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Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946

45 writers report on the events of the last two years, from the Italian campaign and D-Day to the surrender of Japan. Included in full: Bill Mauldin’s Up Front, complete with his famous cartoons, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima. More

“It is a measure of how well they succeeded that, a half century later, the war comes alive again in these pages.” — The Washington Post

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Influences Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises
December 29, 2020

News Morgan Library exhibition presents an Ernest Hemingway for the twenty-first century
November 11, 2020

Story of the Week John Fisher, “I First Saw the Ruins of Dunkerque”
June 4, 2020

Order both Reporting World War II volumes in a boxed set and save $20!

This Library of America volume (along with its companion) evokes an extraordinary period in American history—and in American journalism. Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A.J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, Janet Flanner: in a time when public perceptions were shaped mainly by the written word, correspondents like these were often as influential as politicians and as celebrated as movie stars.

This second volume traces the final eighteen months of the war: the campaign in Italy and the Southwest Pacific, the Normandy invasion, the island battles from Saipan to Iwo Jima, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, the fall of Berlin, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here are Ernie Pyle bearing witness to war in the infantrymen’s foxholes; A.J. Liebling on D-Day; Robert Sherrod and Tom Lea landing with Marines and registering the horrors of Pacific Island warfare; Martha Gellhorn and Edward R. Murrow indelibly reporting on the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. Here too are two great book-length works, included in full: Bill Mauldin’s Up Front, the classic evocation of war from the GI’s point of view, complete with his famous cartoons, and Hiroshima, John Hersey’s compassionate account of the first atomic bombing and its aftermath.

Writers who covered the home front are included as well: S.J. Perelman on the absurdities of wartime advertising, James Agee on the impact of wartime newsreels, E.B. White on the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Here too are writers on aspects of the war still often neglected: Vincent Tubbs and Bill Davidson on the combat role of African-American soldiers; Susan B. Anthony II on working in the Navy Yard; I.F. Stone protesting U.S. government inaction in the face of Nazi genocide.

This volume contains a detailed chronology of the war, historical maps, biographical profiles of the journalists, explanatory notes, a glossary of military terms, and an index. Also included are thirty-two pages of photographs of the correspondents, many from private collections and never seen before.

The advisory board for Reporting World War II includes Samuel Hynes, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature emeritus at Princeton University; Anne Matthews, the first woman to direct the Princeton Writing Program; writer Nancy Caldwell Sorel (1934-2015), and Roger J. Spiller, George C. Marshall Distinguished Professor of Military History (retired) at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946 is kept in print by a gift from the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of Pfc. Paul Cauley Clark.
News & Views

Influences Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises
December 29, 2020

News Morgan Library exhibition presents an Ernest Hemingway for the twenty-first century
November 11, 2020

Story of the Week John Fisher, “I First Saw the Ruins of Dunkerque”
June 4, 2020

News New animated film honors Edward Field, WWII veteran and a hero on several fronts
November 12, 2019

Story of the Week Susan B. Anthony II, “Working at the Navy Yard”
April 26, 2019
Table of Contents

Ernie Pyle
“Waiting for the Next Attack” (The Italian Campaign: February 1944)
“Those Lulls That Sometimes Come in War”
“The Night Was Full of Distant Warfare”
“A Certain Fundamental Appreciation for the Ridiculous”
“The Trail Was Never Straight”
Vincent Tubbs
“Wide Awake on an Island Beachhead” (The Southwest Pacific: February-March 1944)
“No Picturesque Battle Scenes in SWP War”
“Homesick Joe in Pacific”
“Men Can’t Sleep; They Talk, Dream of Home”
Walter Bernstein
Search for a Battle (Italy: March 1944)
Ernie Pyle
“Perpetual Astonishments of a War Life” (The Italian Campaign: March 1944)
“A Life of Flying In Combat”
“Their Hunger Most Surely Was Genuine”
“Nobody Is Wholly Safe”
“You Just Lie in Your Foxhole”
“A Look I Dread to See”
The Editors of Fortune; drawing by Mine Okubo
Issei, Nisei, Kibei (Japanese-American Internment: 1944)
Homer Bigart
Cassino, Once Thriving, Is Turned Into a Scene of Unrelieved Grimness (May 1944)
Vincent Tubbs
Girl Thrills New Caledonia G.I.’s (USO Show, May 1944)
A. J. Liebling
Notes from the Kidnap House (French Underground Journalism: 1944)
Susan B. Anthony II
Working at the Navy Yard (Women in War Plants: 1944)
Vincent Tubbs
93rd Div. Patrol Kills 20 Japs, Escapes 3 Ambushes (Bougainville, May 1944)
I. F. Stone
For the Jews—Life or Death? (Jewish Refugees: June 1944)
A. J. Liebling
Cross-Channel Trip (The D-Day Invasion: June I-II, 1944)
Ernie Pyle
Omaha Beach (After D-Day: June 1944)
“And Yet We Got On”
“The Wreckage Was Vast and Startling”
“This Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish”
Martha Gellhorn
The First Hospital Ship (Normandy: June 1944)
S. J Perelman
Take Two Parts Sand, One Part Girl, and Stir (Wartime Advertising: 1944)
Robert Sherrod
Gone To Earth (Saipan: June 1944)
The Nature of the Enemy (Saipan: July 1944)
Lee Miller
U.S.A. Tent Hospital (Normandy: July 1944)
Ernie Pyle
Battle and Breakout in Normandy (July-August 1944)
“They Weren’t Heroic Figures”
“A Small Assembly Plant”
“The Heavy Ordnance Company”
“The Great Attack”
“A Ghastly Relentlessness”
“The Universe Became Filled with a Gigantic Rattling”
“Anybody Makes Mistakes”
“This Weird Hedgerow Fighting”
“Each One Is a Separate Little War”
“Nothing Left Behind But The Remains”
“Wounded and Trapped”
Bill Davidson
“Rommel—Count Your Men” (Siege of St. Malo: August 1944)
Lee Miller
The Siege of St. Malo (August 1944)
Ernest Hemingway
How We Came To Paris (August 1944)
Irwin Shaw
Morts pour la Patrie (The Liberation of Paris: August 25, 1944)
Helen Kirkpatrick
Daily News Writer Sees Man Slain at Her Side in Hail of Lead (The Liberation of Paris: August 26, 1944)
W. H. Lawrence
Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp (Maidanek: August 1944)
Ernie Pyle
A Last Word (France: August 1944)
Bill Mauldin
Up Front
Rupert Trimmingham and others
Democracy? (African-Americans and the War: 1944)
Brendan Gill
Young Man Behind Plexiglass (An American Bombardier: August 1944)
Martha Gellhorn
The Gothic Line (Northern Italy, September 1944)
Tom Lea
Peleliu Landing (Peleliu, September 1944)
Mack Morriss
My Old Outfit (Maastricht, September 1944)
William Walton
Now the Germans Are the Refugees (The Fall of Aachen: October 1944)
Peggy Hull Deuell
Death of Carrier Described (The Princeton: October 1944)
John H. Crider
U.S. Board Bares Atrocity Details Told by Witnesses at Polish Camps (Auschwitz: November 1944)
Mack Morriss
War in the Huertgen Forest (November 1944)
Eric Sevareid
The Price We Pay in Italy (November 1944)
Anne O’Hare McCormick
The Italian Ordeal Surprises Members of Congress (December 1944)
Ed Cunningham
The Battle of the Bulge (The Ardennes: December 1944–January 1945)
Jack Belden
Retreat in Belgium (The Ardennes: December 1944)
Martha Gellhorn
The Battle of the Bulge (The Road to Bastogne: December 1944)
Carl Mydans
“My God! It’s Carl Mydans” (Santos Tomas Prison Camp: Manila, February 1945)
John P. Marquand
Iwo Jima Before H-Hour (February 1945)
Robert Sherrod
The First Three Days (Iwo Jima: February 1945)
Howard Brodie
Jump-Off (Assault Across the Roer: February 1945)
Richard C. Hottelet
Big Jump into Germany (East of the Rhine: March 24, 1945)
James Agee
“These Terrible Records of War” (Newsreels of Iwo Jima: March 1945)
Janet Flanner (Genet)
Letter from Cologne (March 1945)
Marguerite Higgins
Freed Captives Fill Roads That Lead to France (Germany, April 1945)
Martha Gellhorn
Das Deutsches Volk (Germans in Defeat, April 1945)
James Agee
“A Soldier Died Today” (The Death of F.D.R.: April 12, 1945)
Edward R. Murrow
“For Most of It I Have No Words” (Buchenwald: April 15, 1945)
Evan Wylie
Ernie Pyle (Ie Shima, April 18, 1945)
Janet Flanner (Genet)
Letters from Paris (April 1945)
“Let Us Weep For This Man”
“A Sad Homecoming”
Martha Gellhorn
The Russians (Meeting at the Elbe: April 1945)
Virginia Irwin
“A Giant Whirlpool of Destruction” (The Russians in Berlin: April 1945)
Marguerite Higgins
33,000 Dachau Captives Freed by 7th Army (April 29, 1945)
Martha Gellhorn
Dachau (May 1945)
Edward Kennedy
The War in Europe Is Ended! (May 7, 1945)
A. J. Liebling
The A.P. Surrender (The Press and the Military: May 1945)
Philip Hamburger
Letter from Rome (V-E Day: May 1945)
E. B. White
Beautiful Upon a Hill (The United Nations Conference: San Francisco, May 1945)
Phelps Adams
Attack on Carrier Bunker Hill (Kamikaze Raid Off Okinawa: May 1945)
Shelley Mydans
Guam Holdouts Give Out (Japanese Soldiers Surrender: Spring 1945)
William L. Laurence
Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Told by Flight Member (Nagasaki, August 9, 1945)
Homer Bigart
Japan Signs, Second World War Is Ended (September 2, 1945)
A Month After the Atom Bomb: Hiroshima Still Can’t Believe It (September 3, 1945)
John Hersey
Hiroshima
Contributors

Phelps Adams
James Agee
Susan B. Anthony II
Jack Belden
Walter Bernstein
Homer Bigart
Howard Brodie
John H. Crider
Ed Cunningham
Bill Davidson
Peggy Hull Deuell
Janet Flanner
Martha Gelhorn
Brendan Gill
Philip Hamburger
Ernest Hemingway
John Hersey
Marguerite Higgins
Richard C. Hottelet
Virginia Irwin
Edward Kennedy
Helen Kirkpatrick
William L. Laurence
W.H. Lawrence
Tom Lea
A. J. Liebling
Anne O’Hare McCormick
John P. Marquand
Bill Mauldin
Lee Miller
Mack Morriss
Edward R. Murrow
Carl Mydans
Shelly Mydans
Miné Okubo
S. J. Perelman
Ernie Pyle
Eric Sevareid
Irwin Shaw
Robert Sherrod
I. F. Stone
Vincent Tubbs
William Walton
E. B. White
Evan Wylie

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