Correspondent In The Balkans

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29401, 31 December 1960, Page 3

Correspondent In The Balkans

Foreign Correspondent. By Robert St. John. Hutchinson. 236 PPAt the age of 37 Robert St. John was deemed too old by his employers, Associated Press, to be entrusted with the strenuous job of war correspondent, but on August 28, 1939, with his wife, Eda, and a total capital of 1005 dollars, 50 cents, he set off from Paris for Budapest, the nearest permissible approach to Poland which both felt must be the opening scene of an imminent world-wide conflagration. With the trained nose of a news-hound, and some good American journalist connexions in Europe, St. John confidently trusted that he could employ his talents sufficiently well to keep above the breadline. His adventures during the ensuing two years justified this belief.

With a Polish girl as interpreter he followed the events in Warsaw by tenuous communications with its radio station until the fall of that unhappy city, and then, with visas for five countries moved on to Istanbul. Black market dealings in his remaining dollars financed this move, and only when A.P., after receiving many valuable dispatches, accorded him a small salaried status did the financial horizon begin to clear. . His next journey was to Bucharest, where, in the following months enough events of world importance took place to keep an active journalist fully employed. The Rumanian capital was, at that time, the scene of King Carol's oblique manoeuvres to keep his throne and his independence of German domination, both of which he was shortly to lose. German “tourists" of very military carriage poured into the city; so did the Gestapo, and with the Russian seizure of Bessarabia and Transylvania, the Germans took steps to ensure that the Rumanian oilfields came under their control. Carol's abdication under threats of assassination soon followed, and while his young son nominally succeeded him on the throne, General Antonescu, who was chief of the infamous Nazi-like Legion of the Archangel Michael, became undisputed head of the State. There followed fratricidal strife between the army and the Legion,

and one of the author's abiding memories is of seeing a soldier soaked in petrol after an affray with the Legion, and set on fire. Shortly after this horrible episode a terrific earthquake rocked Bucharest, bringing down a 13storey hotel building and creating a hell of death and destruction; and the author’s final memory of the city was of a pogrom in which the Legion systematically destroyed every human being in the Jewish quarter. After that he left Rumania for Bulgaria, and following a short sojourn moved on to Jugoslavia—the only Balkan State which was not by then committed to the German cause. The pro-German Prince Paul, regent for the boy king Peter, had been banished and the country awaited the inevitable German attack. It was not long in coming, and one of the most graphic descriptions in this incident-packed book is of the systematic bombing of defenceless Belgrade, and the subsequent flight of a pathetically helpless people from a murdered city. St. John and some of his colleagues chartered a 20-foot sardine boat at Buvda. and tried to cross the Gulf of Corinth to Greece which was by now also embroiled in the war. and the party arrived at Patras in a ship, which had rescued them from their suicidally fragile craft, just in time for a full-scale bombing raid.

It was in Greece that the author’s active war-adventures came to an end. but not before he had witnessed the deliberate bombing and burning of a Red Cross train full of wounded men. He himself became a casualty at this time, but was taken by a British merchant ship to Cairo from whence he was able to make his way home to America. It is almost impossible to do full justice to this book, which is not only crowded with eyewitness accounts of the Balkan theatre of war, but also describes the characters of many worldfamous newspaper men with whom the author’s adventures were shared. The wonder is that any of them survived, but be makes clear in a postscript that most of them did. The book is a masterpiece of objective reporting.