One night 54 years ago, I was drinking a beer in bar on a hotel rooftop in Saigon listening to the distinctive krrrump of bombs falling from American B-52 planes on the countryside not too far distant and wondering what I had let myself in for.
I had begun the year on a new post as Asian correspondent for the late, lamented New Zealand Press Association (NZPA). Reporting on New Zealand troops’ activities in Vietnam was an integral part of the job, and having moved a pregnant, understanding wife and two children to our new base in Singapore, I had to deal quickly with my nervousness about becoming a war correspondent.
Unlike the renowned fellow Kiwi reporter Peter Arnett, who made his name in Vietnam, I was never of a “warry” disposition. Perhaps living through the World War II Blitz in London as a child removed any trace of that from my DNA, and two years’ of Royal Air Force national service in the 1950s Cyprus emergency left me devoid of affection for things military.
I freely confess that fear seldom left me during many subsequent visits to Vietnam to report on the war over the next three years. I was comforted many years later to read the confession of my journalism hero, Scotsman James Cameron: “I have never met a war correspondent/photographer who was not far braver than I.”
Retiring after 60 years in the newspaper business, from 15-year-old office boy on a London daily to reporting from more than 50 countries, I wrote three volumes of memoir, while dreaming nightly about press conferences, interviews, unhelpful diplomats and filing difficulties from remote cities. Memories of the days before mobile phones, emails and the internet continue to haunt my sleep today, perhaps understandably after six decades of round-the-clock commitment to getting and sending the news.
Searching for a new project, I started writing a collection of potted biographies of fellow scribes I had admired – or otherwise, in the case of the British spy traitor HAR (Kim) Philby, whose Beirut byline in the Observer in the 1950s I well remember – around the world over the years.
This may or may not, in the current publishing environment, result in another book, but my research produced some fascinating stories, including those of two extraordinary female New Zealand war correspondents, Robin Hyde and Kate Webb, born nearly 40 years apart.
Both left their mark in the annals of journalism covering wars in different parts of Asia, suffering unimaginable pain, debilitating illness and mysterious disappearances in the process.
Both were far from the conventional image of gung-ho, predominantly male, war reporters and, to repeat James Cameron, were far braver than I. They shared a common approach to concentrate not on military strategy and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, but on its impact on society and ordinary people. Both witnessed atrocities that left them mentally and physically shattered.
Unlike most correspondents of my era, employed by newspapers and other media outlets and blessed with salaries, expense accounts, health insurance and supply back-up at home, both began reporting from overseas as freelancers, with self-paid, one-way tickets to the war zone and no guarantee of work. Both left family and friends mourning their disappearances in hostile territory.
Front-line dispatches
Robin Hyde – best remembered for her novel The Godwits Fly – was 32 when she disappeared for a month while travelling in Japanese-occupied China in 1938, where she became the first woman journalist to report on the front line.
She was there three years before American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who achieved unwanted notoriety as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was immortalised as UC (“Unwilling Companion”) in Gellhorn’s memoir account of her visit to China in 1941.
Kate Webb was 28 when she was captured by communist forces in Cambodia in April, 1971, while reporting for the American UPI news agency on the expansion of the war in Vietnam into its neighbour. Newspapers, including the New York Times, published obituaries and her family held a memorial service after the burnt body of a European woman was discovered and wrongly identified. She was released, racked with malaria and 10kg lighter, after a harrowing 23-day detention in which she, a Japanese photojournalist and four Cambodian companions were repeatedly interrogated.
She was told she was a prisoner of war and could be shot. “I don’t consider myself a prisoner of war,” she said. “I am not a soldier.”
“Then consider yourself an invited guest,” said her interrogator, laughing.
When Webb died 36 years later, an obituary described her as a “beautiful, softly spoken young woman, elfin with steely toughness” who fascinated an almost all-male press corps in Vietnam. A book about female reporters who covered Vietnam said: “Picture a brunette Princess Diana in jungle fatigues with about 40 more points of IQ.”
Few people today are aware that Robin Hyde – then known by her given name, Iris Wilkinson – was the first female accredited to the parliamentary press gallery in Wellington at the age of 18. Born in Cape Town, she was a baby when her family migrated to Wellington.
After the Dominion appointed her to write a chatty, light-hearted, woman’s view of the daily proceedings in Parliament, her political reporting style gave no hint of the hard-nosed war stories to come.
She left a remarkable account of her war reports from China in a book called Dragon Rampant, published in 1939. A review in the Times Literary Supplement testified to her right to inclusion in the foremost ranks of war correspondents.
The reviewer wrote, “Her descriptions of the bombing of the civilian population, of the dramatic taking of Hsuchowfu itself and its occupation by the Japanese, of the fate of its 200,000 citizens, with no water, little or no medical supplies, the power plant destroyed so that operations had to be conducted by candlelight, the food shortage, the frequency of rape and general terror, are not only a personal newspaper scoop which her fellow correspondents will read with envy, but one of the most terrible indictments of modern warfare.”
