The American flag flew triumphant this Memorial day over the rocky ridges of Attu Island. That was the lead on the Associated Press story that ran in hundreds of newspapers Monday, May 31, 1943, in a report datelined the previous day out of Washington, D.C. It was based on War Department communiques, and the message they conveyed was succinct: “Except
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Late on the afternoon of May 28, 1945, two British officers gathering firewood north of Flensburg, Germany, near the Danish border, encountered a man in civilian clothes. He stopped to chat, first in German and then in French — his right hand in his pocket the entire time. He then said, in English: “I used to gather firewood myself.” The
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Gertrude Lawrence had been trying for some time to get back home after spending years in the United States. The actress finally secured a seat from New York to London on the Pan-Am Clipper in mid-May 1944 but worried to a fellow passenger right up until takeoff that she might get bumped from the flight. “If I lose this seat
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From the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen to the liberation of Paris, Ollie Stewart spanned the Mediterranean and European theaters as a correspondent for Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper.
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On May 16, 1943, the RAF launched one of its most ambitious operations of the war, bombing a pair of dams in Germany’s Ruhr region.
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Sometime after V-J Day, the War Department produced a list of correspondents who had received official acknowledgement for covering various theaters of the war. The list runs 13 typewritten pages and by my count includes the names of 837 reporters and photographers. Exactly one of them, Edward T. Folliard, worked for The Washington Post. It’s a mind-boggling notion for someone
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War correspondents of the 1940s came from a variety of journalistic backgrounds. Some had been foreign correspondents, but many more were writing about city hall or sports before finding themselves on the front lines of the biggest story of the century. Price Day had done his share of nuts-and-bolts newspaper work before shipping overseas in December 1943 to cover the
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By summer 1944, Londoners were well aware of the rhythms of a German air raid. Though thankfully years removed from the nightly poundings of the Blitz, the capital and the south coast remained forever on alert for sporadic appearances by the Luftwaffe. When the sirens sounded around 4:30 a.m. on June 13, then, residents knew the drill. But it soon
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By the end of 1943, Ernie Pyle’s dispatches had become the indispensable lens through which Americans on the home front viewed their war. Though he was twice as old as many of the men whose toils he chronicled, Pyle’s humble, in-the-trenches approach endeared him to four-stars and grunts alike. All it took was a glance at a couple of his
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World War II on Deadline 