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1940-1949
Daniel Witt Hancock
Edward H. (Harry) Crockett
George Bede Irvin
Asahel "Ace" Bush
Joseph Morton
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Daniel
Witt Hancock (1907-1942)
Newsman Witt Hancock was killed March 7, 1942, when
Japanese bombers sank the Dutch refugee ship he was
aboard in the Indian Ocean south of Java. He was 34
and the first AP reporter to die during World War II.
War correspondents in the Dutch East Indies had a difficult
time getting stories through to the outside world, but
Hancock managed one last time on March 2 to get a telephone
call - monitored by censors - through from Java to AP
in New York. Hancock told Cable Editor James Long that
the Army planned to evacuate foreign newsmen soon but
he hadn't decided when he would leave. His last words
on the call: "Good luck, and keep your fingers
crossed." He was missing for months after that,
and an account of his death was finally given by another
correspondent who escaped the sinking ship.Hancock joined
the AP in Raleigh, N.C., in 1929, and worked in Charlotte
and New York, London, Moscow, Turkey, and India before
arriving in Indonesia as the Japanese forces approached.
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Edward
H. (Harry) Crockett (1911-1943)
Newsman Harry Crockett was killed on Feb. 5, 1943, aboard
a British ship that was torpedoed by enemy warships in
the Mediterranean Sea. He was 31. Crockett began covering
World War II a year earlier, reporting from the battlefront
in Egypt and German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's last
offensive at Bir Hacheim in the desert. "He rode
tanks. ... He stood with gunners to watch artillery pound
the enemy and he watched infantry from points of vantage
where only a man with real courage would want to stand,"
wrote Ed Kennedy, an AP correspondent who had worked with
Crockett in the Middle East. A native of Lowell, Mass.,
Crockett joined the AP in Boston in 1937. On Jan. 25,
1944, Crockett's widow, Sally, christened a 10,500-ton
Liberty ship the "Edward H. Crockett." with
a smashing of the traditional champagne bottle at a launching
from a shipyard in South Portland, Maine.
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George
Bede Irvin (1910-1944)
Photographer Bede Irvin was killed July 25, 1944, after
photographing an aerial bombardment north of St. Lo, France,
at the start of the Allied drive out of Normandy. He was
33. An Allied bomb which fell short of its mark caught
Irvin as he dived for a roadside ditch from the jeep he
had been sitting in. He had apparently hesitated for a
second to grab his camera and was hit by a bomb fragment.
Irvin, a native of Des Moines, Iowa, worked for the Des
Moines Register and Tribune before joining the AP in Kansas
City in 1936. He worked in Detroit before going to London
in 1943 on the eve of the Normandy invasion, the first
American photographer assigned by the AP to cover the
war in Europe in preparation for D-Day. He was buried
with military honors at a U.S. Military Cemetery near
La Cambe, France, on July 27, 1944, his 34th birthday.
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Asahel
"Ace" Bush (1910-1944)
Newsman Asahel Bush was killed on Oct. 25, 1944 when a
Japanese bomb struck the American-occupied capital of
Tacloban, on the Philippine island of Leyte. He was 31
and the first correspondent to die in the Philippines
during World War II. Bush died a year to the day after
he left San Francisco to report on action in the Pacific
theater. He covered nearly every operation launched by
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and had come close to death on
many of his assignments. Bush, who joined the AP in 1939
in Salt Lake City, was born into a newspaper family in
Salem, Ore. - his great-grandfather established the state's
first newspaper, The Oregon City Statesman.
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Joseph
Morton (1911-1945)
In the fall of 1944, war correspondent Joseph Morton accompanied
a group of American intelligence officers on a secret
mission from Italy into Slovakia to assist an anti-Nazi
uprising. The 34-year-old, who had made headlines with
exclusive interviews of Yugoslaviaís Josip Broz
Tito and Romaniaís King Michael, told his bureau
chief only that the assignment would be the ìbiggest
story of my life.î By late October, the Nazis had
closed in. Morton and the U.S. officers hid in the mountains
for two months, before taking refuge from the snow and
bitter cold in a mountain hut, where they were captured
hours after Christmas. They were tortured and, on Jan.
24, 1945, shot to death at the Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria. Morton, the only foreign correspondent
executed by the Nazis, was from St. Joseph, Mo., and had
joined AP in 1937. His widow, Letty Miller Morton, wrote
that Morton always ìchampioned the underprivileged
ñ the little man who was not getting his due in
the worldî and that she took comfort that he died
ìdoing the work he loved.î The mountain hut
was later rebuilt and, in 1994, AP dedicated a plaque
at the site in Mortonís memory.
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