Archibald Steele

In 1950 Steele was co-winner of a George Polk award, given by Long Island University, for reporting on China for The New York Herald Tribune.

In 1955 he won a Maria Moors Cabot medal, given by Columbia University, for articles in The Herald Tribune about a journey with his wife from Alaska to Chile.

[6] In the early years of the Depression, Steele owned The Downey Champion, a small weekly newspaper in California, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria beginning September 18, 1931.

Rather than remain and go slowly bankrupt, Steele turned the newspaper over to his business manager, gathered a small amount of cash and took a ship named Taiyo Maru for Shanghai.

Steele knew little about China and had no prospects for a job, but arrived just before the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1931, and soon was hired to cover the war.

Steele broke the news about the events that became known as the "Rape of Nanking" (The New York Times correspondent F. Tillman Durdin is sometimes mistakenly credited as being the first.)

The Chicago Daily News ran Steele's article on December 15, 1937, while The New York Times story appeared three days later.

[10] He explained: His other travels during the war included a 1938 visit to Yan'an, the Chinese Communist wartime headquarters, and a 1944 trip to Tibet for the Chicago Daily News, where he met the Dalai Lama, who was then a young boy.

In 1966, he was named by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a panel of nineteen experts to advise on US policy on China[2] In that year he published The American People and China, a survey of US public opinion, and in 1977 Shanghai and Manchuria, 1932: Recollections of a War Correspondent (Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University).