William McGaffin captured the human side of war like few others
William McGaffin was one of the last Americans to flee Paris in June 1940, driving southwest with fellow Associated Press correspondent William J. Humphreys as German troops closed in on the French capital.
For days to come, along a route that would take them through Chartres, Tours and Bordeaux on the way to safety across the Spanish border, they had dodged attacks from German aircraft.
We had heard the chilling wail of the sirens, the cough of the anti-aircraft guns, the rattle of the machine guns as planes fought overhead. We had held our breath and run for the war storm caves. We had fought our way through excited, surging mobs, gone without food and sleep.
Something seemed wrong as we stood on our balcony in San Sebastian that first night out of France and watched the sun sink below the sea. Suddenly we realized what it was — the lights.
Millions of them, it seemed, were coming on along the beach promenade down below. Streets were brilliant. Our room was ablaze with lights — no blinds were drawn — and there was no angry warning whistle from the police. We were out of the blackout.
After 10 dark months of war, months in which you picked your path with a flashlight, stubbed your toe on sandbags, and groped your way through darkened rooms to make sure the blinds were drawn before turning on the lights, you suddenly emerged into an eye-smarting aurora borealis.
It was like coming out of a tunnel. We felt like owls. The psychological lift was unmistakable. It was comparable to a brisk cocktail after a hard day’s work.
William McGaffin was born Oct. 2, 1910 in David City, Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1932, and began his journalism career with a series of newspaper jobs in his home state. He spent a year studying journalism at Columbia before joining the AP in 1935 and two years later moved to London, where he was directed to report on “the human side of European life.”
On Aug. 1, 1939, he was in Helsinki, writing about preparations for the 1940 Olympics. On Sept. 1, he wrote from Paris with tales of worried citizens fleeing the city with the continent apparently on the brink of another war.
Like the rest of his counterparts in the region, the coming weeks and months saw him transition to war correspondence. His dispatches sketched increasingly harrowing scenes, particularly in the spring of 1940 after Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands and France. On May 11, he wrote:
I have just seen the scattered remains of three private homes where two civilians were blown to bits and another gravely injured by Germany’s first great aerial onslaught on France.
Plowing through the debris on the outskirts of this village (name deleted by censor), I suddenly came upon a jagged piece of bone and flesh wedged against a wall.
“Her thigh,” said one of the military officers who was conducting me.
Malca Leon, young and pretty, was engaged to be married. They picked up her remains in a sack after the German planes went over at dawn today.
Stories like that and those McGaffin would file from London during the Blitz after his escape via Spain brought the realities of war to American readers at a time when many preferred to stay out of the conflict and let Europe sort things out itself.
McGaffin moved on to North Africa in the summer of 1941, spending months reporting from Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt. He moved on to New Delhi in May 1942 to cover the fighting in the China-Burma-India theater.
Perhaps his most notable work there was an interview with Gen. Joseph Stilwell, recently returned from Burma, who acknowledged to McGaffin that “we got a hell of a beating” but insisted “the Japanese are not supermen.”
After a four-month stint in Moscow in the middle of 1943, McGaffin returned to the AP’s Middle East team in Cairo. That winter, on the road once again, he filed a widely printed story with a memorable dateline:
BETHLETHEM, Dec. 24, 1943, A.D. — Thousands of Twentieth Century pilgrims, many of them in khaki, follow the path of the three wise men tonight to worship with rejoicing hearts on the hallowed ground five and a half miles south of Jerusalem where the Prince of Peace was born nearly 2,000 years ago.
Their hearts are full of hope and they sing with exceeding joy as a blacked-out world observes its fifth Christmas of the war. For this year there is a promise in allied victories that it will not be long before the angel’s message can be reaffirmed. “Peace on earth, good will toward men …”
Even the stars in the eternal heavens, once brilliant with wondrous tidings, seem to shine more brightly as the glad refrains of the old songs float up from the cheerful mortals below. “Hark, the herald angels sing,” they carol as they crowd about the ancient stone Church of the Nativity which Constantine built on the site of the Holy Manger in the year 330. For this is the anniversary of a miracle, the greatest news story the world has ever known.
McGaffin left the AP in 1944, joining the Chicago Daily News foreign staff that May and heading to the Pacific theater via Pearl Harbor.
He reported from Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was with Ernie Pyle the day before the correspondent was killed on Ie Shima in April 1945.
As the war finally came to an end, he was in Tokyo interviewing Americans who had just been released from a prisoner of war camp.
Following the war, McGaffin would serve as the Daily News London bureau chief and have a stint as United Nations correspondent before joining the Washington bureau in 1956.
He was still working for the Daily News in D.C. when he died there on April 14, 1975. He was 64 years old.