Reporter on Bataan (Newsweek Magazine, 1942)
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.
War Correspondents
Ernest Hemingway of Time Magazine (Coronet Magazine, 1953)
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.
Tom Treanor of the L.A. Times (Coronet Magazine, 1944)
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.
Reporting D-Day (Newsweek Magazine, 1944)
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…
Richard McMillan with the United Press (Newsweek Magazine, 1943)
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.
John Steinbeck of The N.Y. Herald Tribune (Newsweek Magazine, 1943)
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.
A Victory for the Associated Press (Coronet Magazine, 1952)
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.
Leo Disher of the United Press (Coronet Magazine, 1944)
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.
Bob Miller of the United Press (Coronet Magazine, 1944)
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.