Jack Belden Papers

Alfred Goodwin Jack Belden was born to Alfred Goodwin (1878-1950) and Mabel Kathleen (Sweezey) Belden Howland (1885-) in New York on February 3, 1910. He had one sister, Kathleen Jewel (Belden) Groves (1908-1991). His father left the family when Belden was a small child and he remembered little of him beyond occasional formal Sunday lunches.

Jack Belden graduated from Adelphi Academy in Summit, N.J. (1926) and from Colgate University (1931). During his college vacations, he shipped all over the world as a seaman. He jumped ship in Hong Kong in 1931 and embarked on a precarious existence, sleeping at the Salvation Army and either begging on the streets or gambling with sailors for money. He eventually moved to Beijing, where he learned the Chinese language, house-sat for a Chinese general, and taught English at a night school.

Belden's first newspaper job was with the English-language Evening Post & Mercury in Shanghai. When the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, Belden became a correspondent for the United Press and traveled to the Nationalists' capital in Nanjing. Belden retreated to Hankow with the Army in December of 1937, venturing into the countryside were conditions were more difficult, confirming rumors that the Japanese were using gas in combat, and researching Shanghai's underground. He relocated to Chungking (the new capital of Free China) in 1940. His colleagues at the Chungking Press Hostel knew him as alternately suspicious and fun-loving, intense, and familiar with the seamy side of China.

After leaving the UP, Belden joined the International News Service and later Time-Life. In 1942, he went to Burma with General Stilwell. He published a book about this experience entitled Retreat with Stilwell in 1943. Following the retreat, Belden covered the Flying Tigers' campaign against the Japanese and then relocated to Cairo to replace a Time reporter injured in a plane accident. In North Africa, he flew with American bombers over Tunisia, traveled to Malta immediately after the siege ended, accompanied British forces fighting General Erwin Rommel along the Mareth Line, and made two amphibious landings. After landing with the advance reconnaissance forces south of Salerno, Italy in September of 1943, Belden was shot twice in the leg and evacuated to a military hospital in Oran, Algeria. He wrote two articles about the experience and completed another book, Still Time To Die (1944), while convalescing in New York.

Once he had recovered from his wounds, Time-Life sent Belden to the London bureau in time for D-Day. Belden believed, however, that he had been wronged – he thought that his editors had promised him a top reporting position and was angry when it did not materialize. Time-Life fired him in January of 1945. Harper's issued him credentials, but never paid him or used any of his materials.

After the war ended, Belden married a Frenchwoman and attempted (unsuccessfully) to work as a freelance journalist in Paris. The couple had one son and divorced in 1954, at which time Belden returned to China to cover the civil war in progress. After returning to the United States, he published a book about the conflict entitled China Shakes the World (1949). Because of the anti-Communist climate, however, the book was not successful. Belden, bitter and depressed, left journalism. He remarried, had a second son, and divorced again. Belden supported himself driving a taxi and a school bus, selling aluminum siding, and working for the Post Office. He also wrote sonnets, for which there unfortunately proved to be no market.

In 1969, Belden returned to France and visited the United States only once more to celebrate his mother's 100th birthday in 1985. He eked out a meager existence in Paris until dying of lung cancer on June 3, 1989.