Death of a War Correspondent: His Typewriter and his Last Story

Along with Margaret Bourke White's grotesque image of a Triumph standard typewriter in the rubble of a bombed out Leipzig in May 1945, this is probably one of the most dramatic typewriter photographs ever taken.

Roydon Keith Parker (1906-1943)

It shows what remains of the Remington portable typewriter which belonged to New Zealand-born Australian war correspondent Roydon Keith Palmer, who was killed during a Japanese air raid on a Bougainville beachhead in the Solomon Islands. Palmer was outside the US Marine Corps Press hut when a 500lb bomb fell within 10 yards of it. It blew a hole 12 feet deep by 30 feet wide. A piece of shell struck Palmer in the forehead and he died instantly.

AP's Rembert James at his own Remington portable typewriter

Parker's shattered Remington was found beside his body - along with a seven-page draft of his last story - by Associated Press war correspondent Rembert Faulkner James, who took the typed copy to United Press's George Edward Jones (1916-1994) to get it ready for filing.
Palmer, who was covering the Pacific Theatre of World War II for the US magazine Newsweek and the Australian newspaper the Melbourne Herald, died at 2.30 on the morning of Sunday, November 7, 1943. He had just turned 37.
Here is the last story Palmer wrote on his Remington:

Palmer's death was widely covered in US newspapers at the time, largely because he was just 10 feet away from AP's Rembert Faulkner James (born October 14, 1905, Waxahachie, Texas; died January 10, 1985, La Jolla, California), who was seriously wounded in the same air raid and who wrote about the bombing in great detail.
James wrote that it was Palmer's "own amazing curiosity" which led to his death, hence this US newspaper headline:

Ted C.Link

James wrote that the last man to see Palmer alive was the great St Louis Post-Dispatch crime reporter Theodore Carl Link (1904-1974), who was in Bougainville as a technical sergeant, the Marine Corps' combat correspondent and editor of Chevron. TIME magazine once said Link had "probably written more about crime than any other US newsman". Link was a grandson of the famous German-born architect of the same name. Link told James:

According to James, the first man to reach Palmer was Marine Corps Third Division press relations officer Captain Patrick Francis O'Sheel, who, like James and Link, had also been injured in the heavy shelling.

Patrick O'Sheel in 1961

O'Sheel, born in Washington DC on October 31, 1914, was a graduate of Dartmouth College and served as a Marine Corps press officer and combat correspondent during World War II.  Immediately after the war he was in the US Diplomatic Corps in Africa and the Middle East, then wrote for The New Yorker and worked in London for LIFE magazine as associate editor and bureau chief. He was later a CIA agent in Europe. He died on July 23, 1994, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
It was O'Sheel who saw to Palmer's burial. James ended his story with these touching lines:

Less than three months after his death, the US Navy named a Liberty ship in Palmer's honour. The SS Keith Palmer was launched at the Todd Shipyard in Houston, Texas, in late February 1944. A message from Palmer's widow was read at the launching. The ship was sponsored by the wife of Newsweek's foreign editor Harry Kern.
Roydon Keith Palmer was born in October 1906 in Foxhill, in the Waimea South district of the Nelson province in New Zealand. His story is close to my heart, since my paternal grandmother was also born there, at Belgrove, along with one of my aunts and three uncles, and my grandparents married in Wakefield. Also born close by was Ernest Rutherford, the man who split the atom.

Like some of my great-uncles, Palmer attended Nelson College. He then went on to Canterbury University in Christchurch, but elected to pursue a career in journalism. He joined the Christchurch Sun in 1927 and later moved to The Press. In 1933 he married Mary Edith McKee (born Shankill, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, December 1908) and three years later the couple settled in Australia. Palmer became an aviation writer with the Melbourne Herald, having developed a passion for flying after befriending Australian aviation pioneer Charles Kingsford Smith in New Zealand, before Kingsford Smith's untimely death in November 1935. Palmer was the first journalist to fly around Australia.

In 1937 Palmer (seen here talking the fellow journalists on the ground) flew back to New Zealand in a de Havilland DH86 Express passenger transport biplane. This photo was taken in Wellington.

In August 1940 Palmer covered for a range of Herald group newspapers across the country the inaugural flight of the Pan-American-TEAL (Tasman Empire Airways Ltd) Boeing 314 Clipper NC18602, the California Clipper. He was one of the first two Australians to fly the Pacific route from Sydney to Auckland and on to San Francisco.

Pan-Am's California Clipper and beside it TEAL's Aotearoa at Auckland International Airport at Mechanics Bay in 1940. I kid you not. That was what it was called.

At the outbreak of the Pacific War, Palmer, who was general vice-president of the Australian Journalists' Association, was embedded with the Royal Australian Navy, representing the Australian Press Association. After a spell back on dry land, as magazine editor of the Melbourne Herald, he was asked to replace AAP's special correspondent, Winston Turner, a veteran of the Boer War and First World War, as South Pacific war correspondent. Turner was in Java when the Japanese advanced south, but was able to escape back to Australia on a small ship.
Days before his death, Palmer filed this story:

Palmer's wife and two young sons returned to New Zealand from Melbourne soon after his death. Mary Palmer lived out the rest of her life in Christchurch. I believe she may have died in 2009, having reached the age of 100. One of her sons, David Maxwell Palmer, became a Christchurch solicitor.

