A farewell to Carl Mydans: The man who ‘returned’ with MacArthur at Leyte Gulf

Remember that unforgettable photo (below) of General Douglas MacArthur striding ashore at Leyte through the surf, to fulfill his vow, "I shall return"?

The homecoming took place on Oct. 20, 1944 – and the man who snapped that famous picture – which was the basis of the MacArthur "wading ashore" monument in Tacloban – was a LIFE combat photographer named Carl Mydans.

Mydans leaped off the deck of MacArthur’s landing craft "onto pontoons erected for a dry arrival," but then MacArthur, ever the showman, ordered the craft to reverse and sail further down the beach, so he and his group could get their feet wet, wading ashore "for a more impressive arrival." Carl Mydans scrambled down the beach to snap the final photo, which will forever be engraved in memory. If you’ll notice, right behind "Big Man" was our friend and his confidante, the late Brig. General and journalist, Carlos P. Romulo.

Carl said later of MacArthur: "No one I have ever known... had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture."

The same thing could be said of Mydans himself. When the wire services, and some phone calls alerted me yesterday about the death of Mydans, aged 97, at his home in Larchmont, it was with a pang I remembered that Carl, too, was a former "Manileño" in a sense that he "returned" to the Philippines with MacArthur.

I got the inside story of how Carl had snapped the Leyte landing from the recent book, From the Front: The Story of War edited by Michael Sweeney, featuring war correspondents’ chronicles down through the ages. What the book did not say was that Mydans and his wife, Shelley, then a LIFE magazine researcher and reporter, too, were captured by the Japanese when they invaded Manila in 1941 and spent two years in Japanese prison here, before being transferred to Shanghai, where they were released in a prisoner "exchange."

Mydans did not "rest" long in New York. As one of the first six photographers of LIFE magazine (hired by the legendary publisher/founder Henry Luce), Mydans was recalled to duty and sent by the editors to cover the Allied Liberation of Italy and France. Then, at his request, he was dispatched back to the Pacific.

As Andy Grundberg who wrote his epitaph pointed out, Mydans specialized in getting the ONE picture "that told the story by itself". Thus, out of scores of photos he took in that action, he "captured" the defining Leyte Landing portrait.

He also snapped the Lingayen landing, on January 9, 1945, then as denouément the Japanese surrender on the battledeck of the USS "Missouri" in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, among many other great photos during his 36 years as a lensman.

He was forever in the midst of battle – gutsy, lucky to stay alive while his comrades fell all around him – but always that Mydans Touch. As if he had carefully "posed" every image. Combat was his canvas, as an artist of the camera; that fearless feel for what made war both human and inhuman was his inspiration. No wonder his son, Seth Mydans of The New York Times, has inherited that gritty, sometimes irritating (to his subjects), but inexorably accurate kind of reporting.

Carl’s wife, Shelley, who was subsequently an author and radio commentator of TIME Inc., had died in March 2002. Besides Seth – who covered the Philippines during the waning months of the Marcos dictatorship and the post-EDSA liberation weeks, and is now an all-Asia correspondent for NYT – they are survived by a daughter "Misty" who lives in Sacramento, California, and of course their grandchildren.

Carl and Shelley, indeed, were a team as writer/photographer dispatched to cover the "wars" in Finland, Italy and France – and had gone to China in early 1941 to cover the Sino-Japanese conflict. Then they came to do a story in Manila, in time to be collared by the invading Japanese.

Well, here’s the self-serving part of my story. It had been Carl Mydans and his fellow correspondents who accompanied MacArthur to Leyte who founded the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC). The MOPC was "officially" incorporated in 1945 after the Liberation of Manila, and its first President was William C. Wilson. Its 1947 President was John Grover. In 1948, it was the brash New Yorker, who hailed from Brooklyn, David Boguslav – who settled here to become the Editor-in-Chief of The Manila Times under its Publisher Joaquin P. "Chino" Roces – my subsequent boss. Tatang Chino became MOPC President himself in 1962 – and later our cellmate with Ninoy Aquino in the maximum security prison of Fort Bonifacio.

