Seymour Korman and the fight for Hill 424
From the very beginning of his four decades in journalism to the final story he filed, Seymour Korman wrote untold thousands of words about suffering and death.
It was just part of the job for a reporter who learned the ropes covering cops and courts at Chicago’s legendary City News Bureau starting in 1930 and spent much of the final year of his life covering the Manson family and the Tate-LaBianca murder case.
Korman’s time as a war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune put him squarely in the arena, making him a firsthand witness to such violence on a regular basis.
Born July 7, 1909 in New York City, Korman made his way to Chicago after earning his journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin. The lanky correspondent (his draft card listed him at 6 feet tall, 128 pounds) joined the Tribune staff in 1933 and was a seasoned veteran by the time he went overseas in August 1942.
Beginning in London, Korman handled a variety of assignments, from daily reports on Eighth Air Force bombing raids to short color pieces on the life of the fighting man. He eventually made his way to North Africa, then Sicily, before landing in Salerno in mid-September 1943.
Days after his arrival, he found himself caught up in a harrowing drama that led to one of his most memorable stories — the battle for Hill 424.
Late on Sept. 16, Korman and fellow correspondent Richard Tregaskis joined up with a small detachment led by Col. Reuben Tucker, commanding officer of the 82nd Airborne’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, near Albanella, Italy.
They were trying to link up with two battalions that had been separated from the main group and were working their way in the dark through a series of ditches in the hilly, rocky terrain. Under fire from German artillery and mortars, they scrambled forward toward their objective, Hill 424, which they finally reached around midnight — to discover the battalions they had been seeking were nowhere to be found.
Now on all sides the German rifles and machine guns went into action and the shells came thudding in.
We were encircled. We had no communications and only a handful of men. We were out of contact with other units, with our division, with our army. We were in contact only with the enemy.
Two officers went out to try and find help but soon crawled back to the group, wounded, after running into Germans armed with machine pistols.
The commander went around checking up on the rest of us and directing us to dig foxholes. We crawled beneath the trees and dug frantically with our little shovels and with our fingers. It was a cool enough evening, but we were sweating. And always around us sprayed slugs and shells.
Col. Tucker was not named in Korman’s initial dispatch, which ran in the Sept. 20 Tribune. Neither was Maj. Don B. Dunham, the regimental operations officer, who Korman had introduced earlier in the story as “a major from California who had been one of my favorite companions in the bivouacs.”
About 4 a.m. on the 17th, Korman had just finished digging when Dunham and M/Sgt. Henry Furst approached his foxhole.
“Sey,” the major addressed me by my nickname, “we’re going to try to break thru the ring again and bring help. Otherwise you guys won’t have a chance at dawn. Take care of my map case and binoculars.”
He handed them to me.
“Okay, Don,” I said. “I’ll give them back to you in the morning.”
“Maybe,” he said slowly. We shook hands and he and the sergeant bent low and streaked toward the perimeter of the ridge. It was five minutes later that I heard machine pistol shots and a foreboding came upon me. Ten more minutes and Furst came sprinting back alone.
“They got the major,” he gasped. “They shot him in the chest, head and mouth. He’s dead.”
I nodded helplessly, looked at the map case and binoculars, and put them tenderly in my foxhole.
“He was a fine soldier,” Furst said, near tears.
“Yes, he was a fine soldier,” I echoed, and I thought no other epitaph was necessary.
Soldiers and frontline correspondents alike had become all too familiar with sudden tragedies like that, friends and companions here one minute and gone the next. Dunham, 32, would be posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that night.
Korman and the rest remained stranded atop the hill as dawn broke, with sporadic German fire keeping them on edge. Around mid-morning, Korman took his notes out of his pocket and buried them in the dirt so the enemy wouldn’t find them.
Not long after, around 10 a.m., a companion told him the group was going to make a break for it and head downhill. Korman retrieved his notes and Dunham’s map case and binoculars, and joined the rest in running for safety. They passed Dunham’s body on the way, and a few minute later encountered troops from one of the battalions they had been trying to reach.
While Tucker and his men prepared to head back to Hill 424 with the reinforcements, the colonel told Korman to head to safety:
“You go back with the wounded and write your story about us,” he told the correspondent.
Korman helped the wounded downhill, including a soldier who “had lost most of his nose from the impact of a machine gun bullet, and was worrying that his girl might not like his looks anymore. We assured him she would be very proud to be his girl.”
Their group, led by Lt. Col. Leslie Freeman, came under fire again near an aid station and had to dodge more artillery rounds before finally making their way over a ridge to safety.
As I was leaving, Freeman looked at his charges — all of them were there.
Then he remarked to me: “The God of battles is with us.”
Korman would see plenty more fighting before his war was over, following Fifth Army troops across Italy, then covering Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France, in late summer 1944. He would stay with Seventh Army as it crossed the Rhine into Germany, writing stories from the former Nazi strongholds of Nuremberg and Munich and accompanying U.S. troops to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.
He was there on the day Germany officially surrendered, touring a former German command post with Col. Robert Sink of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His story filed the following day began this way:
Two hundred American big guns fired a salvo over Berchtesgaden tonight. And as the roar echoed and re-echoed thru the Bavarian Alps there was accomplished the salute to the end of the war.
Korman would spend more time in Europe after the fighting ended, serving as the Tribune’s Rome bureau chief. In 1947, he moved to Los Angeles to work as the Tribune’s West Coast correspondent.
He held that post for the rest of his life. On Jan. 6, 1971, Korman was at Santa Anita Park watching the horses when he suffered a heart attack. He died that day at age 61.