The War Correspondents

The list of American war correspondents who covered the European Theater of Operations during the Second World War is a veritable Who’s Who of American literary and journalistic greats of the Twentieth Century. Between them, the reporters, photographers, novelists, and film makers listed above have amassed two Nobel Prizes, three Pulitzer Prizes, four Presidential Medals of Freedom, two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, six Peabody Awards, two Legions of Merit, three Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, and numerous other accolades.

WarCo’s not only rubbed shoulders with generals, admirals, prime ministers and presidents, they often placed themselves at great personal risk in order to cover the European War. While flying over Germany aboard B-17 Flying Fortresses, both Stars and Stripes reporter Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite of United Press helped man their bomber’s defensive machine guns. Ernest Hemingway, while stringing for Collier’s, led a band of French resistance fighters during the liberation of Paris. Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, was wounded by German mortar fragments while visiting front-line troops in Italy. So was the Hearst correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who journeyed to the European theater after writing the New York Times Best Seller Guadalcanal Diary. Joseph Morton of the Associated Press was captured by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia while reporting on the operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the modern CIA. Morton was put to death in the Mauthausen concentration camp along with a dozen OSS officers, the only reporter to be executed by enemy forces during the war. The enormously popular syndicated columnist Ernie Pyle, after spending the better part of three years covering the war in Europe, was killed by a burst of Japanese machine gun fire on Okinawa.