Joe James Custer - Pacific Fleet

Soldiers of the press! If you have any idea that all a war correspondent has to do is sit at some headquarters table and take down notes from the high command, or ride comfortably in a staff car miles behind the fighting lines, dismiss it.

A foreign assignment is a job, thrilling and exciting of course, but it's a job after all. And the war correspondents who crouch in the foxholes, ride with the bombers or accompany a task force at sea are expertclassmen working at one of the most dangerous occupations in the world today. Such a man is United Press correspondent Joe James Kuster.

I've been assigned to the Pacific Fleet since a short time after we got into this war. Possibly you may wonder how a fellow gets such an assignment in the first place. Well, to begin with, I've been a newspaperman for a good many years in San Francisco and later on a number of newspapers

in Hawaii. Matter of fact, I was working for Honolulu newspaper that Sunday when Jack bombers roared out of the morning mists and unloaded their bombs on Pearl Harvard. From that day on I knew what I wanted to do. I admit Frank Tremaine, manager of the United Press Bureau and Honolulu on a number of assignments, so

I went to see him in the UP offices in the Honolulu Advertiser Building. I found him hard at work in his typewriter. Hello, Tremaine. You look like a man who hasn't been in bed in a week.

Oh, hello, Costa. I guess you almost call the turn. I've been up to my ears at work ever since this thing broke. And brother, it looks like a long, tough pull ahead. Yeah, no doubt about it. We're in a plenty tight spot. That's what I came to talk to you about.