War correspondent Tom Treanor (1914 — 1944) of
The Los Angeles Times was billed by writer Damon Runyon as "one of the four best reporters developed in this war.":
"Landing in Cairo just about the time Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was approaching Alexandria, Treanor went to the British to obtain an accreditation certificate as a war correspondent. But since the British didn't know him they wouldn't accredit him. Undaunted he went out and bought a set of correspondent's insignia for 70 cents, borrowed an army truck, and made a trip to the front and back before the British realized he was gone. They stripped him of his illegal insignia, but in the meantime Tom had obtained material for several 'hot' columns." Treanor was killed in France shortly after this column went to press.
Richard Tregaskis (1916 – 1973) covered the invasion of Guadalcanal and the first seven weeks of Marine fighting on that island, the earliest stages of the Tokyo air raid, covered the Battle of Midway, wrote a best-selling book
(
Guadalcanal Diary) and accompanied the forces that invaded the Russell Islands."
"It wasn't long after he arrived in the Mediterrian that stories began appearing in American papers under the Tregaskis byline, and he is still 'somewhere' on the European fighting front covering the big battles which make news."
"On the day following the first landing made by United States Marines on Guadalcanal, United Press' Bob Miller accomplished something which probably no other war correspondent has ever done. Singlehanded, he captured a Jap prisoner."
"During the six weeks he spent on Guadalcanal, Miller's group was bombed almost daily during the entire time, and Jap ground forces were a constant threat."
Miller was known to one and all in the Pacific Theater as "Baldy". Shortly before this article appeared in CORONET he had fallen victim to malaria and was returned to the U.S. for convelesence. In 1944 his dispatches to the UnitedPress would concern the liberation of France and the Nuremburg Trials.
John Thompson of The Chicago
Tribune saw more of the World War II than most other correspondents. He had witnessed to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald death camp. Throughout his life, Thompson held the distinction of being the last surviving war correspondent to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings; by war's end he had been awarded the Purple Heart, nine battle stars and was the first correspondent to receive the Medal of Freedom. This column was written in 1943 and pertains to some of his experiences in North Africa and Sicily.
"Leo Disher was among the war correspondents who sailed for Africa with the American invasion fleet late in October of 1942... Army authorities were so impressed with his conduct under fire that they presented him with a Purple Heart [he was the first W.W. II reporter to earn this distinction]. More important was the fact that the story he dictated from his hospital cot after the shooting was over was displayed on the front pages of most of the UP papers."
This article was penned by
Yank correspondent Evans Wylie; it is an account of Ernie Pyle's (1900 - 1945) surprise appearance during the Okinawa campaign and the violent death that Pyle had long anticipated for himself. His end came while he was being driven along a road in the company of Marines in a sector that was believed to have been safe.
Of all the many American war correspondents writing during World War II, Pyle was, without a doubt, the most well loved; he was adored by readers on the home front as well as the GIs in the field. Like many men, Pyle struggled in his career as a younger man; yet when the war broke out he very quickly found his voice - and his readership soon followed.
Two months after the death of Ernie Pyle, United Artists released a movie about him; Click here to read about it...
A well-illustrated 1944 article by Leonard Lyons pertaining to the assorted wartime experiences of ten American war correspondents:
• Martin Agronsky for NBC News
• Vincent Sheean with The N.Y. Tribune
• Henry Cassidy of the Associated Press
• Bob Casey of the Chicago Tribune
• John Gunther of The Chicago Daily News
• Jack Thompson of The Chicago Tribune
• Cecil Brown of CBS News
• W.L. White of the Associated Press
• Quentin Reynolds of Collier's Magazine
• Cyrus Schulzberger with the NY Times
Wishing not to give away the ending to this ironic story, we will not post the stereotypical summation that is so unique to this site; we can only say that this single page anecdote, the result of European military pageantry and tradition, could only have been generated in the age of mass-media.
Like most capital cities, Washington, D.C. had numerous social clubs set aside for members of the press throughout the decades. A great number of the ones in Washington flopped because they would extend credit to their members when they drank at the bar. The one exception was the National Press Club - they insisted that their reporters and columnists pay-as-they-go. It was this well-observed rule that saved the club from bankruptcy and allowed it to flourish well into the Twenty-first Century. This article recalls what a busy place the NPC was during the war years.
Recommended reading:
Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps
Some wise old wag once opined that by the time W.W. II came along, Hemingway was far too fascinated by his own public image to have ever been an effective war correspondent. However, it should be remembered that he had looked war in the face on many occasions - the Second World War was the seventh conflict that he witnessed as a war reporter. Prior to working as a war correspondent for Time and Collier's during the Second World War, Hemingway had written for a number of other outlets in six other conflicts.
No other cartoonist during the Second World War ever portrayed the American GI so knowingly and with more sympathy than the STARS and STRIPES cartoonist Sgt. Bill Mauldin (1921 – 2003), who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1945.
Mauldin wrote the attached essay at the end of the war and gave the Yank Magazine readers an earful regarding his understanding of the front, the rear and all the the blessed officers in between
Click here to read a wartime interview with another popular 1940s American cartoonist: Milton Caniff.
"Never had so many correspondents (450) poured so much copy (millions of words) into so many press associations, photo services, newspapers, magazine and radio stations (115 organizations in all). Representing the combined Allied press, some 100 reporters covered every phase of the actual battle operations. Their pooled copy started reaching the United States within four hours of General Eisenhower's communiqué."
The first newspaper to get the scoop was The New York Daily News (circulation 2,000,999). The First radio station to announce the news was WNEW (NYC).
Click here to read about the extensive press coverage that was devoted to the death of FDR...
War reporter Nat Floyd (news service unknown) briefly explains how he was able to get out of Bataan just in the nick of time and avoid years of starvation at the hands of the Japanese Army.
"An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is an inaudible, pulsing thing."
Click here to read a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath.
"McMillan, who was [in 1914] the first accredited correspondent with the BEF in France, was sent by the United Press from London to Gibraltar in November, 1940, on what he thought would be a routine assignment. He expected to be back in England in two days. Instead, he stayed in the Mediterranean two years."
Published four months after the above article, here is a similar, well-illustrated piece that lists the names of the photographers and reporters who were killed - and the younger breed of writers and lens-men who took their places.
This brief column tells the story of three women war correspondents who marched at the point of the spear alongside the American infantry in order to report on the collapse of Hitler's Germany. The correspondents in question were:
• Lee Carson in Remagen
• Iris Carpenter in Remagen
• Ann Stringer in the city of Bonn
- from Amazon: What's a Woman Doing Here?
CBS war correspondent Betty Wason (1912 - 2001) reported in a very chatty way about how the war was proceeding along the shores of the Southern Mediterranean Sea. Of particular interest was her observation regarding how thoroughly lame the Italian Army appeared to their opposite numbers in the Albanian Army. Rather than eliciting feelings of dread and hatred, the Italian soldiers were pitied for their poor skills - their bodies were plentiful on every battlefield.
