World War ii's Enduring Journalism   

Reporting World War II
The Library of America

Reporting World War II
The Library of America
Volume one, 912 pages, $35

"Reporting World War II" is an impressive historical treasury, full of accounts still moving after half a century. And it is more. It also lets us pursue a question that is always contemporary: What makes enduring journalism?

Based on this collection, the answer seems to have little to do with everyday news coverage. The editors have chosen few hard news articles, few conventional inverted pyramids. What predominates is journalism with voice — commentary, columns and magazine-style pieces.

Their shining quality is the writers' ability to make connections with audiences, often in the first person. Listen to the inimitable Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting for CBS radio in 1940:

"I'm standing again tonight on a rooftop looking out over London, feeling rather large and lonesome..there's an ominous silence hanging over London. But at the same time a silence that has a great deal of dignity. Just straightaway in front of me the searchlights are working. I can see one or two bursts of antiaircraft fire far in the distance. Just on the roof across the way I can see a man standing wearing a tin hat, with a pair of powerful night glasses to his eyes... Out of one window there waves something that looks like a white bed sheet, a window curtain swinging free in this night breeze. It looks as though it were being shaken by a ghost. There are a great many ghosts around these buildings in London..."

Or Scripps Howard's immortal Ernie Pyle, at the Tunisian front in 1943:

"It was odd, the way we went up into the thick of the battle in our Jeep. We didn't attach ourselves to anybody. We didn't ask anybody if we could go. We just started the motor and went... Soon the dive bombers came. They set fires behind us. American and German tanks were burning ahead of us... War has its own peculiar sounds... The clank of a starting tank, the scream of a shell through the air, the ever-rising whine of fiendishness as a bomber dives... Once heard in war, they remain with you forever."

Over and over, these reporters use the understated powers of conversation and observation to craft pieces of almost indescribable vividness.

"I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth — the German concentration camp at Maidanek," writes W. H. Lawrence in the New York Times, "in which..as many as 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years... I have seen the skeletons of bodies the Germans did not have time to burn... I have seen such evidence as bone ash still in the furnaces... I walked across literally tens of thousands of shoes spread across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator... I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved."

On and on it goes: Murrow's eloquence; Pyle's common fanfares; Homer Bigart with the 5th Army in Italy; Ernest Hemingway from Paris; Marguerite Higgins from Dachau; Martha Gellhorn's graphic reports from an air force burn center and a hospital ship off Normandy. At home, E. B. White examines why "the newspaper reader finds it very difficult to get at the truth..the war is too big and moves too fast..."

Two entire books also are included: Bill Mauldin's "Up Front," with numerous Joe and Willie drawings, and John Hersey's exquisite "Hiroshima," which originally ran in The New Yorker. It's nice and a touch sad, given the demise of many big magazines, to be reminded of the distinguished tradition of magazine journalism.

The editors have carefully included several critical selections: Ted Nakashima's scathing piece on the Japanese-Americans' internment ("Concentration Camp: U.S. Style") from The New Republic; Deton J. Brooks Jr.'s unsparing look at Jim Crow rules at a Southern Army base, from the Chicago Defender; I.F. Stone's impassioned plea to fellow journalists on behalf of "the fast-disappearing Jews of Europe."

There are sketches, cartoons and photos from the time, portraits and thumbnail biographies of the correspondents, and a detailed war chronology. About my only criticism is that the accompanying maps seem dingy and hard to follow.

In sum, this project is a grand achievement. Consider one last excerpt from Hersey's "Hiroshima," quoting a Jesuit priest in Japan when the atomic bomb fell: "Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas... Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender... The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences?.. When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?"

When indeed? It's striking how cogently that paragraph crystallizes issues we have just been re-debating, 50 years later. Hersey was onto them less than a year after the bomb was dropped. That's enduring journalism indeed, and here it is certified as literature.