Memories of a war correspondent’s daughter

Columnist recalls World War II as she watches Russian invasion of Ukraine

Calla Jones Corner

The first memory I have of my father as a World War II war correspondent is the red hat my mother wore when she took me and my sister, Christina, to meet the Liberty ship my father was returning on, after 18 months of covering the war in China, Burma and India. That was in 1946. I was 4 and Christina was 6.

My mother had written to my father, when she knew he was coming home after the Japanese surrender, that she would be on Manhattan’s west side dock wearing a red hat. My mother knew she would be among a throng of waving families, fiancées and wives welcoming home soldiers, sailors, airmen and a handful of war correspondents, and she wanted to stand out.

I wish my father had captured in color the moment he saw the red hat. But Kodachrome wasn’t yet available to war correspondents. His main camera, the Speed Graphic, was used to record the war with more than 3,000 black and white photos he’d taken for Uncle Sam.

I do have, nevertheless, a flash of red in my memory bank and my father’s charming, colorfully illustrated letters that he wrote to my sister and me from the CBI theater, that told and taught us about his war. The letters were flown to us via his Air Force buddies who piloted the planes (sometimes under enemy fire), which carried my father’s colorfully illustrated pamphlets, that, as a member of the Office of War Information, he wrote, illustrated, printed and dropped behind enemy lines, cajoling the Japanese to surrender.

 My best memories, after the letters, are the contents of my father’s “war chest” that arrived at our home in Pleasantville, N.Y., a few days after my father’s return.To me, as a toddler, the trunk — as that is what it was — seemed huge and its contents exotic. An embroidered dressing gown from Kashmir for my mother. Silver bracelets from India for Chris and me. Three diamonds, wrapped in yellow tissue paper, for my father’s “three girls” (my parents bought a car with them). A wok and utensils —to help my father recreate the Cantonese dishes he’d learned to cook from his devoted assistant, Jimmy Li.

Ivory chopsticks for all of us, plus war buddies, whose expertise in survival helped turn a cow barn into a charming home.They would arrive now-and-then for long weekends in Weston, Conn., equipped with useful tools and tales from their war experiences. I grew up on these tales, told over and over, always with, it seemed, yet another vignette.

My father was an art director at J. Walter Thompson when he was recruited by the State Department for his many talents. As a married man with children, he was not required to sign up for active duty. Nevertheless, like many able bodied men of his age, who also were exempt from military service, they volunteered to fight for their country in Europe or the Far East. I once asked my father why, if he didn’t have to fight, he would leave his family to fight a war so far away. 

His answer was simple: It’s what one did.

Having helped my father put together his account of those 18 months as a war correspondent in “High Road To China,” while he battled pancreatic cancer, I was fortunate to be able to provide for my children a unique story of history they would not have learned in school. The collaboration was not only an act of love on my part, but a way for my father’s unique legacy to be handed down to grandchildren and future generations. That legacy is set against a historical background of adventure, romance and a sense of patriotism that might have stopped with my generation.

Fast forward to today. I was following Fox News Channel correspondent Benjamin Hall’s extraordinary daily briefings, along with the other Fox team from Ukraine, when I saw and heard about the ambush that killed a veteran war zone photographer, Pierre Zakraewski, 55,  and Oleksandra Kuvshynova, 24, a Ukrainian journalist, and seriously injured Mr. Hall, 36.  I immediately  turned to memories of my father’s war.

Married with three children, Mr. Hall is the same age as my father when he volunteered to cover his war. Why would a young journalist, with so much living ahead of him, risk his life to report on an insane war, whose outcome depends on whether Vladimir Putin fails in his attempt to force Ukraine back into a “new Russia empire” or whether he pushes a red button to release weapons of mass destruction? There will be no enticing “war chest” for his children — just hours and hours of bloody, videoed devastation. I perhaps see talent and patriotism but no romantic adventures.

 My father idolized Ernest Hemmingway’s war experience and his prose in “High Road To China” and the articles he wrote for Collier’s is Hemingwayesque. His photographs and illustrations are, however, all his. I wonder which war correspondents Mr. Hall and his colleagues admire? With 24/7 coverage in horrifying images being sent nonstop via satellite and amateur cell phones, was going behind enemy lines in this murky fog of war worth the risk?

The heroes here are the Texan doctor and Fox team that got Mr. Hall out of danger and to Germany. Our enemies no longer follow the Geneva Convention that once protected the press. 

In a FaceTime session with my daughter, Lucy, in Australia (she is married to a film photographer and they are very strict about what they allow the children to see), she told me their 5-year-old said he wanted to use “the war” for a recent show-and-tell. He had overheard his parents attempting to explain the war to his 10-year-old twin brothers. Lucy said she’d found a brilliant explanation for children on the internet, posted by a British mom. I looked it up and it was rather brilliant. 

But I wondered if there was a way to explain the war visually to children without freaking them out. A picture, even a video, is still worth a thousand words,  in my book.

The overarching geopolitical “domino theory,” which I grew up with, suddenly seemed possible by using LEGO blocks. Even a 5-year-old would understand that if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic dreams aren’t stopped and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s are allowed to expand, a line of LEGO blocks tumbling one by one will be the unimaginable result.

The LEGOs could even be labeled — Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hong Kong, Taiwan just to start. The first block, of course, would be labeled communism. There’s nothing new about that.