Bonnie Wiley; AP War Correspondent

Bonnie Wiley, Associated Press’ only female war correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, died Sept. 23 at a Honolulu retirement home. She was 90.

“Men went to war; I got more assignments,” the blunt-spoken Wiley once wrote when asked how the war affected her.

She belonged to a trailblazing minority: the fewer than 100 American women journalists who covered World War II and were the first to report from combat zones on an equal footing with men.

Wiley covered combat on Iwo Jima, the mop-up operations on Okinawa and the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945. She also reported on the arraignment of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of Japanese occupation forces in the Philippines, and interviewed survivors of the Bataan Death March in Manila.

A native of Portland, Ore., Wiley entered journalism when she was 17. Her first job was as a $10-a-week, part-time proofreader at the Yakima Morning Herald in Washington.

She worked her way up to head the paper’s society coverage, but hated the job and left to become managing editor of a weekly newspaper in Toppenish, Wash. She also worked as a feature writer for the women’s section of the Seattle Times and as a reporter-photographer for the Portland Oregonian.

When World War II erupted, Wiley knew she wanted to be a war correspondent. She went to San Francisco, where she persuaded Associated Press to hire her as Western features editor in 1944.

After a year, she was offered an AP job in Hollywood but turned it down for a more coveted assignment in the Pacific. In January 1945, she was among a handful of women, including magazine writers Shelley Smith Mydans of Life and Pat Lochridge of Woman’s Home Companion, who were accredited to the Pacific fleet and shipped out to Guam.

Guam had been captured about six months before they arrived, but enemy holdouts remained. Most of the attention was focused on one island, Iwo Jima. That became the first combat area in the Pacific to admit women correspondents, according to Nancy Caldwell Sorel, author of the recent book “The Women Who Wrote the War.”

In February 1945, Wiley was interviewed by Arthur Primm of the Mutual Broadcasting System about her experiences covering Iwo Jima. Like the other women correspondents in the Pacific, Wiley had filed her dispatches from a hospital ship.

She recalled that the ship, loaded with 600 wounded, stopped for eight burials at sea. The ceremonies, so impressive and sad, “made you want to cry and grab up a gun at the same time,” she told Primm.

She described her horror when she learned that one wounded soldier who had been smiling and chatting was later examined and found to have lost a leg in battle. Seeing such casualties was, she said, “something I’ll probably dream about all my life.”

Wiley later received a Navy commendation and battle stars for combat.

“They were amazing women,” Sorel, who corresponded with Wiley during the course of her research, said of Wiley and the other women combat reporters. “They went after stories and related to the men and saw a lot more than they ever wanted to remember in later years.”

After the war, Wiley became a journalism instructor. She taught at Oregon State University before returning to school to earn a journalism degree in 1948 from the University of Washington. She eventually earned a doctorate in journalism from Southern Illinois University in 1965.

Later that year, she joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii and taught there for 10 years before accepting a teaching post in Samoa. While there, she helped to develop the American Samoa Community College.

Wiley returned to the University of Hawaii in the 1980s to teach in a program for mid-career journalists from China. After training many top Chinese news executives, she was invited to Beijing for a year to serve as editorial advisor for Xinhua, the government-run news agency.

She was at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre, in which two Xinhua reporters were killed. She left China five days later. That year, she received the UNESCO Award for outstanding contributions to international journalism and education.