As Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s troops plowed into Germany in the spring of 1945, the supreme commander made it clear that Berlin was not an objective for the Western Allies. The prize of capturing the seat of Nazi power would go to the Russians, symbolism and public relations value be damned. While U.S. and British troops had no choice but
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In the final minutes of June 6, 1944, Blue Network correspondent George Hicks began recording one of the signature radio reports of World War II.
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Honolulu Star-Bulletin editor Riley Allen arrived at his desk by 6:30 a.m. every day, seven days a week. For most of the nearly three decades he had led the paper, those early mornings — particularly on the weekend — had offered mostly peace and quiet to churn through a never-ending pile of work. On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, though,
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On Saturday, November 29, 1941, Honolulu bureau chief Frank Tremaine filed a story to the United Press wire. It ran in numerous newspapers over the next few days, mostly filling out a random inside page here or there. The Wisconsin State Journal was among the last newspapers to run Tremaine’s story, giving it about 12 column inches on page 9
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The Chicago Tribune ran one photograph on the front page of its July 12, 1943 edition, a day after the Trib and newspapers worldwide had first reported on the Allied landings in Sicily. The picture in question was a one-column cutout of Tribune war correspondent John Hall “Jack” Thompson, dressed in paratrooper gear. The headline above it read “Sky Writer”.
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Last night, some of the young gentlemen of the RAF took me to Berlin. Edward R. Murrow was nothing if not cool, as the opening sentence of perhaps his most famous wartime report makes clear. Seated before a microphone at the BBC’s London studios on December 3, 1943, Murrow spent 18 minutes walking CBS listeners through his experience accompanying a
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For eight raging hours, under intense Nazi fire from dawn into a sweltering afternoon, I watched Canadian troops fight the blazing, bloody battle of Dieppe. So began Ross Munro’s epic account of the Allies’ first significant action on the Continent since the evacuation from Dunkirk more than two years earlier. Dieppe would in time become notorious, a debacle that helped
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When retired Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe died in 1975, both the headline and the first sentence of his New York Times obituary prominently featured perhaps the most famous one-word sentence in United States history: “Nuts!” The fact that McAuliffe rated a lengthy news obituary in the paper of record was attributable mostly to that single word, typed at his direction
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World War II on Deadline 