She wrote about Japanese atrocities, including the rape of young Chinese women, but only hinted at her personal experiences in a later letter. “The decent conduct of one body of men is flatly contradicted by what the next group does and says – I experienced that personally, over and over again …” she wrote.
She had had no dedicated outlet for her writing when she sailed for Europe on her OE in 1938 but was fascinated by China, which had been invaded by Japan, when the ship docked in Hong Kong.
She headed for Japanese-controlled Shanghai after reading that a local newspaper had been bombed and decapitated bodies of journalists left outside on the pavements.
“I felt a city where newspapermen are systematically decapitated by terrorists behind whom is, unquestionably [a] foreign fascist organisation, would be interesting to a writer and occasional freelance,” she wrote later.
A report in which she described Shanghai as a “backyard of war” with camps containing 80,000 refugees was published in a New Zealand monthly magazine called Woman Today, which did not pay its contributors. It said her report was “specially written for us without expecting any financial reward” and noted that she had been “declared missing in territory overrun by Japanese troops”.
In a later report, Hyde said that travelling with a pass signed by the nationalist Chinese Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, she had become “the first white woman to be allowed” to go to Hsuchowfu, a major railway junction and a key city close to the front.
She observed Japanese troops from a mountain top mounted on a small donkey and dressed in a Kuomintang uniform – both gifts of a Kuomintang general – but two weeks later, the city fell to the Japanese after heavy bombing forced the withdrawal of the Chinese defenders.
Trying to leave the occupied city by walking more than 320km to the nearest British consulate at Tsingtao, she experienced the best and worst of behaviour by the occupying Japanese.
Hyde said a Japanese doctor possibly prevented an infection by putting drops in an eye punctured by a thorn, but one officer wanted to shoot her as a spy despite her having a pass signed by another. In a different confrontation with soldiers, she was stripped of her clothes.
‘Any rotten job’
Kate Webb wrote about her capture in a book incorrectly titled On the Other Side: 23 days with the Viet Cong. She survived because she was captured, not by the Viet Cong but by soldiers of the North Vietnamese army – fighting to support Cambodian communists – who protected her from the country’s ruthless Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The Khmer Rouge habitually killed their prisoners.
Webb was born in Christchurch in 1943 but moved to Canberra as a child with her parents, who died in a car crash when she was 18. She reportedly graduated with a philosophy degree in symbolic logic before joining the Daily Mirror in Sydney.
Seeking adventure, as an obituary later had it, she paid her way to Vietnam in 1967 with a few hundred dollars and a portable typewriter. Initially hired by UPI to cover South Vietnamese domestic politics, she soon graduated to become one of the few women reporting from the battlefield.
She proved herself more than capable of footing it with other hard-drinking, chain-smoking war correspondents in Vietnam.
“If you don’t make a thing about being female,” she said, “if you don’t demand special privileges and don’t ask where you plug in your hairdryer, you have no problems.”
Webb was appointed UPI bureau chief in Cambodia after her boss was found dead in a paddy field. In April 1971, she was captured with five other civilians while covering a clash on a highway south of Phnom Penh.
The roads out of the capital were notoriously dangerous and when I visited Phnom Penh later that year, I reported a Cambodian army spokesman (memorably named Major Am Rong) declining to give correspondents guarantees about safe travel anywhere in the country.
Webb’s group was stranded when Cambodian troops they were following retreated from an ambush. Captured by North Vietnamese soldiers with AK47s, they were forced to march in bare feet, starved of food and water and endured long interrogations for three weeks before being released.
She said an order releasing them was read at a speech-filled ceremony in which fruit, sweets, tea and cigarettes were presented.
Recovered, she returned to Vietnam to cover the fall of Saigon in 1975. After joining Agence France-Presse (AFP), she reported on the Tamil Tiger uprising in Sri Lanka, the assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the first Gulf War and the handover of Hong Kong to China.
She nearly lost an arm in a motorcycle accident in Delhi and escaped a vicious attack by an Afghan warlord in Kabul. She retired in 2001, saying she had become too old for front-line reporting, which was the only kind of journalism she liked.
When she died six years later, obituaries said that, despite her hard-drinking, chain-smoking reputation, Webb described herself as “a real softie”, adding that “hard people shatter”. But fellow correspondent Tony Clifton wrote in a biography for the Australian Media Hall of Fame that she was “an outstanding member of a small group of female reporters who established that women reporters and photographers could do any rotten job on a battlefield that men could do”.
The lives of both Hyde and Webb ended tragically. Hyde, long troubled with depression and health problems worsened by her experiences in China, committed suicide in London at the age of 33 as the New Zealand government prepared to bring her home at public expense.
She had published Dragon Rampant, five novels, a collection of her journalism and three books of poetry in the previous 10 years.
Webb succumbed to bowel cancer in May, 2007, at the age of 64. Although she had spent most of her life outside New Zealand, she asked for her ashes to be scattered in Wellington Harbour.
One year later, I was privileged to be in a small party of old Asia hands who joined her sister Rachel and brother Jeremy in that moving ceremony from a boat after drinks and a memorial lunch.
