Lary Wallace on how Fort Dix prepared Michael Herr for Dispatches

Guest blog post by Lary Wallace, a collector of rare Michael Herr materials and contributing editor for The Faster Times

The lifers gripe, too. . . . A lot of them will say that Dix is a dead end for careers, a sounding board for civilian interference, a center that half-trains 100,000 Ultimate Weapons a year, and most of those six-monthers. They are putting in for Viet Nam (you pick up grade there), for Fort Benning or Fort Bragg (you really train there), or for return tours in Guam, in Korea, in Germany. Somewhere, there’s good duty.

That’s the debriefing Michael Herr delivers on his way out of “Fort Dix: The New Army Game,” his 1966 feature-story for Holiday in which he revisits the training post whose “chief business . . . is the basic training of recruits from” just about the entire Northeast. To convince all concerned of “the vital relevance of the foot soldier in the nuclear age,” the New Jersey base had “taken on the name of ‘The Home of the Ultimate Weapon,’ which for all its rhetoric fell like a short round on the average trainee until recently; the fighting in Viet Nam has restored it by proving that infantry is never obsolete.”

Two years earlier, Herr had been a recruit at Dix; two years later, he would be a correspondent in Vietnam. At Dix he had been one of the “six-monthers” mentioned above, ready reservists who’d agreed to six months of active duty in exchange for a certain kind of immunity from further service, back when that was still an option. In Vietnam he would be reporting the war on behalf of Esquire, an opportunity that gave him all the access and material he needed to write his classic war memoir Dispatches (1977).

This Fort Dix piece usually gets mentioned in books and scholarly articles that deal with Herr’s time in Vietnam, but these never offer much detail on its contents or even bother to quote directly from it. Most often, it gets mentioned for its influence on John Sack, already at Esquire, and his own Vietnam book, M. Proper credit should be given to how it prefigures Herr’s own book.

Douglas Brinkley on Walter Cronkite’s “most memorable reporting assignment”

Guest blog post by Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University, editor of Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960, and author of the new book Cronkite

If I were to choose the turning point in Walter Cronkite’s career, it was when a ghastly tragedy occurred in the Heart of Texas and he ambulance-chased to the scene. Two months after starting at United Press, Cronkite was assigned to work at the Dallas bureau for a brief spell, on loan from the Kansas City desk. On March 18, 1937, at 3:05 PM on a beautiful spring day, Cronkite was at his Dallas desk when there was a natural gas explosion at a consolidated public school in New London, Texas, causing 295 deaths, a majority of them children. A gas leak at the two-story school, a steel-formed building only a couple of years old, had caused a bomblike detonation that blew the edifice to kingdom come. Balls of rolling gas shot into the Texas sky like a fiery orange tornado and caused the ground to shake for miles around.

Located in the northwest corner of Rusk County, New London was surrounded by ten thousand oil derricks; eleven had been fatally erected on school grounds. Governor James Allred called up the Texas Rangers, the Texas Highway Patrol, and the Texas National Guard to pull out bruised and battered survivors. The New London boom’s echo, it was said, had been heard a hundred miles away, in the stockyards of Fort Worth. Some students miraculously walked out of the rubble unscathed, dazed and confused but spared serious injuries.

Cronkite received a dispatch from the Houston UP bureau confirming the explosion, and off he raced in his Dodge to New London with Bill Baldwin, the manager of the UP bureau in Dallas. Just how horrific the tragedy was became vividly apparent when he saw a line of cars, ambulances, and trucks parked at the funeral home in Tyler, all unloading corpses. Makeshift morgues had been erected in Henderson, Kilgore, and Overton to accommodate the dead. Cronkite flashed a United Press badge for access to the disaster zone. He hitched a ride on a fire department searchlight vehicle that had just arrived from Beaumont to help out in the impending nighttime rescue efforts. Cronkite searched for eyewitnesses who saw the school’s roof blow off. “It is not easy,” Cronkite quickly learned, “to approach someone in such distress to seek answers to the questions that need asking.”

Nothing in his University of Texas journalism classes or the Missouri Method had prepared Cronkite for this story. Oil roughnecks had rushed to New London from the Permian Basin to look for lost children, to collect the charred and crushed bodies of the young. Cronkite’s harrowing eyewitness UP dispatches offered emotional images of what the reporter saw—and yet kept the reporter out of the articles. His eye for ironic detail—such as a surviving school wall with a blackboard on which someone had written, “Oil and natural gas are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessings”—was superb. One of his UP reports read, in part, as follows:

OVERTON, TEX., MAR. 19 [1937]—(UP) 

Take oil from this town and nothing would be left. The last census showed its population to be a little more than 500 yet 3,000 persons receive their mail at the general post office. 

