If there was one person the American public wanted to hear from once news of the Normandy invasion broke, it was Ernie Pyle. Through his work in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, millions had come to rely on the diminutive columnist’s vivid portrayals of everyday soldiers. Now that the most overwhelming day of the war had arrived, surely Ernie would
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Like everyone else in her line of work, Martha Gellhorn was anxious in the spring of 1944, wondering where the invasion of Western Europe would begin and how she might secure a place near the action. The veteran war correspondent wrote to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt on April 28, frustrated that she had allowed her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to coax
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Merrill “Red” Mueller of NBC spent nearly four months attached to Eisenhower’s HQ from D-Day on.
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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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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 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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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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World War II on Deadline 