Q&A with Keith Warren Lloyd

 

 

Keith Warren Lloyd is the author of the new book The War Correspondents: The Incredible Stories of the Brave Men and Women Who Covered the Fight Against Hitler's Germany. His other books include The Great Desert Escape. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The War Correspondents?

 

A: It was a matter of one thing leading to another. In 2021, I wrote a book called Avenging Pearl Harbor. It told the story of the American battleships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack, how they were salvaged, repaired, remanned, and then sent back into combat in the Pacific.

 

That book culminated in the Battle of Surigao Strait, a bitter fight in which several PT boats participated. That sparked my interest in PT boats. After conducting a great deal of research, I wrote Dark Nights, Deadly Waters, a book about PT boats in the Guadalcanal campaign.

 

That book featured a combat reporter, Richard Tregaskis, who wrote the bestseller Guadalcanal Diary. Researching and writing about Tregaskis led to the concept of The War Correspondents.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: What surprised me the most, and makes for interesting reading, is the way the private lives of the different war correspondents intertwined. War reporters were then, and still are today, part of a rather small community.

 

Tregaskis, for example, was among the first allied personnel to enter Naples, Italy, after the German Army evacuated the city. With him was Noel Monks, an Australian reporter who was married to Mary Welsh. She ended up divorcing Monks in order to marry Ernest Hemingway.

 

During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway became good friends with the war photographer Robert Capa. Capa was also close with Ernie Pyle, who used to share a tent with Andy Rooney at the army press camps.

 

Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were part a reporter’s pool that covered the 8th Air Force, and both went on to work for CBS and became household names in America. There are many, many stories of how the correspondents crossed paths with one another in the book.

 

Q: Of the various figures you write about in the book, are there some that especially stand out for you?

 

A: That’s the whole hook of the story; all of the central figures are stand-outs. The book is about writers, artists, and photographers who were either famous at the time—like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Ernie Pyle—or became famous as a result of their work as war correspondents, like Edward R. Murrow, Robert Capa, Walter Cronkite, and Andy Rooney.

 

If I were to pick the correspondent who impressed me the most, it would have to be Capa, the young Hungarian who fled Europe ahead of the Holocaust to become a photographer for Life magazine. He was a larger-than-life character who always seemed to be at the center of things, including landing on Omaha Beach with the first wave of American troops on D-Day.

 

Q: How would you compare these journalists to today’s correspondents?

 

A: The foreign correspondents of today are just as hard-working and courageous as their 1940s counterparts. But World War II was a very different era. The journalists of World War II were not just reporting on the war, they were a part of the war effort.

 

Of course, there was no television or internet at the time. Print and photojournalists alone bore the heavy burden of responsibility to tell the stories of the young men who were doing the fighting and dying.

 

They were also responsible for helping civilians on the home front understand what their soldiers were going through, and what they were up against. At the same time, reporters had to be careful in the way they wrote their dispatches so as to not adversely affect morale at home.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Another example of one thing leading to another. The War Correspondents follows the course of the Second World War in Europe, from the Spanish Civil War to the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Allied campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and Germany.

 

While researching and writing about the Italian campaign, I became interested in the story of the Allied landings at Anzio, which eventually led to the capture of Rome. I have started preliminary research on a book about Anzio. Perhaps I can obtain an artist’s visa and live in Italy while conducting research...

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I think readers of The War Correspondents will find it an entertaining and enlightening read, replete with interesting stories and anecdotes of those charged with covering the greatest news story of the 20th century.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb