Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary and Memoirs Book

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead is one of the legendary reporters of World War II. For the Associated Press he covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe—from North Africa to landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy, and to the drive into Germany. His dispatches, published in the recent Beachhead Don, are treasures of wartime journalism.

From the fall of September 1942, as a freshly minted A.P. journalist in New York, to the spring of 1943 as Allied tanks closed in on the Germans in Tunisia, Whitehead kept a diary of his experiences as a rookie combat reporter. The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now. Back home later, Whitehead started, but never finished, a memoir of his extraordinary life in combat.

John Romeiser has woven both the North African diary and Whitehead’s memoir of the subsequent landings in Sicily into a vivid, unvarnished, and completely riveting story of eight months during some of the most brutal combat of the war. Here, Whitehead captures the fierce fighting in the African desert and Sicilian mountains, as well as rare insights into the daily grind of reporting from a war zone, where tedium alternated with terror. In the tradition of cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s memoir Up Front, Don Whitehead’s powerful self-portrait is destined to become an American classic.

Library Journal

A World War II diary interwoven with subsequent memoir, this recounts Don Whitehead's travels as a fledgling Associated Press combat reporter in 1942. His first assignment, which most of this book covers, was reporting on the British army's attempt to defeat and remove from Africa the German forces led by General Rommel. From the start, Whitehead notes his frustrations, excitements, fears, and longings for home, along with the dangers encountered when venturing into the North African desert with other correspondents in chase of Rommel's troops. Whitehead also vents his difficulties as a reporter in dealing with the censorship office while trying to write accurately about what he saw daily. Overall, we bear witness to his life in his first eight months as a war reporter: the physical hardships, the friends lost, the challenges in reporting, and the excitement of seeing the war firsthand. Recommended for academic and public libraries, particularly those with collections on or of World War II journalism. Erin J. Miller, Middletown, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.