These reminiscences by 30 of the AP’s top World War II correspondents, written when they were fresh off the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, capture an era of combat news reporting as practiced by masters of the craft.
By republishing “World War II” as an e-book, The Associated Press today recovers those memories and opens a window to a past world. The writers portray the mood in Danzig on the eve of the first shots, and follow the course of the war right through to the discovery of the concentration camps in Germany, and the jubilation felt by American witnesses to the Japanese surrender “on the broad deck of the USS Missouri” in Tokyo Bay.
“A straight-backed little man in civilian clothes asked the night clerk to call him at 4 a.m.,” wrote AP correspondent Lynn Heinzerling just before the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland. “I knew he was a German army officer and it was obvious he wasn’t rising at that hour to advance the cause of peace.”
“To see the wasted corpses of ten thousand women stacked like cordwood, table-high over a space as big as a football field—that was staggering enough for any normal human being. It became suddenly and appallingly worse when, out of the mass, details began to emerge, and the pitiful and wretched dead began to reclaim their lost identity as people,” recounted correspondent William Frye of his visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Since this book was compiled 70 years ago at the request of AP Executive Director Kent Cooper, historians have written mountains about the world’s greatest and most terrifying conflict.
But few pack the immediacy or embody the spirit of the times as this one thin volume, illuminated by the work of frontline photographers like Joe Rosenthal, Frank Filan and William C. Allen.
“Years hence when the historians can begin to appraise World War II more fully, they are certain to lean heavily on the graphic day-to-day accounts, books and recollections of the correspondents,” wrote Cooper in 1945.
I couldn’t agree more. The memories are vivid and immediate again. It is, indeed, reporting to remember.
John Daniszewski
Vice President for International News
April 2015