Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal

CHAPTER 6Germany

IN EARLY 1949, Judy and I set sail on the French liner De Grasse, the fare paid by Stars and Stripes. We landed in Le Havre, visited Paris briefly, then took a night train to Frankfurt. As the distinctive European water towers, unlike any I had ever seen in the States, rushed by our sleeping compartment window, and I saw and sensed the narrow-gauge European rail tracks and the bombed-out ruins pass in the darkness, I felt I was entering a new mysterious world, a world of shadows and intrigue, one only recently under Nazi occupation and bitterly fought over by the mightiest armies in history.

Our train arrived at the Frankfurt railroad station, the Bahnhof, its roof half open to the sky from Allied air-raid damage that had not ...