How lives are intertwined. It had been Dave Boguslav who hired that skinny, big-eared young man, Benigno Aquino Jr., and, when he was only 17, sent him to cover the war in Korea – the youngest foreign correspondent to report on that war. (When Ninoy went home to tell his mother he had volunteered to go to Korea, she almost fainted.)

Dave and his co-Editor, Joe Bautista (a no-nonsense former police reporter) drummed into us the dictum: Get the story, get it right, for Godsakes, get it early. (As my editors will tell you, I violate the "get it early" part in my old age.)

Joe Bautista would add to the police reporters: "If it’s after midnight, and nobody got killed, don’t bother to write the story till tomorrow."

Anyway, I’ll have to relate the anecdote above to what the British journalist Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn Waugh?) said – in jest, I hope – about the instructions he received from his editors in London while covering the Tamil Tigers’ rebellion in Sri Lanka. In getting a story, he was admonished: "Make it early, make it short – and, if necessary, make it up!"

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Carl Mydans was, I think, the last of the living legends of photo-journalism. They were the ones who sent home to readers, long before the era of television, the images of the World War II death struggle. Thirty-seven accredited American journalists died covering that war in Europe and the Pacific.

It’s amazing how the pain and persistence of recording combat from the foot soldier’s level has never changed.

One of the most renowned correspondents was Ernie Pyle, who wrote for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, and sent dispatches home which read poignantly like G.I. Joe’s letters from the front.

Having risked life and limb for years, battle-weary but unscathed, recording the European war from the foot-slogger’s standpoint, as the Allies smashed into Germany, Pyle rushed over to the Pacific to join the 77th Infantry Division in its landing on the island of Ie Shima in April 1945, enroute to the Japanese homeland.

On April 18, a Japanese nambu machine gun bullet caught him in the head. The G.I.s tied a cotton swab to a stick and put up a crude sign where they sadly buried him: "At this spot, the 77th Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle."

Found in his pocket when he died was a fragment of a column he had started writing on "the anticipated German surrender" – Pyle had just arrived in the Pacific from Germany and still had to wrap up his summing up of the conflict to crush the Nazis.

Sweeney says in his volume "From the Front" that this fragment could serve as Pyle’s epitaph, "showing how he understood that every death is a tragedy, and that those who witness war risk being crushed by it".

Reading it brings an unbidden tear to the eye. The fragment in his pocket speaks for all of us – including this unworthy writer – who covered war, bloodied in the midst of combat, suffocating in the mud and choking in the humidity of jungles, stranded in the swamps of frustration, losing "best friends" and men you’d met just minutes before, counting the piles of corpses, men, women, and children even the most innocent and blameless.

Pyle, in his last testament of a column, had keened: "Dead men by mass production – in one country after another – month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such a monstrous infinity that they become monotonous. Those are things that you at home need not even try to understand... You don’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference."

There is a difference we can never begin to explain. We’ve them in the shattered streets of Saigon, and My Tho, and Hue during the "Tet" offensive, the killing fields of Cambodia, the hundreds of thousands massacred by angry mobs during the failed GESTAPU coup in Indonesia, from Jakarta to Semarang to Solo, the charred corpses and burning tanks on the Irbid Peninsula in Black September, or in the Lahore-to-Chandigarh perimeter with Pakistan locked, as always, in internecine strife with India.

This is why those of us who’ve managed to live to "old age," survivors who’ve looked death in the eye (we blinked, really) celebrate life.

A fond adieu to Carl Mydans: And, hopefully – someday – to war, and all that.

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THE ROVING EYE... The Pressident announced, on schedule as predicted, yesterday on August 18 her new Cabinet lineup. A new Foreign Affairs Secretary Bert Romulo rang me up to confirm last night his appointment. New Press Secretary and concurrent Press Spokesman (he now wears two hats) Ignacio "Toting" Bunye also rang me up to transmit the President’s message: "Tell Max that I kept my promise to him to announce the new Cabinet on August l8." Even Ace Durano’s appointment as Tourism Secretary was announced. General Edgar Aglipay, my dinner guest at home last night, has been promoted chief of the Philippine National Police. Gen. Jun Ebdane who also arrived at my house has been named National Security Officer.