St. Clair McKelway. Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker

The rain fell on the just hardened concrete of the runway, on the black-topped asphalt of the taxiways and the hardstands, splashed into the faces of the ground crews crouching in pup tents alongside the places where the homecoming B-29's would park, if they ever did park. It fell on the surrounding white-capped sea. It washed away some of the unfinished roads leading from the airstrip to the air crews' quarters; it flooded already muddy roads and walks in wing and group and squadron establishments along the bluff over the sea; it ruined the previous day's work of the Army Engineers, who were building three-lane asphalt highways to the impressive headquarters of the island commander on Saipan's highest hilltop; and it made a mess of the carefully graded terraces between the closely packed Quonset huts where the administrative business of the island would be carried out weeks later when a fresh invasion force took off from Saipan to invade Iwo Jima. It fell on the cemeteries of the Marine and Army men who had been killed in the battles that won the Marianas from the Japanese.

The rain fell and drained inside Possum's and Rosy's raincoats, streamed down their backs, down their chests, over their stomachs, down their thighs, their legs, their ankles, into their muddy, soldier's shoes. It trickled off their hats into their ears, into their eyes. They stood looking into the almost impenetrable sky, walking up and down, looking to east, to west, to north, to south, and saying nothing. There was nothing they could do and there was nothing they could say. ("A Reporter with the B-29s: I -- Possum, Rosy, and the Thousand Kids," The New Yorker, June 9, 1945, pp. 36-37)

Neither I nor very many other people in the Twenty-first Bomber command knew anything about [Curtis] LeMay beyond the fact that he unquestionably had a fine record as an Air Forces officer and as a B-29 commander in China. His looks had not helped us to take a jolly view of the future. He was around a few days, said almost nothing to anybody, was what, by civilian standards, would be called rude to many people. He was a big, husky, healthy, rather stocky, full-faced, black-haired man, thirty-nine years old, from Columbus, Ohio. He apparently couldn't make himself heard even in a small room except when you bent all your ears in his direction, and when you did he appeared to evade your attempt to hear him. He did this by interposing a cigar or pipe among the words which were trying to escape through teeth that had obviously been pried open only with effort, an effort with which the speaker had no real sympathy and to which he was unwilling to lend more than half-hearted assistance. ("A Reporter with the B-29s: II -- The Doldrums, Guam, and Something Coming Up," The New Yorker (June 16, 1945), pp. 32-33.)

Whatever their jobs were, officers and men did not want, and seemed unable, to sleep more than three or four hours at a time. They ate irregularly, sparingly, and hurriedly. They worked almost incessantly and, when they felt like it, played or relaxed completely, knowing they had it coming to them. Even airplane commanders and their crews, back from a fifteen-hour mission to Japan, usually hit the sack for not more than five or six hours and were up and around again, attending classes, studying tactics, bombardment, navigation, and ordnance, and forming little groups in Quonset huts, talking flying talking fighting, using their hands as airplanes, the way fliers do, flying the latest mission over again, perfecting it, and flying the next mission once or twice in advance, before the takeoff. Good men were better. Men who had seemed mediocre became good. ("A Reporter with the B-29s: IV -- The People," The New Yorker (June 30, 1945), p. 35.)

Most of the counterfeiters the Secret Service men have caught, or have ever heard of, were extraordinarily clever craftsmen. Old Mr. Eight Eighty was so inept that his counterfeit one-dollar bills were laughable if they were even casually looked at or felt. His clumsily retouched portrait of Washington was murky and deathlike. His border work and his numerals and lettering were botched. The paper he used was an inexpensive bond paper that can be bought at any stationery store. Old Mr. Eight Eighty kept passing the things, though, and he passed them at what the Secret Service considered a hideously humble rate. None of his fellow-citizens ever looked at or felt his dollar bills when he passed them. They were, after all, only dollar bills. When people discovered that they had been stuck with them, they were, it seems, taught a lesson only to the extent that the loss of a dollar ever teaches the average American a lesson. Long before the Secret Service men caught up with Old Eight Eighty, in the spring of 1948, and arrested him in the kitchen of his sunny, top-floor tenement flat near Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, he was, besides being known to them as Old Mr. Eight Eighty, generally recognized by them as the most exasperating counterfeiter of all times, and the least greedy. (True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality, p. 233-34)

(I'll confess to never having heard of St. Clair McKelway, who wrote for The New Yorker between the 30s and 50s, until reading Roger Angell's ecstatic review of A Reporter at Wit's End, an anthology of some of McKelway's earlier pieces, in a March 2010 issue of The New Yorker. In fact, what caught my attention was the extraordinarily mesmerizing account of the falling rain, from a 1945, four-part article on the B-29's bombing Japan at the tail end of WWII, which led me to the articles themselves -- and thus to an exquisitely detailed description of Curtis LeMay, inevitably a villain in my books for the obliteration of Tokyo and then for pushing SAC in an age of missile defense (for which see Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War). (In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara said that, had the US lost the war, they would all have been shot as war criminals.) Inevitably, McKelway's profile of LeMay, written at the height of the war, presents the counter-point: a hard-working, intelligent general, intent on ending the war as quickly as possible. At any rate, St. Clair McKelway is a terrific journalist, and I am glad to have discovered him. Although not as flashy a journalist as A.J. Liebling, and not as whimsical as Joseph Mitchell, he's easily their equal in the solidity and elegance of his prose, and his choice of subject matter -- often rascals, criminals, and outsiders, including an old codger who counterfeited dollar bills -- is so eccentric and compassionate, so concerned to get out of his subjects' way, that everyone in McKelway, from Possum to Rosy, from Curtis LeMay to Old Mr. Eight Eighty, is treated with a fine mixture of bemusement, dignity, attention, and respect. I suppose that in an age of irony, if not downright cynicism, the straightforward, honed efficiency of McKelway's prose might strike one as naive, but as best as I can tell, it's an expression of his faith in humanity. Every once in a while you run into an author who invites you to look twice, and then thrice, in order to take the true measure of a person's worth. Having seen better, you're the better for it.)