[Editor's note: this article originally appeared in the November 1944 issue of BLUE BOOK.]
By Gault MacGowan
Bill Makin's death was a tragic climax to an adventurous career throughout the world. He was mortally wounded in his greatest adventure of all, while attempting to cross no man's land to reach Chartres in an endeavor to enter Paris with the spearhead of our armor. He was operated on in a German field hospital, but abandoned when the Nazis retreated. Liberated by the Marquis [the French underground], he was placed in a French hospital, but there efficient treatment was impossible. Our liberation forces took him to an American hospital, where blood transfusions and everything possible was done for him, but he suddenly collapsed and died of peritonitis....He died among friends.
Though he was born in Manchester, England, and lived and worked in India, South Africa, Middle East, West Indies and other places, his heart was in America, where he visited frequently and where he hoped to live and work after the war.
Bill had been with the American Army since D-Day. He came out with me in the same tank landing ship, saw the worst fighting from the Normandy hedgerows to the breakthrough at St. Lo, and was always up near the front, regardless of risk. He was bright-eyed, eager to share the hardships of officers and enlisted men, for a realistic depiction of the American war effort for the millions of readers of the fourteen British Kemsley-owned newspapers and to gather material for a new book and for the short stories he wrote so brilliantly for BLUE BOOK.
Everyone liked this quiet, unassuming, thoughtful writer with an international outlook and a keen flair for the dramatic. Probably his greatest disappointment was that he did not live to tell the experiences of his last days from the moment he was carried out of action "spread-eagled," to use his own word, on the long snout of a Nazi tank, to the day of his liberation. It was a long, uncomfortable journey for him--wounded, bandaged, stretched out--but there was no other way to carry him out of action; and a Nazi surgeon, as American surgeons testified, did a skilled operative job on him. But it was in vain, and his courageous adventurous spirit passed over, to the deep regret of his comrades and his friends.
Because of his American sympathies and associations, "We specially selected him to cover the American campaign in Normandy," said H. N. Heywood, director of the Kemsley-chain newspapers which Makin represented as a war correspondent. "We were delighted with his messages; he did magnificently. His death at the climax of the war was tragic. Such men are rare and extremely difficult to replace."
In a dispatch to the New York Sun written after his daring escape from the train taking him to Germany, Mr. MacGowan wrote:
"Paul Holt of the London Daily Express, William Makin of the Sunday Times, Bernard Robert, a Frenchman, who runs a profitable little movie theater in the village of Beaumont on the Chartres Road, and William Rosenburg, 10 Franklin Place, Woodmere, Long Island, our driver, were with me speeding toward Beaumont, where we hoped to call on Louis Morgan, a cousin of the Roosevelts, who live in a chateau near the village. Suddenly there was burst of machine-gun fire behind us and bullets whizzed about our ears.
"Drive on! Don't stop! Keep going! Let's get the hell out of here," our startled voices exclaimed. Maybe I said one of those things; but, alas, Rosey--so we called our driver--was already all out. He swerved the jeep toward the ditch, bullets sang again and the jeep tilted against a heap of gravel and stopped.
"Makin and I fell into the ditch. Makin sobbing, 'They've got me.' The others seemed to leap over our heads. They were on the far side of the jeep, and I heard them crash through the hedge and the scrub trees.
"I heard the crunch of their boots on dead branches and brushwood, and I cursed because I had been too close to the ditch to jump; but Makin was clutching his stomach and groaning, and as two Nazi light tanks roared to a stop just ahead of us and men tumbled out, firing small arms, we could only flatten ourselves in the ditch.
"Shouting and shooting they came at us, firing overhead at our escaping companions. I heard afterward that Robert was shot in the spine as he ran, but our captors were too busy to chase them. They rounded us out of the ditch, and hustled us toward their tanks."
- submitted to The Pulp Rack by Peter Ruber
Links:
You'll find two more articles about William Makin from the pages of Blue Book here at The Pulp Rack. You can read "William J. Makin" by clicking here. You can read "A Few Hundred Yards Farther: William Makin" by clicking here.
"William J. Makin: A Bibliography in Progress" appears elsewhere on The Pulp Rack. Click here to see the listing.
Posted by ds at April 15, 2003 11:07 PM