It is the capital of the East Texas oil field, the richest in the world, whose forest of derricks stretch [sic] 90 miles across the Texas hills on a line one to 15 miles wide. 

Week days, its few streets are dotted by the toughest migratory workers in the world—the men who go from field to field where oil is gushing, who work hard and dangerously and live hard and gaily.

Saturday night, dressed in their silk shirts and pleated trousers, a week’s pay in their pockets, the men come in for what diversions the town affords. They are strong men and hard men.

Today they were in town on another mission and beneath the flamboyant shirts, knotted shoulder muscles bent beneath unseen weights. Faces were heavy-jawed and screwed tensely. They stood about in small knots, looking not into passing faces but toward their feet. They gathered at the curbs. From a distance they seemed to be chatting. But closer, the passerby heard men weep, heard rasp-like voices oddly strained in unaccustomed efforts to be tender.

Decades later, even after he was credited with helping end the Vietnam War, Cronkite called the New London tragedy his most memorable reporting assignment. Sleeping at the Overton Hotel, calling CBS Radio News in New York from a pay phone to offer a nationwide listening audience a detailed eyewitness report, twenty-year-old Cronkite earned his spurs that sad March week.

Also of interest:

• Learn more about the New London School Explosion at the museum’s website
• Read an interview with Douglas Brinkley about Cronkite on the Bookish blog
• Read LOA’s exclusive interview with Douglas Brinkley about Jack Kerouac
• Eyewitnesses recall the 1937 New London School Explosion

Related LOA works: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959–1969 (includes a transcript of Cronkite’s February 1968 telecast “We Are Mired in Stalemate”)

Errol Louis on Ernest Hemingway, Westbrook Pegler, and other great “deadline artists”

Guest blog post by Errol Louis, co-editor with Jesse Angelo and John Avlon of Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns (published last month by Overlook Press)

The opportunity and obligation of the newspaper columnist, Finley Peter Dunne once said, is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Columnists are supposed to be truth-tellers—literary private eyes working for the public good.

But what sets the newspaper column apart is its improvisational nature: the near miracle that stories composed on a daily deadline can resonate with beauty and power decades later.

A long list of literary masters honed their craft writing newspaper columns, including Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Langston Hughes, Damon Runyon, and Mark Twain. Generations of students have pored over works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and For Whom the Bell Tolls, unaware that their authors also tackled the issues of the day—war, crime, sports, politics—in thoughtful, delightful essays that hold their own alongside better-known works.

One example. Here is Hemingway, writing for the Toronto Star in 1921—years before he published his first short-story collection—displaying the punchy trademark style so many writers later sought to imitate:

Anthony d’Andrea, pale and spectacled, defeated candidate for alderman of the 19th ward, Chicago, stepped out of the closed car in front of his residence and, holding an automatic pistol in his hand, backed gingerly up the steps.

Reaching back with his left hand to press the door bell, he was blinded by two red jets of flame from the window of the next apartment, heard a terrific roar and felt himself clouted sickeningly in the body with the shock of the slugs from the sawed-off shotgun.

It was the end of the trail that had started with a white-faced boy studying for the priesthood in a little Sicilian town. It was the end of a trail that had wound from the sunlit hills of Sicily across the sea and into the homes of Chicago’s nouveau riche. . . . It is all part of the unfinished story of the gunman’s political war that is raging in Chicago at present.

The column, called “Chicago Gang War,” is as fine a piece of writing as you’re likely to find anywhere, and an intriguing true-to-life precursor to “The Killers,” Hemingway’s celebrated 1927 story about two hit men hunting down a doomed prizefighter in a Chicago suburb.

But it’s remarkably difficult to find “Chicago Gang War” online or in print. The same is true for literally thousands of fantastic works of short nonfiction by great columnists that get published in newspapers, only to vanish forever the next day. Few anthologies of newspaper columns have ever been published, and a great many are now out of print.

Richard Snow on America’s “Hooligan Navy” vs. German U-boats in the early days of WWII

Guest blog post by Richard Snow, former American Heritage editor-in-chief and author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II, which has just been published in paperback

I’ve been reading with pleasure and admiration The Library of America’s Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944. This seems to me more than an anthology of fine journalism: the articles are arranged in such fluent chronology that the book also offers a uniquely vivid narrative history—at once intimate and spacious—of the entire war.

I was particularly struck with Helen Lawrenson’s stark account of what the men of the Merchant Marine were up against in the first months after America’s entry into the conflict. Her story underscores a part of the war that has nearly vanished from the national memory.

