Marguerite
Higgins was
born in Hong Kong on 3rd September,
1920. Her father, Lawrence Higgins, an American working at a shipping
company, moved the family back to the United States
in 1923.
Higgins was educated at the University of California. In her first
year she worked on the student newspaper, The
Daily Californian.
After Higgins graduated in 1941, she moved to Columbia University
where she completed a masters degree in journalism.
In 1942 Higgins was hired by the New
York Tribune.
Higgins wanted to report the war in Europe but it was not until 1944
that her editor agreed to send her to London.
The following year she moved to mainland Europe, first reporting the
war from France and later in Germany.
This included accompanying Allied troops when they entered the Nazi
extermination camps of Dachau
and Buchenwald.
After the war and covered the Nuremberg
War Trials
and the growing
tension between west and eastern Europe for the
New
York Tribune.
In 1947 Higgins was promoted to bureau chief in Berlin.
In 1950 Higgins was assigned to Japan where
she became the newspaper's Far East bureau chief. On the outbreak
of the Korean War, Higgins moved to South
Korea where she reported the the fall of the capital, Seoul, to North
Korean forces.
The New
York Tribune
sent their top war reporter, Homer
Bigart,
to South Korea and ordered Higgins to return to Tokyo. Higgins refused
to go and continued to compete with Bigart to get the best stories.
This became more difficult when all women reporters were banned from
the front-line. Higgins was furious but was eventually able to persuade
General Douglas MacArthur to allow
her to resume her front-line reporting.
Higgins, who was with the Marines when they landed in Inchon, 200
miles behind the North Korean lines, on 15th September, 1950, soon
established herself as an outstanding war journalist. Her more personal
style of reporting the war was popular with the American public. In
October, 1950, Higgins was the subject of an article in Life
Magazine.
In 1951, her book, War
in Korea,
became a best-seller. That year she won the Pulitzer
Prize
for international
reporting and was voted Woman of the Year by the Associated Press
news organization.
Higgins was sent to Vietnam in 1953 where
she reported the defeat of the French Army at Dien Bein Phu. During
the fighting she narrowly escaped injury when while walking alongside
the photographer, Robert Capra, he was
killed when he stepped on a land mine.
In 1955 she travelled extensively in the Soviet Union and afterwards
published her book Red
Plush and Black Bread
(1955). This was followed by another book on journalism, News
is a Singular Thing
(1955). Higgins also covered the civil war in the Congo.
Higgins made many visits to Vietnam
and her book Our
Vietnam Nightmare
(1965), documented her concerns about United States
military involvement in the region. While in Vietnam in 1965 she went
down with leishmaniasis, a tropical disease.
Marguerite Higgins was brought back to the United States but died
on 3rd January, 1966. In recognition of her outstanding war reporting
she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
(1)
Marguerite Higgins,
New York Tribune (18th September, 1950)
Heavily
laden U.S. Marines, is one of the most technically difficult amphibious
landings in history, stormed at sunset today over a ten-foot sea wall
in the heart of the port of Inchon and within an hour had taken three
commanding hills in the city.
I was in the fifth wave
that hit "Red Beach," which in reality was a rough, vertical
pile of stones over which the first assault troops had to scramble
with the aid of improvised landing ladders topped with steel hooks.
Despite a deadly and steady
pounding from naval guns and airplanes, enough North Koreans remained
alive close to
the beach to harass us with small-arms and mortar fire. They even
hurled hand grenades down at us as we crouched in
trenches, which unfortunately ran behind the
sea wall in the inland side.
It was far from the "virtually
unopposed" landing for which the troops had hoped after hearing
of the quick capture of Wolmi Island in the morning by an earlier
Marine assault. Wolmi is inside Inchon harbor and just off "Red
Beach." At
H-hour minus seventy, confident, joking Marines started climbing down
from the transport ship on cargo nest and dropping into small assault
boats. Our wave commander. Lieutenant R. J. Schening, a veteran of
five amphibious assaults, including Guadalcanal, hailed me with the
comment, "This has a good chance of being a pushover."
Because of tricky tides,
our transport had to stand down the channel and it was more than nine
miles to the rendezvous
point where our assault waves formed up.
The channel reverberated
with the ear-splitting boom of warship guns and rockets. Blue and
orange flames spurted from
the "Red Beach" area and a huge oil tank, on fire, sent
great black rings of smoke over the shore. Then the fire from the
big guns lifted and the planes that had been circling overhead swooped
low to rake their fire deep into the sea wall.
The first wave of our
assault troops was speeding toward the shore by now. It would be H-hour
(5:30 P.M.) in two minutes. Suddenly, bright-orange tracer bullets
spun out from the hill in our direction.
"My God! There are
still some left," Lieutenant Schening said. "Everybody get
down. Here we go!"
