A veteran foreign correspondent who had witnessed firsthand the rise of authoritarianism in several European capitals, Ralph Barnes was the first American reporter to die covering a war that spanned the globe.
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Associated Press correspondent Vern Haugland bailed out of a B-26 over New Guinea on August 7, 1942 and spent the next six weeks in the jungle before wandering, delirious, into a native village. His diary chronicled a remarkable story of survival.
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On September 12, 1944, war correspondents Edward Beattie, Wright Bryan and John Mecklin were captured by German troops in France. Suddenly, they were the news instead of the ones reporting on it.
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Clare Hollingworth had been a Daily Telegraph correspondent for less than a week when she spotted a massive buildup of German tanks near the Polish border. Her report that an attack seemed imminent hit the front page three days before World War II began.
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As Allied forces drove toward Paris in August 1944, war correspondents had a firsthand reminder of the dangers of their chosen profession.
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New York Times science writer William L. Laurence joined the War Department as a “special consultant” to the Manhattan Project in the spring of 1945. That assignment put him in position to watch the bombing of Nagasaki firsthand from a B-29.
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More than a hundred Americans were killed by bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft on July 25, 1944 — a key Army figure and beloved Associated Press photographer among them.
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The type of Atlantic convoy action portrayed in the new Tom Hanks movie was covered by press correspondents at the time. We examine some of their work.
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John T. Whitaker was one of the most well-connected reporters in Europe, allowing him to make uncannily accurate predictions about the course of the war — before he took extreme measures to join the fight himself.
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Newsweek’s Bill Shenkel had written about aviation for years, and finally got a chance in 1944 to get out of the D.C. office and cover the war from the field. The first U.S. bombing mission to the Japanese home islands since the Doolittle Raid was the opportunity he had waited for, but he didn’t come home.
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World War II on Deadline 