To correspondent Gwen Dew, traveling was living
Gwen Dew never had a chance to serve as a war correspondent in the traditional sense. Living in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was swept up along with other American citizens in the opening days of the suddenly far-reaching conflict.
War woke us with rough giant fingers in Hong Kong on that historical morning of Dec. 8, 1941. (Dec. 7 in this hemisphere.) It shook our lives out on bloody streets, and tore our hearts and minds to shreds with ruthless disregard of all humanities.
It left us ignominious prisoners in a semistarved condition in a Japanese concentration camp, from which 350 Americans have just returned out of that human bondage, leaving behind 3,000 British slaves to hope for the day when the American Navy and Air Force will make them free again.
Those words opened the first installment of Dew’s lengthy account of her experience as a Japanese prisoner, which ran in dozens of newspapers in August and September 1942 after her release and lengthy return voyage to the U.S.
Though being held captive was a new and wholly unwelcome experience for Dew, she was no stranger to foreign conflict, having spent years traveling the world and reporting back to various newspapers and magazines — a life that was so out of the norm for women at the time that New York World-Telegram columnist Alice Hughes described her as “the sort of girl reporter we feel sprouts only in the minds of popular novelists.
“But this one, Gwen Dew, was very real, a solid hunk of girl out of Detroit, and had passed through all the adventures we associate with the brightlyillustrated pieces in the slick-paper fiction magazines.”
Gwendolyn Dew was born June 18, 1903 in Albion, Michigan, about 100 miles west of Detroit, where her parents ran the local flower shop.
She developed an early interest in writing and after beginning her studies locally at Albion College would transfer to the University of Michigan, where she earned a journalism degree in 1924.
Dew worked for an Albion newspaper for a time before moving to Detroit to start the publicity department for FTD, the flower delivery service. She stayed there until 1929, the same year a serious automobile crash changed her outlook on life.
Dew underwent numerous operations and spent months laid up as she recovered. She would tell an interviewer early in 1941 that the experience left her determined “to store my mind with things no one can take from me.”
To Drew, that meant seeing the world, and by the mid-1930s she had formulated a plan. She convinced the Detroit News to take her on as a globe-trotting correspondent and photographer and embarked in the spring of 1936 on an adventure that would continue for more than a year.
She spent much of that trip roaming Asia, where she scored a rare interview with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in China and also visited Japan, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and other exotic locales. In addition to filing her stories to the News, she sold photographs to numerous publications, including Life — a business model that would allow her to fit right into today’s travel-blogging community.
Dew’s trip concluded with a spin through Europe in the spring of 1937, and she was supposed to return home to the U.S. aboard the Hindenburg during its fateful voyage that May, but her flight to Frankfurt was canceled so she was unable to make the connection.
Her around-the-world trip hardly satisfied her urge to travel. She would spend time reporting from Mexico, then return to Hawaii early in 1941 with plans to report from the Burma Road if she could make her way there. She ended up in Japan that spring, then moved on to China in the fall, where she wrote a series of stories from Shanghai that offered readers a feel for the simmering conflict in the region.
A piece datelined Sept. 23, 1941 began: “I saw an assassination this morning. It is rather an alarming thing to see a man cough his lungs out, and brings vivid proof of how quickly life can become death.”
A young Chinese banker named Kennson Gee had been seated a table over from Dew at breakfast that morning, and shortly after his departure she heard a sound outside “like a small exploding firecracker.” She looked from the window and saw him on the ground, “clutching his throat with his hand.”
She described the ensuing gunfight between police and Gee’s five assailants, which left a dozen bystanders dead, and noted that Gee had drawn attention for publicly criticizing the puppet government Japan had installed in Nanking.
While the gun battle was going on, I hurriedly crossed the street to see if I could do anything for the man who laid in the spreading pool of crimson blood. Since the Chinese believe that you are responsibly for anyone the rest of his life if you save him from death, they will not go near an injured person.
So for a few minutes, while life became death, I alone watched the thick curdled stream grow wider on the pavement. There was nothing I could do — save offer prayer to destiny that this man had found peace.
A little over two months later, Dew found herself in the heart of the fighting in Hong Kong and immediately began documenting what she saw — beginning her “search for the meaning of war,” as she would later describe it.
I took pictures of children who had been blown out of their mother’s arms. I took movies of Chinese looters who swept through Kowloon, whirling through houses like a flood tide, leaving nothing of value, destroying what they did not want to carry with them. I searched for places where bombs had dropped, and photographed what was left of homes and families.
The air raids and fighting continued through Christmas Day, when the British colonial government surrendered Hong Kong to the Japanese. Dew and the others were now prisoners, though she initially did not expect to survive. She would describe a “slightly drunken” Japanese guard running his bayonet back and forth across her neck. “He was trying to break my nerve, and I blessed a good poker face for control of my feelings.”
They eventually were marched eight miles at bayonet point through the streets, past dead British soldiers, before being ferried to Kowloon to start months of confinement.
“We slept on the floor, with one thin blanket over us, and it was extremely cold,” she wrote. “From that time until I was released on June 30 (1943), with the exception of two weeks, I never had a bed, chair or table. I lived in the slack suit in which I was captured for four months, including sleeping in it most of the time.”
The final article in her three-part series concluded with a call to action for Americans on the homefront.
I could tell you of more rape, of torture, of mistreatment. I could tell you of Jap soldiers slapping civilians for no reason, or making them stand for hours holding a stick above their heads. I could tell you of many abnormal restrictions.
I wish I could tell you everything I know — for then you would realize you are fighting for civilization, that your enemies are men of medieval standards, without honor, without pity. You would work harder, faster, longer. The American soldiers and sailors in the Far East know what they are up against. We can depend on them. But it is up to us at home to keep supplies going to those men faster, faster, faster. …
Those of us who have returned from Hong Kong beg you to know that your enemy is an animal, his lust is great, his intentions disastrous to all standards of democratic civilization. It’s up to you to stop him.
Dew would recount her experience in greater detail in her book Prisoner of the Japs, released in 1943, and spent much of the rest of the war speaking about her experiences at war bond rallies and community functions in Michigan and around the country.
In the fall of 1945, Dew and other journalists had an opportunity to fly over Japan and survey the damage done by the atomic bombs that had ended the war. Though her feelings about the Japanese were clearly stated in her earlier writings, the sight of the widespread devastation in Hiroshima left Dew appalled. “I literally could not speak for days,” she would write.
Gwen Dew eventually settled in the Phoenix area in 1955, and in January 1958 she launched the “World Adventure-Logue Series” at the Scottsdale High School auditorium, bringing in speakers every week to share stories of their travels abroad.
“I really miss people who make the world their beat, and I’ll have to admit I’m bringing world travelers to the Valley as much for myself as for the public,” she told the Arizona Republic.
Aside from occasional trips of her own, the inveterate traveler would spend the rest of her life in the Valley of the Sun. She died in Phoenix on June 17, 1993, the day before her 90th birthday.