The men Lawrenson writes about were being attacked by German submarines not in the far, stormy reaches of the North Atlantic but, in one sinking she mentions, within sight of the shore lights of Fort Pitt, Florida. The Battle of the Atlantic was the only campaign of the war whose progress American civilians could often watch from their homes.

As soon as Germany declared war on the United States, Admiral Karl Doenitz, the dismayingly capable head of Hitler’s U-boat fleet, was eager to get to our east coast. He believed Germany’s only chance was to throttle Great Britain by cutting off the supplies America was sending. He knew that ninety-five per cent of the oil from the Louisiana and Texas fields went in tankers along the coast, and he guessed that our navy, now spread thin, could do little to protect this crucial traffic.

He was right. A month later Captain Reinhard Hardegan, the first U-boat skipper to arrive, cruised around unchallenged in New York harbor: “I cannot describe the feeling in words,” he said “but it was unbelievable and beautiful and great. . . We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out on the coast of the USA.”

A few hours later he torpedoed the Coimbra, carrying 80,000 barrels of oil (fifty-three gallons to the barrel) so close inshore that Long Island citizens called local police stations to report a fire.

That May another U-boat captain harvesting this rich field arrived off Miami and was astounded to find the city glowing bright. This early in the war, nobody seemed to have the authority to order the mayor to turn off the lights. When the Navy begged Mayor Reeder to extinguish them, he said the hell with that: it would discourage the tourists.

The spectacle certainly cheered at least one tourist. Captain Cremer of the U-333 wrote, “Against the footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and shape as the outlines in a sales catalog. Here they were formally presented to us on a plate: please help yourselves.”

The Germans helped themselves with a free hand. In the first four months of 1942 the U-boats sank 515,000 tons—eighty-seven ships—along the East Coast.

The government responded to the crisis by bringing into the service yachts and sports fishing boats and their owners—equipping the larger vessels with a couple of depth charges or a pair of twenty-millimeter guns and begging their crews to do what they could. (Ernest Hemingway got in on the act, talking the navy out of $32,000 worth of range and direction finding equipment for his thirty-eight-foot fishing boat Pilar.)

The improvised mini-navy couldn’t do much, of course, and it certainly didn’t intimidate the Germans. Once, off the Florida coast, the crew of a militant cabin cruiser was astounded to see rise from the sea beside them a tall steel conning tower, from which the skipper called down in what was reported to be “excellent Americanese”: “Get the hell out of here, you guys! Do you want to get hurt? Now scram.”

The Coast Guard gave these little boats the gallant name the Corsair Fleet. The fleet’s members knew their chances. They immediately christened themselves the Hooligan Navy.

Nevertheless, they went out night after night, month after month. If they never hurt a U-boat, they were there combing the debris of what were in effect scores of forgotten Pearl Harbors for survivors of torpedoed ships. They saved hundreds.

It is worth remembering that this is the first time since the War of 1812 that the United States sent raw militia against the world’s best-trained professional military men. And that there are still people among us today who owe their lives to the fact that the Hooligan Navy was on duty when the war came to our shores.

Also of interest:

• Richard Snow describes his new book A Measureless Peril (YouTube)
• Watch a 47-minute documentary about the Hooligan Navy at the National Sailing Hall of Fame Film Library
• In 2009 Terry Mort wrote a book about Hemingway’s search patrols: The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Search for U-Boats
• Cornelius Ryan on D-Day, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Kristallnacht in the writings of Arthur Miller and Philip Roth

The night of November 9, 1938, marks the beginning of the two days known as Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” As Sigrid Shultz reported in The Chicago Tribune the next day:

Systematic destruction of Jewish property, looting, arson, and wholesale arrests of Jews without official charges swept Germany today. It is estimated that 20,000 Jews were arrested in Germany and what was Austria.

The Nazi violence far outdid anything that happened along this line in Germany in the darkest days of the Red revolution. Then hungry mobs stormed food stores. Today the mobs gloated over the smashed stores of Jews. They helped themselves to clothes, furs, and toys, and scattered the goods in the streets for their friends to pick up.

Later reports estimated that 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, more than 200 synagogues burned down and 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed. Most historians date the beginning of the Holocaust from Kristallnacht and Jews worldwide memorialize the events every year.