How Typewriters Helped Change the World Economy

It's almost exactly 100 years since the United States became the world's leading exporter for the first time in its history. That was at the end of the fiscal year 1914-15, on June 30, 1915. The US held its lead for 97 years, until 2012, when it was overtaken by China, which went on to oust the US as the world’s largest trading nation (as measured by the sum of exports and imports) last year*.

Back in 1915 it was Britain which the US surpassed - and of course that was as a direct consequence of the outbreak of World War I a month into the 1914-15 fiscal year, on July 28, 1914. The war increased the US's export trade by 17 per cent, to $2768.6 million. This was $600 million higher than British export trade, which had decreased by 30 per cent.

The US had previously, though infrequently, headed Britain in exporting domestic product, but not for combined domestic and foreign goods. Still, US domestic exports rose to $2716.2 million from $2329.7 million, which was 98.1 per cent of total exports (export of foreign-made goods went up from $52.4 million from $34.9 million). Combined British figures had included Irish and "colonial" (that is, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, South African and Indian) goods. Typewriter Topics reported:

For the US, the most marked rise was in manufactured goods, excluding foodstuffs. These increased from $8 million in 1821 to $1166 million in 1915. And typewriters were at the forefront of this boom in manufactured exports. From the start of World War I to June 1915, the monthly export of US-made typewriters increased sixfold. As at June 1915, all US typewriter makers were still in typewriter production mode (11 new manufacturers had emerged in the previous 12 months) and the internal typewriter business was also prospering.

Typewriter Topics' European editor Gustave Hemes wrote:

A month earlier, Topics reported that typewriter exports had passed the $500,000 mark:

And in April:

One US typewriter company which performed particularly well during this period was Underwood.

*China's figures are bolstered by its assembly of iPhones for Apple, of which it exports about $5 billion worth to the US. But iPhones are made up of components from all over the world, including Japan and South Korea, and are American designed and branded. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates China makes about $57 out of every $100 worth of iPhones exported. For every $100 worth of goods exported by China, the domestic component, or Chinese value added part, is only $67, according to OECD data. So in the year China became the largest exporter in the world, the country exported $1.4 trillion of goods with the Chinese value added share a shade more than $800 billion. American exporters remain at the top end of the supply chain and their export businesses are a lot more profitable than their Chinese competitors. China really overtook the US in 2012 - by a small margin of $9.1 billion. In 2013, China’s exports were $88 billion larger than the US but the volume was only 40 per cent larger than the US.

Les machines à écrire Remington du Québec

On June 26, 1915, the Remington Typewriter Company's Montreal agent, Napoléon Martineau (1862-), was officially "crowned" in New York City as the world's leading typewriter salesman. Martineau can be seen above standing at the back of his prize, an Overland "Remington car", while event organiser and sponsor Elwood Ernest Rice looks on. 

Martineau is circled in The Evening World advertisement below:

Remington sales in Québec stayed in the hands of the Martineau family for at least two more generations after Napoléon. His son Gérald Martineau (1902-1968) took on the franchise in 1919 and retained it after Rand bought into the company in 1935. Then Napoléon's grandson Robert Martineau (1926-) acquired the rights when Gérald was appointed to Legislative Council of Québec, the unelected upper house, in August 1946.

Gérald and Robert also, incidentally, owned and ran the Québec Aces ice hockey team from 1959 until 1967, when it was taken over by the Philadelphia Flyers. The club became the Richmond Robins in 1971.

Gérald Martineau

A former treasurer of the Union Nationale Party, Gérald represented  the Laurentian division in the Québec Upper House until 1959 and the Lauzon division to 1967. He died the next year, aged 65, after being found guilty in 1966 of 13 influence-peddling charges, serving a 50-day sentence under guard in hospital and paying a $49,000 fine.

In 1961 the Remington-Rand business dealings of Gérald and Robert were investigated as part of the Québec Royal Commission into Union Nationale Government purchases between 1955-60. Union Nationale was a conservative and nationalist provincial political party which identified with Québécois autonomism. It was created during the Great Depression and held power in Québec from 1936-39, 1944-60 and 1966-70. It was founded by Maurice Duplessis, who led it until his death in 1959.

Gérald's misfortunes were a far cry from the day when his father Napoléon was given one of the cars seen above, and declared the world's best typewriter salesman. Typewriter Topics reported:

Elwood Ernest Rice (1979-1958)

Rice is seen sitting beside Henry Ford (at wheel)

Elwood Ernest Rice was president of the Rice Electric Display Company and the R. R. Sign Company (the other "R" in R.R. being V.R. Rumbarger). Rice was born in Dayton, Ohio, on October 11, 1879. He started out in the plaster business, selling Rice’s Diamond Wall Plaster before making his fortune in the electric sign business. He died in obscurity on March 6, 1958.