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Every telephone, telegraph and electric light wire in the town was down. S. M. Craige, a former Marine, operator of the Managua radio transmitter, ran out to his station nearly four miles in the country. The station was still standing. He burst in, panting, and sent the first word of Managua's ruin to the outer world. Soon came vivid reports to the U. S. Press. Besides the regular correspondents, several able newshawks happened to be in Managua last week. Dapper Charles J. V. Murphy, a former New York World man, was there preparing a book on the Marines in Nicaragua. All day long he worked with the rescue squads, writing despatches at night by the light of a flashlight. And less than 76 hours after the earthquake, U. S. newspaper readers and cinemaddicts 2,000 miles away were looking at pictures of the disaster. Specially chartered planes flew films of rival agencies via Havana and Miami to Atlanta whence telephoto machines flashed them on. Picture men boasted: "A record!"
Relief. U. S. Marines have been in Nicaragua since 1912. Nicaragua may be an independent republic on the statute books, but officials and citizens instinctively realized last week that U. S. responsibility in a Nicaraguan disaster is precisely like that of Great Britain in an Egyptian disaster. Immediately after the 'quake, all available planes of Pan American Airways were placed at the disposal, not of homeless President Jose Maria Moncada, sleeping in a tent last week with his new Presidential Palace a mess of pink stucco on the side of La Loma. an extinct volcano, but of U. S. Acting Secretary of the Navy Ernest Lee Jahncke.
Emergency meetings of the Red Cross were held in Washington. Ernest J. Swift, who had charge of Red Cross relief work in the Santo Domingo hurricane last fall (TIME, Sept. 15, 22), took the first train to Miami, flew in a Pan American plane to Managua, took charge of all emergency feeding stations.
The U. S. Fleet had just broken up after battle practice in the Caribbean. On the Atlantic and Pacific, ships swung round, raced for Nicaragua. The hospital ship Relief was off the west coast of Mexico, bound for San Diego. Knowing that every bed would be needed, convalescent sailors went over the side in lifeboats, were transferred to cruisers and destroyers while the Relief plowed south to Corinto.
Up from the Canal Zone came the cruiser Rochester. The transport Chaumont, due at Corinto in four days, raced at full speed with blankets, tents, medical supplies. The aircraft carrier Lexington raced out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at 28 knots, outdistanced her destroyer convoy. Next day, 150 miles off the coast of Central America, she swung into the wind and a covey of fire planes roared off her flying deck. In a little more than four hours they landed in Managua with physicians, surgeons, loads of urgently needed anaesthetics. (By the previous midnight, four Navy surgeons had performed more than 500 operations, mostly without anaesthetics.)
From Rome, Pope Pius cabled a special relief fund.
Tension. Meanwhile, Managua burned and horror began piling on horror. Wrote Correspondent Murphy: