George Weller, 95, Daily News reporter
December 21, 2002
BY BRENDA WARNER ROTZOLL STAFF REPORTER
George Weller of the Chicago Daily News was one of the outstanding foreign correspondents of the 20th century. He also was one of the most captured as he kept crossing front lines in search of the day's front-page news.
Mr. Weller escaped from the Gestapo in 1940; fled Singapore after its fall; sneaked into Nagasaki, Japan, ahead of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's forces; was held captive by the communist Chinese as they battled Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in Manchuria, and was held incommunicado for 30 hours in East Germany in 1957. In between, he swam the Bosporus, predicted the outbreak of Israel's Six-Day War in 1967 six days before it happened, and tracked the major events of the day throughout the Mediterranean Basin and beyond.
During his half-century career, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for foreign reporting, the George Polk Award and was named a Neimann Fellow. He wrote several books based on his war and post-war experiences.
Mr. Weller died Thursday at his home of many years in San Felice Circeo, Italy, about two hours south of Rome. He was 95.
His wife, former International News Service and Daily News correspondent Charlotte Ebener, died in 1990.
Mr. Weller was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard University in 1929, studied acting in Vienna, wrote a novel about life at Harvard and was named to the Balkan reporting team of the New York Times. He switched to the Daily News as World War II began in Europe.
Mr. Weller escaped from burning Salonika, Greece, half an hour ahead of the Germans; fled on small fishing boats to Athens, where he stayed until the Germans took over, and was held captive by the Gestapo two months in Vienna. He made his way to Africa and wangled an exclusive interview with Free French leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle.
From there he flew to Singapore just before its fall, went on to Java, and when Japanese forces took that island, fled to Australia on a boat that was bombed repeatedly.
Held in Australia and unable to get to the front, his interviews of returning soldiers and sailors led to his Pulitzer for his story of the way pharmacist's mate Wheeler B. Lipes performed an emergency appendectomy in a submarine submerged in enemy waters. The story figured in the Cary Grant movie "Destination Tokyo."
As U.S. forces neared Japan, MacArthur forbade correspondents to go ashore. Mr. Weller hired a Japanese rowboat to take him to Nagasaki, and the general retaliated by killing all 30,000 words Mr. Weller filed.
Mr. Weller met Ebener, his wife of 42 years, in 1946 when they were in a group of correspondents held for three weeks in Manchuria by the advancing communist Chinese army. They married in 1948.
They soon teamed up as Daily News foreign correspondents, and covered the Balkans, Mideast and Africa from Rome, where he headed the Daily News bureau.
Mr. Weller filed his copy to the Daily News over the wires of United Press International, usually showing up after midnight.
"He had little briefcases filled with notes from each country on his beat with all his contacts. If he got called in the middle of the night, he just grabbed a bag for the country in question and went," former UPI Rome bureau manager Bill Bell said.
"If the Daily News had an award such as the Congressional Medal of Honor for services above and beyond the call of duty, it would long ago have been conferred upon him," that newspaper said in an editorial in the 1940s.
Mr. Weller is survived by a son, Anthony; a daughter, Ann Tagge; a nephew, Michael Weller, two grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
