Don Whitehead

"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 this volume, deftly combining his diary and a previously unpublished memoir, brings Whitehead and his reporting back to life, and 21st-century readers are the richer for it."—from the Foreword, by Rick Atkinson Winner of two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 The diary stops in 1943, and it has remained unpublished until now.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.

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Don Whitehead delivered battlefield dispatches that were classics of frontline reporting. One of the legendary reporters of World War II, Whitehead covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from landings in Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio on the Italian front to Normandy, where he went ashore with the First Army Division. Writing for the Associated Press, he covered the brutal beachhead fighting and followed the Allied sweep to victory across France, Belgium, and Germany. Daring, valiant, and fearless, "Beachhead Don" was one of sixteen correspondents awarded the Medal of Freedom by Harry S Truman. Collected here for the first time, his dispatches are classics of war journalism. This book, long overdue, will help a new generation discover Whitehead's vivid, powerful, and unforgettable stories of men at war. John Romeiser provides a richly detailed introduction and background to the man, his work, and his world.