DIVERSITY ON THE MARCH
Francis McCullaugh (1874-1956), born a British subject in Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland, was a prolific journalist, author, and war correspondent, principally but not exclusively for James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald. Active during the first third of the 20th century, McCullaugh apparently did not shy away from getting close to the fighting. He personally covered—and usually then published books about his experiences—numerous worldwide hotspots: the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War alongside Russian troops (With the Cossacks, 1906); unrest following the Russian Revolution of 1905 (New York Times feature articles, 1906); the 1908-1909 Ottoman Empire’s Young Turk Revolution and Abdication of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (The Fall of Abdul Hamid, 1910); the 1911-1912 Italo-Turkish War in Tripoli (Italy’s War for a Desert, 1912); the 1918-1922 Allied Siberian Intervention in the Russian Civil War (A Prisoner of the Reds, 1921); the 1926-1929 Cristero War in Mexico (Red Mexico, 1928); and the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War (In Franco’s Spain, 1937).
It was one of the most composite forces that ever met together in Asia.
Perhaps the Irishman occasionally got a little too close to the action: he was made a prisoner of war by the Japanese in March 1905, and was taken captive by Bolshevik Red Army forces in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Nevertheless, McCullaugh lived until age 82, passing away in White Plains, New York, in 1956.
The genesis of the following classic dispatch was in late 1903 while McCullaugh was living in Japan and working for an English-language newspaper, The Japan Times. Realizing the ever-increasing likelihood of war breaking out between Japan and Russia over both nations’ competing claims in Manchuria and Korea, McCullaugh responded by studying the Russian language, relocating to Port Arthur Novi Krai