Reimagining Kristallnacht has challenged writers since Günter Grass confronted the event with his harrowing novel The Tin Drum in 1959. Two American writers renowned for tackling difficult subjects waited until their seventies to try. In 1994 seventy-nine-year-old Arthur Miller wrote the play Broken Glass, in which the marital difficulties of a Jewish couple living in New York City in 1938 are inextricably entangled with the husband’s struggle with his identity as a Jew and his wife’s pathological reaction to news reports of Kristallnacht:

Hyman [a doctor]: Very disturbing. Forcing old men to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes. On the Kurfurstendamm, that’s equivalent to Fifth Avenue. Nothing but hoodlums in uniform.
Gellburg [the husband]: My wife is very upset about that.
Hyman: I know, that’s why I mention it. (Hesitates.) And how about you?
Gellburg: Of course, it’s a terrible thing. Why do you ask?
Hyman: (a smile)—I don’t know, I got the feeling she may be afraid she’s annoying you when she talks about such things.
Gellburg: Why? I don’t mind.—She said she’s annoying me?
Hyman: Not in so many words, but . . .
Gellburg: I can’t believe she’d say a thing like . . .
Hyman: Wait a minute, I didn’t say she said it . . .
Gellburg: She doesn’t annoy me, but what can be done about such things? The thing is, she doesn’t’ like to hear about the other side of it.
Hyman: What other side?
Gellburg: It’s no excuse for what’s happening over ther, but German Jews can be pretty . . . you know . . . (Pushes up his nose with his forefinger.)

Philip Roth was a spry seventy-one when he concocted The Plot Against America (2004), his alternate history of the war years. When Walter Winchell tours the country to speak out against President Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism, riots break out and American Jews experience their own Kristallnacht:

The worst and most widespread violence occurred in Detroit, the Midwestern headquarters of the “Radio Priest” Father Coughlin and his Jew-hating Christian Front . . . There, in the city’s biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited on the lawns of the fancy houses along Chicago Boulevard and out front of the modest two-family dwellings of the housepainters, plumbers, butchers, bakers, junk dealers and grocers who lived on Webb and Tuxedo and in the little dirt yards of the poorest Jews on Pingry and Euclid.

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: Part One: American Journalism 1938-1944 (includes Sigrid Schultz’s report on Kristallnacht); Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961; Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959-1995

Ernie Pyle still sets the style

To think that Ernie Pyle would have turned 110 today is one way of measuring just how far in the past World War II lies—and how enduring Pyle's reporting has proved. Ernie Pyle had already developed a following for his folksy syndicated columns about daily life in America when he began covering the war from London in 1940. Over the next five years his dispatches from Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific would make him the most read—and most imitated—reporter on the war. On April 18, 1945, Pyle was hit in the temple by Japanese machine-gun fire on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa Honto, and died instantly.

In a 1950 reminiscence in The New Yorker, his colleague, wartime correspondent A. J. Liebling, offered this profile, “Pyle Set the Style”:

The thin old-looking reporter who was killed by a Japanese sniper on Ie Shima in April, 1945 (he was only forty-four, but to enlisted men he seemed as old as a senior admiral), contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, Ernest Taylor Pyle, to give him the full name nobody ever called him by, added G. I. Joe, the suffering but triumphant infantryman. The portrait was sentimentalized but the soldier was pleased to recognize himself in it, and millions of newspaper readers recognized their sons and lovers in Pyle’s soldiers and got some glimmer of the fact that war is a nasty business for the pedestrian combatant. Through millions of letters from home enclosing clippings, the soldiers learned that their folks read Ernie Pyle. He provided an emotional bridge. . . . He was the only American war correspondent who made a large personal impress on the nation in the Second World War.

Pyle’s dispatches focused not on military strategy but on the experiences of the common foot soldier, as in this report, “The God-Damned Infantry,” from Northern Tunisia in May 1943:

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else. The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men. There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn't remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

The above excerpts are from Reporting World War II: 1938-1946 (two volumes) and A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings.

Cornelius Ryan on D-Day: Nothing like a reporter chasing his story

The Longest Day—the book Michael Shapiro writes “changed journalism”—began with 1,150 responses to Cornelius Ryan’s questionnaire. “The Reporter Who Time Forgot” tells the story behind the book.

Ryan had initially proposed a D-Day book about only the first two or three hours of the invasion. But then he began to report, and his ads (“Personal: Were You There on 6 June 1944?”) yielded thousands of responses. He followed up with a three-page questionnaire that could serve as a primer for reconstructing a narrative: Where did you land and at what time? What was the trip like during the crossing? Do you remember, for example, any conversations you had or how you passed the time? Were you wounded? Do you remember what it was like—that is, do you remember whether you felt any pain or were you so surprised that you felt nothing?

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946; A J Liebling: World War II Writings