I Was There; Introducing the WWII War Correspondents

As historians begin to appraise World War II more fully the impact that American generation had on the world, the graphic day-to-day accounts, books, and recollections written by news correspondents will offer a fresh, vivid perspective that has not been seen by the public since 1945. Their stories became the bridge to link the human side of the battle front to the home front.

The events leading up to the outbreak of the war and the subsequent American entry into it are of an importance and interest so great that it is difficult to put into one book, so this book I was There; Introducing the WWII War Correspondents starts the series.

The vast major of 1600 World War II news correspondents came from a traditional sedentary home life mold, members of the working American press.
During the Second World War, they were brought close to the sons and husbands in the glory and stink of battle and stories were written not in a London, New York or Paris hotel, but in the foxholes, ships, hospitals, and back areas of the battle-lines in Europe and Pacific.

Scripts-Howard newspaper correspondent Ernie Pyle was able to gain the trust of soldiers who opened up to him in a way that they did not to other correspondents, in part because Pyle did not take notes. The only notes that he took were to make sure that he got names spelled right and hometowns. The rest of it, he would just sit there in conversation and they would open up to him. Yet, they knew he would “get it right.”. It was those conversations that he tended to repeat and portray the human side of the war effort in Europe and the Pacific that connected to the home front.

These four books are a chronicle of the events from 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941 and the failure of efforts to curb the problems of a secure world peace prior to World War II.

The additional books I Was There, Dateline December1941, I Was There, Dateline 1942, I Was There, Dateline 1943, I Was There, Dateline 1944, I Was There, Dateline 1945 and I Was There, Hometown USA will chronicle the events since December 7, 1941 and present pictures and descriptions of the cooperative effort on the part of newspaper correspondents, government officials and individuals to capture the human side in each major event of World War II.

The monthly chronology by year was conceived as an outline of the period of events with the use of “Eye Witness reporting of those event using diaries, books, and news stories written by World War II Correspondents and important individuals” and is intended to be historically definitive account of those events.