Combat Reporter

“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 this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and 21st-century readers are the richer for it.”—from the Foreword, by Rick Atkinson

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 The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now.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.

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, includingThe FBI Story.Romeiser John B. :

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).Atkinson Rick :

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 Benjamin :

Franklin is a retired US Army officer and he knew Whitehead and served with him.

Whitehead's diary gives us a sense of his day-to-day thinking, unchanged by retrospection and polish.

The book never lets up on its trip into the heart of a strange and deadly nightmare.