Battlefield Coverage
by Steve Weinberg Posted Wed, Sep 1 1999
One of the byproducts of war is heroic and compelling journalism. That is especially true for World War II because the war dragged on for so many years, in so many theatres, and was covered by so many already-accomplished journalists.
Examples of heroic and compelling coverage abound in the two-volume set Reporting World War II, from the Library of America. Part One: American Journalism 1938-1944, contains more than 100 examples from 47 writers. Part Two: American Journalism 1944-1946, adds examples from some writers not represented in the first volume to go with those represented again.
The opening piece is by William L. Shirer, who achieved post-war fame with his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In September 1938, Shirer was working for CBS News when he traveled to Munich to cover the four-power conference that everybody hoped would prevent a wider war in Europe. Shirer’s first paragraph suggests both the power and historical importance of the pieces collected in this Library of America set:
“It’s all over. At twelve thirty this morning … Hitler, Mussolini, Chamber-lain and Daladier signed a pact turning over Sudetenland to Germany. The German occupation begins tomorrow, Saturday, October 1, and will be completed by October 10. Thus the two ‘democracies’ even assent to letting Hitler get by with his Sportpalast boast that he would get his Sudetenland by October 1. He gets everything he wanted, except that he has to wait a few days longer for all of it. His waiting ten short days has saved the peace of Europe — a curious commentary on this sick, decadent decade.”
For readers in 1999 not intimately familiar with World War II events, the books contain notes that explain some references. For example, the notes for the opening paragraph explain the geography and importance of Sudetenland and expand on Hitler’s Sportpalast boast. In addition, each volume contains biographical information about the journalists, a glossary of military terms, an index (an unusual, welcome addition), maps, a war chronology, photographs and drawings.
All that information keeps alive the work of journalists who today divide between the well-remembered and the forgotten. Shirer is, of course, well-remembered, as are James Agee, Homer Bigart, Margaret Bourke-White, Janet Flanner, Martha Gellhorn, Brendan Gill, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, A.J. Liebling, Bill Mauldin, Edward R. Murrow, Carl Mydans, Ernie Pyle, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, I.F. Stone, C.L. Sulzberger, Dorothy Thompson and E.B. White.
Many others were never famous or are obscure today after fame in their time. That evaluation is perhaps more a reflection of my age (born in 1948) than reality, but it was a pleasant revelation to read the dispatches by lesser-known writers such as Annalee Jacoby, Roi Ottley and Sigrid Schultz.
Jacoby was a Hollywood screenwriter for MGM. She was stationed in Chungking for United China Relief in 1941, and she married Melville Jacoby (also collected in this anthology), a Time magazine correspondent, in Manila two weeks before the Japanese invasion. They escaped to Australia in 1942; a month later, he was dead from an airplane accident, but she pressed on. Her story about Bataan nurses caring for wounded soldiers in the Philippines appeared in the June 1942 Life magazine.
Ottley worked mostly for the black press, and he wrote frequently about race relations in the United States. The anthology includes an excerpt from his book New World A-Coming, a powerful look circa 1943 at rocky race relations in the military and in the larger society.
Schultz worked for the Chicago Tribune in Europe and found a way to develop sources within the Nazi Party. Using the pen name John Dickson, she wrote a critical series of articles during 1938-1939 about Nazi Germany. She left Germany in 1941 after the frank tone of her reporting cut her off from news sources.
Reporting World War II closes with a piece by John Hersey — the longest, most compelling and perhaps, from the perspective of 1999, most famous work of journalism spawned by World War II. “Hiroshima,” reprinted from the Aug. 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker magazine, is a story about inhumanity and suffering that will never be out of date.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.