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SCMP Reporter

A resourceful war correspondent,  Eddie Tseng En-po had a knack for being in the right place at the right time

Youthful South China Morning Post reporter Eddie Tseng En-po witnessed the beginning of Japan's invasion of Hong Kong - he saw the dive bombers attacking Kai Tak from the balcony of his home in Shamshuipo.

As a war correspondent, then working for China's Central News Agency, he also had the honour of writing the official story that the second world war had ended.

Sipping his whisky and soda years later, his eyes would crinkle in amusement as he recited the first paragraph of the story that he regarded as his greatest scoop: 'Allied forces today formally accepted the Japanese unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.'

He would then admit he had won the right to break the great scoop purely by luck.

September 2, 1945, was a beautiful sunny day. Aboard the mighty American warship was General Douglas MacArthur, ready to accept the formal submission from the military representatives of the Emperor of Japan.

Also on board were five journalists from news agencies.  There was only one radio available, and there was natural rivalry over who would file the first story of the momentous news.

The solution came from a military information officer. He wrote out numbers from one to five.  Each reporter picked out one from a hat, which told them in the order they could file their stories. 'It was pretty tense,' Tseng recalled. 'I got my scrap of paper. My heart leapt. It was number one.'

Seconds after General MacArthur signed his name, Tseng dashed across the deck and down a steel corridor to the radio room to tell the world the long, grim war was over. 'Looking back, I suppose it was a bit ridiculous,' he would recall. 'But it was the only solution we could think of.'

His war reporting career began the day he saw the Japanese aircraft diving out of a clear blue sky to bomb Kowloon. He ran inside, grabbed the telephone and called his news editor.

'Get up to the New Territories,' he was ordered. He ran into the street, stopped a taxi and went to war. By the time he got to Yuen Long two hours later, he was met by British forces in full retreat before the advancing Japanese infantry. The taxi disappeared, leaving the young reporter to trudge south with a party of Scots soldiers. Every couple of hours, when he could find a phone, he would call in an updated story.

After the chaos of invasion, and once random acts of rape and murder had begun to subside, he returned over the harbour to the Post building in Wyndham Street. There was a Japanese man in the editor's chair. Idealist Tseng refused job on the Hongkong News, which was being put out by the military occupation forces on the Post presses.

With tens of thousands of others, he tramped north, up the banks of the Pearl River to Wuzhou in Guangxi, the nearest outpost of what was then 'free China.' He found a branch of the Central News Agency located on a riverfront barge. If he could get to Chongqing in Sichuan, the wartime capital, there was a slot for an English-speaking reporter.

He trekked across southern China, got to Chongqing, and got the job. Assigned to cover the American 14th Air Force, he typically did the job with flair, riding in the aircraft as they flew missions against Japanese shipping in the Straits of Taiwan. He later covered the Burma campaign.

After victory and his great scoop, Tseng worked for the Central News Agency in Japan, then London. With the Kuomintang defeat on the mainland and withdrawal to Taiwan, CNA became its key public relations and information-gathering arm.

'I got a solid grounding in the basics of reporting as a boy on the Post,' he told me once.



On the frontlines