Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II. Joseph R.L. Sterne. Baltimore, MD: The Maryland Historical Society, 2009. 281 pp.
When historians and World War II history buffs think about World War II correspondents, names such as Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, Hal Boyle, Richard Tregaskis, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, and others come up—journalists and writers who reported for national news organizations and publications. They don’t think of names such as Mark Watson, Lee McCardell, Price Day, and Holbrook Bradley.
These four and many others reported for this country’s metropolitan and regional newspapers, paying special attention to soldiers, sailors, and civilians from their newspaper’s readership areas while also often providing standard coverage of the fighting. They did not necessarily spend the duration of the war at the front, dependent as they were on the financial situation of their papers, as well as the plans and ideas of their editors and publishers.
These four reporters were the stars among the ten sent abroad by the Baltimore Sun, whose owners decided at the end of World War I to seek a place among the country’s premier newspapers with strong national and world reporting. The Sun’s World War II initiative, writes Joseph Sterne, was surpassed only by papers in New York City and Chicago. They mentioned in their dispatches the names of more than 6,000 Marylanders in military service.
The author spent forty-four years working for the Sun, starting as a police reporter, continuing as a foreign bureau chief, and culminating with twenty-five years as editorial page editor. He came to know first-hand many of the correspondents he writes about in this book, adding valuable historical perspective.
The Sun stars were an outstanding group. Watson, who served on General John J. Pershing’s staff in World War I and who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, was a long-time military correspondent honored at the end of his career with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and by having the Pentagon press-room named after him. Day also picked up a Pulitzer in 1949 and eventually became the paper’s editor-in-chief. McCardell, who won a Purple Heart and was the most explicit of the Sun’s correspondents, later served as the paper’s assistant managing editor. Bradley, also awarded a Purple Heart, later pursued his career in the Defense Department and the Foreign Service, and is the only one of the Sun’s wartime correspondents who is still alive. He has published his own memoir of his correspondent days.
Sterne divides his book into twenty-seven unfootnoted chapters, including two devoted to the pre-World War II era—with special attention to the paper’s outspoken columnist H.L. Mencken—and one showcasing the paper’s hard-hitting coverage of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Reflecting the general governmental information focus, the Sun, like most other papers, focused its attention primarily on the fighting against Germany. Only after V-E Day did the Sun reporters turn their attention to the war in the Pacific, which ended a little over three months later. With three reporters almost always deployed at any one time, the journalists could divide up their attention, with one providing the big picture, another giving battle reports, and the third offering a first-hand view from the foxhole. They provided bravery and emotion.
The chapters quote liberally from the reporters’ dispatches, culled from Sterne’s reading of old Sun copies in the University of Maryland-Baltimore County Library. Presumably these excerpts constituted the best of the writing, although he provides no rationale for his decisions, other than trying to tie the individual stories to the culture and tradition of the newspaper. Even if the edited excerpts he uses are only the best parts, they hold up remarkably well two-thirds of a century later. For instance, the Sun reporters anticipated the German counter-attack in the last winter of the war, an offensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Ernie Pyle’s wartime reporting has sometimes been criticized for its hometown flavor, with the mentioning of names and hometowns of the soldiers he wrote about. The Sun’s reporters did the same thing, it turns out, but in contrast to what one would expect today, they never made those soldiers the focus of their story.
Reflecting the paper’s engagement in the war, three Sun reporters were aboard the USS Missouri to witness the Japanese surrender, becoming the only newspaper whose own correspondents witnessed both the German and Japanese surrenders. After the war, the paper extended its international coverage, at one time having as many as ten foreign bureaus. Today it has none.
The framework of this book is not war reporting generally or war reporting specifically during World War II, but war reporting by the Baltimore Sun during World War II. In that regard, this well-written volume will be most interesting to those already familiar with the outlines of World War II correspondence.
Censorship, both official and internal, limited reporting during the war, so the public knew little about the cowardice, the brutality, the rapes, and the thievery that constituted part of the battles discussed in recent books by such authors as Antony Beever and Olivier Wieviorka. As Sterne’s book shows, the Baltimore papers hinted at some of these things. Historians now need to consider the significance and interpretation of the difference between the reality described in the news media and what actually happened.
OWEN V. JOHNSON
Indiana University