Two Came Home

During the long months of truce talks at Panmunjom, the closest links between U.S. prisoners of war and their families back home were pictures taken in Korean prison camps by Associated Press's Pulitzer Prizewinning* Photographer Frank Noel. It was a strange sort of beat. Noel, himself a P.W. since his 1950 capture while covering the Marines at Chosin Reservoir, used a Speed Graphic and films forwarded by A.P. through the Panmunjom camp. Censored by both Chinese and U.S. military, his pictures of beaming C.I.s seemed at once good propaganda to the Communists and good news for the U.S. home front. Last week, when Frank Noel reached Panmunjom in a group of released prisoners, his unsought "scoop" came to an end.

Old friends in the press corps mobbed the dusty red truck that brought him back. "Papps" Noel, his blue prison pants rolled above the knee, his sunburned face worn but happy, looked older than his 48 years. Noel said that after his camera arrived in the prison camp, the Communists put him under 24-hour guard, shuttled him from camp to camp to take photographs. Added Noel: "At first, lots of the boys refused [to pose]. But when a few pictures came back in the mail from their home-town papers, they realized I was playing it straight ... I think the pictures did a lot more good than they ever could have done harm."

Faithful to an old A.P. rule, Noel insisted that the Communists group the G.I.s according to states and home towns, so that the pictures would get maximum play back home. He wrote no captions, jotting down only names and addresses. Despite Communist cropping, the published photos gave the U.S. Army valuable information on prison layouts and locations, and positive P.W. identifications. But one beat widely attributed to Noel--the pictures of captured Major General William Dean--was a Communist plant. Noel told newsmen last week that he never saw, much less photographed, the general.

In Hong Kong last week, another American journalist started on the long voyage home. The 5:50 p.m. train that crosses over from Lo Wu, last stop in Red China, disgorged harried, sweating John William ("Bill") Powell, his wife and two children. Powell, 34. editor of Shanghai's China Monthly Review until it folded last month "because we went broke," was the last U.S. journalist to publish in Red China.

Young Bill's father, who founded the old China Weekly Review, had been a courageous voice of freedom in the Far East. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese punished him with a prison sentence that brought starvation, gangrene and the loss of ten toes, and hastened his death. Bill revived the weekly as a monthly, but turned it into a mouthpiece for the Chinese Reds. In recent issues, the Review called the Rosenberg trial a "frame-up," Point Four an "imperialist plot," and had "verified" U.S. "germ warfare" in Korea.

Newsmen who asked Powell last week why he had never criticized any Red action were rewarded with Powell's own version of Orwellian doublespeak: "You just don't understand. In China, there's a new appreciation of the role of the press."

*A survivor of an India-bound ship torpedoed by the Japanese off Sumatra in 1942. Noel won the prize for a photo he took from his lifeboat three days later, showing a Lascar crew member in another lifeboat frantic with thirst. (Its caption: "Water.")

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