It was H-hour plus fifteen
minutes as we sped the last two thousand yards to the beach. About
halfway there the bright
tracers started cutting across the top of our little boat. "Look
at their faces now," said John Davies of the Newark News.
I turned and saw
that the men around me had
expressions contorted with anxiety.
We struck the sea wall
hard at a place where
it had crumbled into a canyon. The bullets
were whining persistently, spattering
the water around us. We clambered over
the high steel sides of the boat, dropping
into the water and, taking shelter beside
the boat as long as we could, snaked on
our stomachs up into a rock-strewn dip
in the sea wall.
In the sky there was good
news. A bright, white star shell from the high ground to our left
and an amber cluster told us that the first wave had taken their initial
objective, Observatory Hill. But whatever the luck of the first four
waves, we were relentlessly pinned down by rifle and automatic-weapon
fire coming down on us from another rise on the right.
There were some thirty
Marines and two correspondents crouched in the gouged-out sea wall.
Then another assault
boat swept up, disgorging about thirty more Marines. This went on
for two more waves until our hole was filled and Marines lying on
their stomachs were strung out all across the top of the sea wall.
(2)
Marguerite Higgins,
A Woman Combat Correspondent (1951)
So
long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed
public opinion it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth. It
is best to tell graphically the moments of desperation and horror
endured by an unprepared army, so that the American public will demand
that it does not happen again.
(3)
Marguerite Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
I
met the Eighth Army commander. Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker,
for the first time when I returned to the front in mid-July after
MacArthur had lifted the ban on women correspondents in Korea. General
Walker was a short, stubby man of bulldog expression and defiant stance.
I wondered if he were trying to imitate the late General George Patton,
under whom he served in World War II as a corps commander.
General
Walker was very correct and absolutely frank with me.
He said he still
felt that the front was no place for a woman, but that
orders were orders and that from now on I could be assured of absolutely
equal treatment.
"If something had
happened to you, an American woman," the general
explained, "I would have gotten a terrible press. The American
public might never have forgiven me. So please be careful
and don't get yourself killed or captured."
General Walker kept his
promise of equal treatment, and from then
on, so far as the United States Army was concerned, I went about
my job with no more hindrance than the men.
(4)
Marguerite Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
Despite large-scale reinforcements,
our troops were still falling
back
fast. Our lines made a large semicircle around the city of Taegu.
The main pressure at that time was from the northwest down the Taejon-Taegu
road. But a new menace was developing with frightening rapidity way
to the southwest. For the Reds, making a huge arc around our outnumbered
troops, were sending spearheads to the south coast of Korea hundreds
of miles to our rear. They hoped to strike along the coast at Pusan,
the vital port through which most of our supplies funneled.
It was
at this time that General Walker issued his famous "stand or
die" order. The 1st Cavalry 25th Division were freshly arrived.
Like 24th Division before them, the new outfits had to learn for themselves
how to cope with this Indian-style warfare for which they were so
unprepared. Their soldiers were not yet battle-toughened. Taking into
account the overwhelming odds, some front-line
generals worried about the performance of their men and told us so
privately.
(5)
Marguerite Higgins,
War in Korea (1951)
A reconnaissance officer came
to the improvised command post and reported that the soldiers landing
on the coast were not a new enemy force to overwhelm us, but South
Korean allies.
On
the hill, soldiers were silencing some of the enemy fire. It was now
seven forty-five. It did not seem possible that so much could have
happened since the enemy had struck three quarters of an hour before.
As
the intensity of fire slackened slightly, soldiers started bringing
in the wounded from the hills, carrying them on their backs. I walked
over to the aid station. The mortars had been set up right next to
the medic's end of the schoolhouse. The guns provided a nerve-racking
accompaniment for the doctors and first-aid men as they ministered
to the wounded. Bullets were still striking this end of the building,
and both doctors and wounded had to keep low to avoid being hit. Because
of the sudden rush of casualties, all hands were frantically busy.
One
medic was running short of plasma but did not dare leave his patients
long enough to try to round up some more. I offered to administer
the remaining plasma and passed about an hour there, helping out as
best I could.
My
most vivid memory of the hour is Captain Logan Weston limping into
the station with a wound in his leg. He was patched up and promptly
turned around and headed for the hills again. Half an hour later he
was back with bullets in his shoulder and chest. Sitting on the floor
smoking a cigarette, the captain calmly remarked, "I guess I'd
better get a shot of morphine now. These last two are beginning to
hurt."
(6)
Marguerite
Higgins, A Woman Combat Correspondent (1951)
With
a shell whistling at you there is not much time to pretend, and a
person's qualities are starkly revealed. You believe that you can
trust what you have seen. It is a feeling that makes old soldiers,
old sailors, old airman and even old war correspondents, humanly close
in a way shut off to people who have not shared the same thing.
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