Missing in Action

At 33, Wilson Fielder knew the Far East as well as he did his own country: China was his first home. The son of U.S. Baptist missionaries, he was born in Cheng-chow, learned to speak Chinese as he learned English. After grade and high school at American schools in Honan Province, he went to the U.S. to college, studied journalism and history at Texas' Baylor University, in due time broke into the newspaper business as a reporter on the Waco News-Tribune.

By the time war came, friendly, fresh-faced Newsman Fielder had moved on, was working on the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as a private early in 1942, was soon commissioned and assigned to train officer candidates at Quantico, Va. Later, he was given command of a company of the sth Marine Division. Then the Marine Corps assigned Captain Fielder to perfect his Chinese at the University of California. When World War II ended, Fielder went back to his true calling, took a job as night city editor for the Associated Press in San Francisco, hoping that a chance would come to go back to China as a journalist.

The chance came in 1948, when he joined the staff of TIME. As a correspondent for TIME & LIFE, he reported the last bitter triumphs of Communism in China, covered guerrilla warfare in Indo-China, went along on a Chinese Nationalist bombing raid from Formosa to Shanghai. When war started in Korea, ex-Marine Fielder volunteered to cover it, left his wife and ten-month-old son behind in Hong Kong. He was aboard the light cruiser Juneau when it shelled Korea's east coast, and filed a notable report--"Last Train from Vladivostok" (TIME, July 24).

Fielder joined the ground forces in Korea, went up to Taejon. Last week, as the burning city fell to the Communists, a convoy of U.S. vehicles fought its way out, under orders to stop for no one. According to the driver of one jeep, Wilson Fielder was riding in the back seat with a G.L, when a burst of machine-gun fire hit them both and knocked them out of the jeep. Obeying orders, the driver said, he kept going.

There were other, conflicting versions of what happened; the Communist Pyongyang Radio, which had falsely claimed the capture of two other correspondents earlier in the fighting, reportedly announced that Correspondent Fielder had been taken prisoner. At week's end, as stragglers continued to make their way out of the Taejon pocket and back to U.S. lines, there was no final word of Wilson Fielder's fate: he was listed only as "missing in action." He was the sixth U.S. newsman to be listed as a battle casualty in the war in Korea.-

*The others: Ray Richards of I.N.S., Corporal Ernie Peeler of Stars and Stripes, both killed in action (TIME, July 24); Frank Gibney of TIME & LIFE, Burton Crane of the New York Times, and Jack James of U.P., wounded.

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