaughtered because they are in inadequate numbers, ill-trained, poorly equipped. . . . The last tired companies of what were proud battalions are -. . . in a galling retreat.”

After a rest in the U.S. (to recover from malaria and dysentery), De Luce covered the Tunisian campaign. In Italy two weeks ago he ran into British General Harold Alexander, whom he had “covered” in Burma’s darkest days. Said the General with well-bred surprise: “You [newspaper] chaps get around extraordinarily well.”

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