Mark S. Watson served in the First World War and covered the Second
A week after the joy of liberation in Paris, Baltimore Sun correspondent Mark S. Watson set out on a trip that would have been unthinkable the first time he traveled the same ground a quarter century earlier.
The journey from Laon to Verdun had been something of a sentimental affair, for in its course we touched at a great many places well remembered from our days under Pershing.
This time instead of being spaced over a long campaign, however, they were compressed into a matter of a single day’s travel. Not through mud but over smooth highways and not past ruins but through the smiling agricultural fields of Champagne, where happily most of the grain crops have come to harvest too late for the Germans to carry away with them.
Among all of Watson’s travels covering the fighting from North Africa to Sicily and Italy and into Normandy, his time surveying the grounds where the great battles of the First World War seemed to resonate most deeply for the veteran correspondent — and for good reason.
Born June 24, 1887, Watson was nearly 30 years old when the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. A roving reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he happened to be in New York at the time, but he immediately caught a train back home and enlisted in an Illinois National Guard artillery unit. He did not tell his bosses he was back in the state because he was afraid they might attempt to derail his hopes of joining the fight.
On the contrary, the Tribune would eventually trumpet Watson’s service, and that of six of his colleagues, after they were assigned to complete officer training at Fort Sheridan. “Their Swords Now Mightier Than Their Pens” read the banner headline over headshots of the seven men in a May 14, 1917 feature story.
Watson was commissioned a second lieutenant and initially tabbed for quartermaster duty, but he was eventually promoted to captain and assigned to the intelligence section at Gen. John J. Pershing’s headquarters after arriving in France. He engineered a transfer to field duty in October 1918, and after the fighting ended the following month, he took over supervision of Stars and Stripes in Paris for several months before returning to the U.S. in the summer of 1919.
Following a brief stint as an editor at Ladies Home Journal, Watson joined the Sun in 1920 and never left. He initially came aboard as assistant managing editor and held similar titles during the interwar years, including a stint as interim editor of the paper.
As war loomed in Europe once again, though, Watson drew on his experience and expertise and began writing about and analyzing military affairs for the newspaper, a focus he would maintain for the rest of his career.
Watson had a near-drowning experience as a child growing up in Plattsburgh, New York, and remained terrified of the water the rest of his life. Nonetheless, at 56 years he waded ashore at Salerno with Fifth Army troops in September 1943 to begin nearly two years of covering the fighting in Europe firsthand.
He certainly had no illusions about the fickle nature of warfare, and he tried his best to convey the reality to readers. In one of his first dispatches from Italy, he mused on a German bomb that had whistled in directly astern of the large troop transport ship on which he was a passenger but failed to explode.
It was an impressive demonstration of many things, including luck, destiny or providential protection, depending on your brand of theology.
It also demonstrates most effectively that the endless pains, cost and energy which went into designing, improving and building that particular enemy plane, into training its pilot, bombardier, navigator and crew, into careful enemy observation of its target on that occasion, into the planning of the attack and its almost perfect execution — all were totally wasted in this instance because something blocked the essential culminating act.
In some unknown German factory some unknown hand failed to make a precise adjustment of a fuse or some other tiny bomb part, and as a result this whole expensive enterprise by the enemy went to waste.
Fortunately, it was an enemy enterprise. But we must realize that our own operations, as well as his, are dependent upon perfection not only at most of the links of a chain from factory to battlefront, but at every single link of that long chain.
One drowsy workman thousands of miles away can be responsible for the misfiring of one shell or bomb which might otherwise have destroyed a vital target and materially affected the course of the whole campaign.
His dispatches are fascinating to read, blending insight like that with crisp descriptions of the day’s fighting, travelogue-worthy scene-setting in Italian vineyards, lamentations over the destruction of a 13th-century chapel in France, and updates on Marylanders he encountered along the way.
When appropriate, Watson became a character in his stories, sometimes referred to as “I” and others with the royal “we.” The most exuberant of these probably was his description of that triumphal ride into Paris on Aug. 25, 1944.
The French civilians were eager to give advice, but only in French which none in the colonel’s jeep could understand. I was called forward so often to interpret that the affair wound up with me being placed in a French civilian’s car to lead the way for our particular column. That is the sort of a thing a newspaper correspondent dreams of but usually encounters only in the movies.
In that formation we moved on, up the Avenue D’Italie with quite hysterical ladies, gentlemen and little children clamoring to touch us and the French driver beside me so excited I had to make occasional clutches for the steering wheel to save the lives of excited civilians.
Watson continued to cover the fighting across France and eventually into Germany, but he was back in Paris on May 7, 1945, when word of the surrender reached the press headquarters at the Hotel Scribe.
Watson’s story about French reaction to the German capitulation ran on Page 2 of the May 8 Sun, but the correspondent’s photo appeared on Page 1. There, his employers trumpeted the news that Watson had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. The citation commended his work covering the war from the battlefronts as well as his analyses filed from Washington and London.
Though he was at an age when many would transition to less vigorous pursuits, Watson never broke stride. He reported from Korea in 1952 and wrote about various military developments into the 1960s.
In 1963, Watson was among the initial group of 31 people awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by John F. Kennedy, along with such luminaries as Marion Anderson, Ralph Bunche, Pablo Casals, E.B. White, Thornton Wilder and Andrew Wyeth.
Mark S. Watson died at his Baltimore home on March 25, 1966 after a brief illness. Tributes poured in from on high, none higher than the note President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote to Watson’s widow, Susan.
He has been my personal friend for many years. I shared with his friends his triumphs — the winning of the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for his war reporting in the European theater of war and persistence of excellence that emerged in a steady stream of factual reporting of this nation’s conduct in the defense of its security.
Mark Watson belonged to that rare tribe — growing smaller each year — the newspaper man’s newspaper man. His values never diminished, nor did his search for accuracy. He shall be sorely missed.