Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary And Memoirs [Hardcover]

John B. Romeiser (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0823226751 | ISBN-13: 978-0823226757 | Publication Date: September 15, 2006 | Edition: 1st

No one bore witness better than Don Whitehead . . . this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and 21st-century readers are the richer for it.-from the Foreword, by Rick AtkinsonWinner of two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 The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now.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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Don Whitehead, who died in 1981, also worked for the New York Herald Tribune and the Knoxville News-Sentinel, won a George Polk Memorial Award, and wrote a number of books, including The FBI Story.

John B. Romeiser teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he is founder and former director of the Normandy Scholars Program. He edited Beachhead Don: Reporting the War from the European Theater, 1942-1945 (Fordham).

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rick Atkinson's best-selling books include In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat and An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943. Franklin is a retired US Army officer and he knew Whitehead and served with him.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Fordham University Press; 1st edition (September 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823226751
• ISBN-13: 978-0823226757
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended memoir., February 3, 2007

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary And Memoirs (Hardcover)

Edited by University of Tennessee-Knoxville teacher John B. Romeiser, Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary and Memoirs is the true story of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Don Whitehead, who served the Associated Press in 1942 by covering the Allied drive against Erwin Rommel's tanks in North Africa, in Whitehead's own words. Collecting and organizing Whitehead's personal journal and unfinished memoir with the rare editor's note in brackets for clarity, Combat Reporter covers events that Whitehead witnessed from 1942-1943 in Cairo, Libya, Tunisia, and Sicily. Combat Reporter offers an evenhanded, front-lines view of the European Theater and an unforgettable self-portrait of a one-of-a-kind reporter. A foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Atkinson and an afterword by Whitehead's colleague Command Sergeant Major Benjamin Franklin (U.S. Army, Ret.) round out this highly recommended memoir.

5.0 out of 5 stars Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead WWII diary and memoirs, January 2, 2011

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Jane - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Combat Reporter: Don Whitehead's World War II Diary And Memoirs (Hardcover)

I loved this book. Too many of us have forgotten or never knew what WWII was like. This helps to remind us. WWII was different from subsequent wars in that it spread so much farther over the globe. So many people lost so much.
This book also shows us the character development of a young man just beginning to cover the actual fighting, his growth and change into a first-rate combat reporter, his longing for his family and his fervent desire to be on the frontlines as much as possible so that his reports were honest and compelling.
These days we can sit in front of our television and watch people getting killed halfway around the world but in Don's time, the only way to know what was truly happening (as much as the censors would permit) was to send someone to the actual place.
I knew Don Whitehead as a person but not as a combat reporter. This book was excellent, very well written and made me want to read the rest of Mr. Romeiser's books.